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Identifying opportunities: Bill Inman President and CEO of Hitchcock Design Group (Best Firm Architecture #7 for 2018), a 35-person landscape architecture firm headquartered in Naperville, Illinois.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
“W e’ll invest heavily in people who are smart and want to get smarter, who are humble and work well in teams, and who are hungry for success,” Inman says. “I believe culture is what you make of it in the moment, not some nebulous ideal that someone else should provide for you.” A CONVERSATION WITH BILL INMAN. The Zweig Letter: Do you tie compensation to perfor- mance for your top leaders? Bill Inman: Absolutely. Hitchcock is a performance-based organization, defined both by metrics and cultural commit- ments. We are committed to compensating all members of our firm in the top-quartile of the market, as defined by their roles, responsibilities, expectations, and experience level. In our firm, all top leaders are responsible for bringing in work, caring for clients, delivering innovative and profitable solutions, and adding value to our culture. Awesome indi- vidual performances are then rewarded in the moment with firmwide recognition and perks, and annually with cash bo- nus awards.
Our philosophy is that when the firm pays bonuses, every- one gets something for being part of the team, and the high- est performing offices and individuals are awarded higher amounts. And since many of our top-leaders are owners, the firm value created by top-owners is further rewarded through incremental intangible-value awards as part of our deferred compensation program. “In our firm, all top leaders are responsible for bringing in work, caring for clients, delivering innovative and profitable solutions, and adding value to our culture.” TZL: What actions do you take to address a geographic office or specific discipline in the event of non-perfor- mance? BI: This hasn’t been much of an issue for us, but sometimes individual offices don’t have the backlog to support their talent, so our workgroup leaders work with each other to share talent between offices to smooth out utilization. We have five workgroup studios across our four offices, but we
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