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P R O F I L E
Benefits for all: Jeff Peacock President and CEO of Parametrix, a 100 percent employee-owned engineering, planning, and environmental sciences firm based in Seattle, Washington.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
P eacock joined Parametrix in 1990 as a transportation staff engineer. In 2008, he became president and CEO. Today, he’s responsible for overall company growth and profitability. He oversees company-wide operations, strategic planning, and business development activities. “I’ve learned through the years that a simple thank you and acknowledging an employee’s commitment to our clients and company often means as much as a financial reward,” Peacock says. “That said, we don’t lose sight of making sure our employee-owners feel great about their compensation and benefits.” A CONVERSATION WITH JEFF PEACOCK. 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? Jeff Peacock: Our key performance indicators include
utilization, sales, backlog, and contribution margin/ profit. As a 100 percent ESOP employee-owned firm we are extremely transparent and have developed a variety of systems and communication channels to enable every employee access and monitoring of their individual performance metrics in real time. We also have bi-weekly “bagel breaks” in all of our offices where office, company information, and updates are routinely shared and discussed with everyone. TZL: How far into the future are you able to reliably predict your workload and cashflow? JP: At a company and office level we track our backlog of executed contracted work (we don’t include on-calls until we have executed task assignments). This gives us a pretty good sense of workload forecasts and we typically target eight to nine months of backlog to feel comfortable we’ll have no problem meeting our goals. At an office level, workload is typically tracked at a much more granular
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