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S P O N S O R
Data, data everywhere
Getting a better handle on your data helps you identify what your firm is truly good at, and where the highest profits are.
I f you are a marketing or business development professional in the AEC industry, you need to help your firm make the best decisions possible to maximize the profitability of each job you take on. You may also be tasked with finding ways to strategically grow your business in a very intentional way versus just being opportunistic about where to pursue additional business.
Randy Reynolds
Making the correct strategic growth decision requires data. But what happens when it takes days or even weeks to pull together all the data you need to make informed decisions? If you can’t find the data you need quickly, you may be missing out on potential projects or worse, pursuing the wrong kind of projects. TOO MANY DATA SILOS. Managing the wealth of data necessary to keep AEC firms running and growing is a massive challenge. Whether you are creating project proposals, managing sales projections, or evaluating past projects, you need a single source of data for your business. But it’s not as simple as it might appear. Information is inconsistent at best and distributed around the office in spread- sheets, file cabinets, financial systems, project
management systems, email archives – even post- it notes! If your firm has acquired another firm, you have historical information in other systems that need to come together to form a complete picture of your business and your people. Some information you need may not be in any system at all – it may be inside the memory of one or more of your tenured employees: The self-proclaimed company historian who remembers details of ev- ery past project. How can you get to the answers you need when it exists in all these different “data silos?” At the pace of today’s business, speed and accuracy can be the difference between winning the next job or wasting time and resources on the
See RANDY REYNOLDS, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 26, 2019, ISSUE 1310
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