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TRANSACT IONS CHA CONSULTING, INC. ACQUIRES DAEDALUS PROJECTS, INC. OF BOSTON CHA Consulting, Inc. announced that it acquired Daedalus Projects, Inc. , a project and construction management firm based in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. “Daedalus brings CHA experienced project and construction management resources that will accelerate growth in our PM/CM business and propel us further into the metro Boston market,” said Michael Carroll, CHA’s president and CEO. “This partnership is extremely positive for both companies. Our values and vision are well aligned, and I am confident that the addition of Daedalus to the CHA team will further enhance our ability to serve our clients more fully with a broader set of services and capabilities.” “The Daedalus team is very excited about the future with CHA,” said Daedalus’ President,
Richard Marks. “The partnership with CHA will provide our team with tremendous opportunities to provide our services to a greater breadth of clients. Our common commitment to excellence, quality, and client satisfaction make CHA the perfect partner for Daedalus.” CHA and Daedalus will work closely together to ensure a seamless transition for Daedalus’ clients. The two firms will also work to maximize the expertise, best practices, and experience of both firms. Daedalus joins the CHA family of companies, which include CHA Consulting, CHA Tech Services, CHA Canada, Novara GeoSolutions, American Fire, and PDT Architects. CHA Consulting, Inc. is a highly diversified, full-service engineering consulting firm which, along with its subsidiaries, provides a wide
range of technology-enhanced planning and design services to public, private and institutional clients. CHA was ranked the 33rd largest design firm in the United States in 2018 by Engineering News Record and has annual revenue of $278 million. With technical personnel and offices throughout the United States and Canada, CHA offers engineering, architectural, survey, construction, and other services necessary to complete projects on time and within budget. Daedalus Projects, Inc. is celebrating 30 years of providing superior owner’s project management and cost estimating services. Combining exceptional personal service with technical expertise, Daedalus has a strong track record of successfully delivering superior- quality professional services for clients across the country, in both the public and private sectors.
LEO MACLEODL, from page 9
❚ ❚ Bite the bullet. Let’s get real. All firms have some of the wrong people on the bus. Before you kick them off, ask your- self this simple question: Was I 100 percent clear in my expec- tations of what was needed? It’s okay to kick them off if you were clear and gave them support to make the cut. But it’s not okay if you weren’t absolutely clear with what the job required or didn’t try to give them a good shot at success. Even when there is a ton of work to do and a company doesn’t believe it can let anyone go, trust me – your staff will find a way of get- ting the work done with the energy boost from not having to deal with that toxic laggard. There’s more than one way to get a job done. I’m amazed at how resilient firms can be when faced with a hole in leadership. “Who has time to worry about putting people in the right seats or getting rid of the dead wood? What can firms do to keep the bus moving down the road to greatness if they’re more concerned with the wheels coming off?” ❚ ❚ Wait for it. The hard truth is that you can network exten- sively, build and promote a great culture, and invest in your people and still come up short on finding the right people for the bus. Avoid cutting corners. Ignore your impulse to hire the wrong people. Not only have you lost your investment in recruiting costs by hiring badly, you’ve also lost productivity getting the wrong person out and back to spending money and time to find another candidate. Companies seem to be hell-bent on riding these boon times no matter what it costs them. Consider scaling down your expectations until the market corrects itself and those good people are easier to find. It may mean turning down work, but if you substitute logic with emotion, you’ll see that being cautious and reasonable about your growth plans is a smarter move than filling the seats. LEO MACLEOD is a leadership coach in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at leo@leomacleod.com.
good people and you need to be top of mind to hit that spot when someone hears of someone looking. ❚ ❚ Sell culture. People, especially millennials, consider work- place culture the deciding factor on where they choose to work. Peter Drucker quipped that culture eats strategy for breakfast. If your culture celebrates people and respects the individual, you have a competitive advantage over firms that are just using people as coal for the engine. If people are leaving your firm, what do they say in their exit interviews? Do they feel appreciated or valued or just overworked and neglected? If you have a strong culture already, let candidates know through marketing – website, social media, and office parties where you invite the outside guests. One of my clients is an asphalt paving contractor. They do all that gnarly, dan- gerous work on the freeways. But if you spend five minutes with any of the key employees, you’ll want to grab a rake and help them behind a truck – they are that much fun to work with. They realized that it’s the culture that defines their company – not the work or the pay. To tell their story, they created a culture video to show good people they should work there. ❚ ❚ Build leaders. Even if you find a good person to hire, it takes time to make them productive. The real cost of losing an em- ployee is the replacement costs of bringing a new person up to speed: up to three times the key person’s salary. The presi- dent of an architectural firm who lost his market sector leader decided to put a hold on expensive recruitment and instead is testing two promising young people to fill the void. It wasn’t an intuitive move, but his theory is solid: Why not invest in the current team to make them better? They may not seem qualified, but what’s at risk by training, coaching and mentor- ing them to see if they can rise to the challenge? So what if they don’t make the grade? They will improve their effective- ness and performance in any regard. And they will most likely stick around because you believed in them. Maybe they are not the right people in the right seats. But give it a shot. You might be surprised. Identify what skills they lack: Time man- agement, delegation, managing teams, selling. Give them a try but be realistic. Maybe your intuition that they aren’t the right people in the right seats was correct after all. It’s still cheaper than making a mistake in hiring the wrong person.
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THE ZWEIG LETTER May 20, 2019, ISSUE 1297
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