Strategic planning is the key to business success. Just ask any member of PSMJ’s 2015 Circle of Excellence.

Representing the top 20% of participants in PSMJ’s annual A/E Financial Performance Benchmark Survey, 66 exceptional firms made it onto the exclusive list this year.

We asked a panel of recurring COE members about their strategic planning efforts. 

Didi Ndando, P.E. - VP, Finance and Administration of HVJ Associates, a Texas corporation founded in Houston in 1985 that provides a range of geotechnical, construction material, environmental and pavement engineering services.  

HVJ’s Strategic Planning or Annual Operating Plan (AOP) process is based on an established Vision/Mission and Value Proposition. It has two phases; developing the plan, and then executing and monitoring. It can be likened to a moon shot where the first phase is to define where we want to go and then develop the plan to get there, and the second step is to navigate to ensure we land where we want.

Developing the plan goes through a process of speculating and formulating the plan, including a couple of scans:

1. An organization and process improvement scan to consider where we can eliminate waste, adopt best practices, and improve stakeholder satisfaction.

2. A business development scan where we consider where we landed in the previous year and what looks attractive now (like moving to other geographic areas, providing new services, market share, etc.)

Executing the plan and evaluating results requires continuously assessing where we are versus where we want to be, and taking corrective action. The questions we address on an ongoing basis (Quarterly Business Reviews) in this phase include:

1. How did we do compared to the plan?

2. How do we account for variances?

3. Is our landing spot still viable and desirable?

4. What changes to the plan are required?

Once we have landed we assess how far we are from our target destination and glean whatever lessons need to be learned and applied moving forward. We also instituted a structured incentive plan to reward and enforce the behaviors we want.

Dee Brown, P.E., Co-Founder & Principal, of Brown Engineers, LLC, a 14-person firm headquartered in Little Rock, AR, specializing in electrical, mechanical, and automation engineering.

Brown Engineers is about nine years old now and started with two guys, and today we’re at 14 full-time plus three part-time employees. We have mostly focused on the business of getting more work and growing our staff with very little actual strategic planning until last year when we engaged PSMJ, and Dave Burstein helped with on-site Strategic Planning. Dave helped us to see the benefit of a long-range plan including Ownership Transition. This has helped us confirm the direction of our firm.

Our greatest successes have come recently from taking the time to define our vision/mission and value proposition first, and designing a process which engages everyone in the company early in the speculation phase. This way we get benefit of diverse perspectives and it is easier to develop firm-wide alignment and synergy once we decide what game we are going to play.

Pete Smith, AIA President and CEO of  BWBR, a 140-person multidisciplinary design firm, with offices in St. Paul, MN, and Madison, WI.

BWBR has been a successful practice for decades and because of that success, strategic planning has often been seen as “unnecessary.” If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. When we have done strategic planning in the past it has been on the urging of one or more individuals who felt a need to answer some high-level questions like “what markets should we be in?” or “what kind of expertise might we be missing?” We have historically done strategic planning by the seat of the pants.

About ten years ago, we went through a change in leadership and strategic planning became more important as we lead our practice and in the last few years much more so. Today our strategic planning efforts are planned out and intentional. It is not an exercise for the sake of the exercise …”there, we did that, can we not talk about strategic planning for a while?” but rather the process is meant to challenge our assumptions, anticipate our trajectory, and ideally be one (or more) steps ahead of our competition.

This article is an excerpt from  PSMJ's recently released complimentary ebook Here's How They Did It! Becoming Part Of PSMJ's Circle of Excellence.