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Excellent quality: Dennis Yap President of DY Consultants, a nationally-recognized aviation consulting firm based in New York City.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
Y ap has spent the past 35 years using his expertise as an airport planner and a civil engineer toward developing DY Consultants, a nationally-recognized aviation consult- ing firm. He works with his team to provide solutions to some of the more sophisticated problems facing airports to- day, while designing and managing the most complex engi- neering projects. His firm has provided services to some of the nation’s largest airports, as well as the general aviation community. “We do have a vision to transform the company toward ‘self-sufficiency,’ where the company is not dependent upon any one person or one group of individuals, including my- self,” Yap says. “We understand that this approach is impor- tant to our sustainability and long-term health. We’re well on our way to meeting this goal.” A CONVERSATION WITH DENNIS YAP. 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? Dennis Yap: That’s easy – in order of importance:
1. Quality, 2. Quality, 3. Quality, and 4. Quality. That’s been my approach from the beginning. It’s what distinguished us from our competitors when I was a “one person” firm and today as a 50-person firm. As long as you provide excellent quality services and deliverables, everything else will work itself out. We discuss this openly with staff and address matters of poor performance and celebrate client accolades. TZL: How far into the future are you able to reliably pre- dict your workload and cashflow? DY: Workload is more predictable than cash flow. We typi- cally project out a year’s worth of minimal workload for our planning and engineering staff as we often manage the pro- grams and have a good understanding of the needs of our repeat airport clients. Much of the services we provide are funded by public monies, such as federal and state grants which are planned a year in advance. Cashflow has sever- al variables. When working with projects funded by grants, there are many factors that impact the reliability of timely payments, including the efficiency of our clients being re- imbursed by the governing agencies. In addition, there’s a level of unpredictability when working with private clients,
THE ZWEIG LETTER Septe
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