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BUSINESS NEWS FLUORAWARDED CONTRACT FORWORLD’S LARGEST PROPYLENE OXIDE AND TERTIARY BUTYL ALCOHOL PLANT Fluor Corporation announced that it was selected by LyondellBasell to perform the engineering and procurement for its propylene oxide and tertiary butyl alcohol project located at its Channelview and Bayport complexes outside of Houston. Fluor booked the undisclosed contract value into backlog in the third quarter of 2017. The project represents the single-largest capital investment in LyondellBasell’s history. When completed, the plant will produce 1 billion pounds per year of PO and 2.2 billion pounds per year of TBA. At the peak of construction, the project is expected to create up to 2,500 jobs and approximately 160 permanent positions when operational. PO is a building block of many everyday products, including bedding, furniture, carpeting, coatings, building materials, and adhesives. The TBA will be converted to fuel additives that help

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gasoline burn cleaner and reduce automobile emissions. “This facility is a strategic part of LyondellBasell’s organic growth plans and we are pleased to continue our partnership on this project,” said Mark Fields, president of Fluor’s Energy and Chemicals business in the Americas. “Using our Zero Base ExecutionSM approach, the LyondellBasell and Fluor team developed a fit-for-purpose solution that optimized the plant design, leveraged global procurement opportunities and implemented a cost-effective modularization approach. Our integrated solutions approach substantially reduced the facility’s capital costs and helped LyondellBasell achieve their final investment decision on this world-scale chemical facility.” LyondellBasell is one of the largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies in the world. Fluor has participated in the project since the commencement of front-end engineering and design in 2015.

MARK ZWEIG, from page 1

a bad idea. The industry overall is made of tens of thousands of 15- to 20-person firms that don’t do all that well. If the aspirations for your firm exceed those, please select ap- propriate norms to compare yourself to. ❚ ❚ If something looks funny, dig into it. I see lots of mistakes in financial reports put together by people working in A/E firms. Some of them are even made by people who are CPAs. If you see something that looks like it doesn’t add up, ask questions. I find that the numbers frequently don’t add up. There may be a good reason for it (in which case you need to understand what it is and why) or, there could just be a messed up spreadsheet. Both happen! ❚ ❚ Never take any income statement or balance sheet for what it says without prob- ing. What I am talking about here is when I see firms that look like they aren’t making any money and then you find out they paid out a million dollars in bonuses with $7 million in revenue and the bonus dollars were all simply charged off to “labor” and expensed out above the profit line. This profitable company appeared unprofitable at first glance. Ditto for balance sheets with depreciated real estate on their books. Their equity could be vastly under-reported as a result. Or, they could have five-year-old ARs on the books that they will never collect that make them look stronger than they really are. It goes both ways. ❚ ❚ Look to the future as opposed to the rearview mirror. Too much of the reporting and attention in our business is given to events that have already happened. We can’t do anything about those things. But what we can do is look ahead and make changes that will impact us in a positive way. That’s the real purpose of the number tracking from a management point of view. What predictive metrics are you tracking? ❚ ❚ Share the numbers with everyone – and if not everyone, everyone who needs them. Everyone can potentially affect your performance in a positive way. Everyone needs reinforcement that they are doing the right thing if the results are good. Why not share this information? ❚ ❚ Remember that people respond to what you measure and report! Measure and re- port on utilization, and you will have people who do a great job eating up labor budgets. Measure and report on effective labor multiplier, and you will have people who don’t charge time to jobs that they should be charging time to. Measure and report on busi- ness development hours worked and you will have a lot of time charged to BD. What are your thoughts on this subject? Email me with any questions or comments! MARK ZWEIG is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.

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THE ZWEIG LETTER December 4, 2017, ISSUE 1226

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