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Crystallize the vision: Christine Franklin President of CEI, a 20-year-old minority-owned engineering and contracting firm based in Miami Lakes, Florida.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
F ranklin has more than 25 years of experience as a civil and environmental engineer managing a variety of environmental and construction projects. From assisting clients to managing procurement programs and serving as engineer-of-record, Franklin ensures that CEI fulfills its obligations to its stakeholders – its clients, employees, and community. “It’s extremely easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of day-to-day activities. It takes discipline to work on the ‘important’ as well as the ‘urgent,’” Franklin says. “My philosophy is that we need to hire competent people and train them to work ‘in the business’ so that the executive team can focus ‘on the business’ in areas of strategy and vision.” A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINE FRANKLIN. The Zweig Letter: What are the three to four key business performance indicators that you watch most
carefully? Do you share that information with your staff? Christine Franklin: We check profitability as profit we reinvest into growing the business. Another KPI that we monitor is applied rate – the overall applied rate of the firm is an indicator that we are adequately staffed for our projects. Backlog is a good indicator of leading economic trends for the nation, and globally, as our business is connected to the stability of the economy. TZL: How far into the future are you able to reliably predict your workload and cashflow? CF: Generally, we have a good indication for workload 18 months out, and have a good indication of potential workload up to two to three years. Right now, we can project our workload into 2021. Cashflow is a whole different ballgame as the projections are also dependent on factors beyond our control such as the pay cycle of
THE ZWEIG LETTER Aug
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