A/E/C THRIVE AGENDA

CEOs in A/E/C want to improve profitability, project performance, and overall project manager proficiency, but actually making that happen? Leading big huge change from 30,000 feet can turn into trying to boil the ocean. Instead, focus on the 10 actionable areas where your firm may struggle with consistency, and start executing at a higher level immediately. Learn from two A/E/C project management experts how to attack the financial performance vampires silently draining the profits from your firm:

• Estimating – Where and how are mistakes yielding inconsistent estimates?
• Scope alignment – Is your team thinking Mercedes when the client is paying for a Buick?
• Identifying Out of Scope work – Most PMs don't identify out of scope work early enough, or at all.
• Charging for Out of Scope work – Get a proven method to capture out of scope work and charge for it, while keeping clients happy.
• Project Planning- How do you know how much work is really left to do and do you have the staff?
• Regular Project Review – Your profitability dashboard may need an update.
• Rear-view reporting – How to turn to the future and focus on what's important.
• Project Accountability – Consider making project performance someone’s responsibility full-time or part-time.
• Over weighting Utilization – Project Profitability and Utilization are in direct conflict and too much emphasis on utilization will erode project profitability.
• Inconsistent Metrics – Push back when employees cherry pick performance KPIs, and get the real picture.
  
  

Are your ownership transition plans on hold? Are you questioning the viability of your acquisition strategy? Are you wondering how COVID-19 could impact your discussions with potential buyers? Are you concerned that a COVID related dip in profits affect valuation and your sale timeline? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you do NOT want to miss this breakout session with PSMJ Senior M&A Consultant Karl Wohler.

Changing times like these can bring great opportunity for those willing to execute on bold strategies. But, this is definitely not the time for uninformed risk-taking or simply trusting your intuition. In this wide-ranging and action-oriented discussion, Karl shares:

• Examples of how A/E/C mergers and acquisition transactions are coming together right now
• The impact of COVID-19 on valuation and transaction structure
• What you need to be doing to find quality buyers and sellers in this market
• Current activity levels of strategic, private equity and family office buyers in the A/E/C M&A market
• His predictions for what you can expect going into the first half of 2021 and beyond
• And more!

How can A/E firms keep their superstars? Turnover is a $600 billion problem in the US alone. More than 4 in 10 workers separate from their jobs every year, and the data show that separations will increase in the years ahead. A staggering 20% of those separations happen within the first 45 days of employment! Leaders are scrambling to respond to the combination of a white-hot economy and low labor participation that has created an unprecedented labor shortage. We need people! But we don’t want just anyone. We want the best, and we want the best to stick around. And while some of us might be tempted to ride out what feels like a short-term labor market blip, the data reveals that attracting and retaining next generation superstars will be a permanent problem. We can no longer continue business as usual in these unusual times. So, what should leaders do? How can they create a Turnover Zero workplace? The answer is as surprising as it is challenging, and it goes beyond ping pong tables, bean bag chairs, and unlimited personal time off. This presentation is specifically designed to teach the underlying principles and the tangible strategies and tactics that will help you attract and keep superstars. Concrete next actions mean you can begin creating a Turnover Zero workplace starting tomorrow. We can’t afford to wait any longer. Welcome to the new world of work! 

• Learn how to create a targeted team or department level onboarding process that allays fear and aids in retention. 
• Learn how to create a tactical and proactive Individual Growth Plan for each team member that encourages sustained professional growth. 
• Learn how to create a Quick Start Plan designed to help your new team member integrate faster into the team, the culture, and the company. 
• Learn the key strategies that boost engagement for younger staff that will keep them happier and more productive. 
• Learn the secrets that will help you better develop your leadership voice, a key skill for the future workplace. 

In making strategic plans for 2021, A/E/C firm leaders must incorporate trends impacting the industry and learn critical leadership skills that will be required of all generations to make the firm successful.

Preparing for the NextGen is much more than succession planning and will require a better understanding of the shifting of generations and their contributing roles in the workplace. By bringing these groups together collaboratively your firm can break through generational stereotypes to create a major competitive advantage.

Join Kristi Weierbach, Managing Director of Workforce Advisory at Stambaugh Ness and Tim Griffin, Executive Vice President at RMF Engineering for a future-focused look at how to identify and leverage engagement strategies that retain your future leaders and prepares them for managing multi-generational workforces. Participate in this breakout session to:

• Learn critical workforce trends impacting the future of the A&E industry
• See what “futureview” means to your firm
• Anticipate potential leadership skill gaps
• Acquire skills to better handle leadership transitions.

A 40-year-old Chief Executive Officer and 35-year-old Director of Design share their perspective on assuming leadership of a Baby Boomer’s architecture firm, as well as four other transitions and acquisitions they have been involved with over the last 10 years. These two Millennials became leaders of their firm at the respective ages of 30 and 26 and have grown it in numerous ways. The most staggering stat is transforming a firm of four staff members with a revenue of $350,000 to a diverse group of 32 talented team members projected to exceed a revenue of $3,000,000. Learn about  lessons learned in all five transitions, along with how the unique leadership style of their Baby Boomer predecessor provided them an opportunity to rise and establish an award-winning, culture-based design firm.

Baby Boomers to Millennials
Millennials want to see a career path - In the next few years, we will see many businesses pass from baby boomers to millennials. Millennials want to see a career path. Firms need to develop a realistic and well-thought out ownership transition plan.

Bridging the Generation Gap
A/E/C firms looking to the future should encourage multi-generational collaboration to ensure they can tap the talent of the baby boomers and allow Millennials to put on their own unique spin.

Leverage Generational Preferences
You need to learn what motivates and demotivates your employees to encourage a successful transfer of knowledge. Learn how to effectively engage Millennials and have them soak up the knowledge like sponges!

Relax your Definition of Learning and Trust Your Employees
Millennials respect knowledge and learning. In fact, they will leave for greener pastures if challenge, learning, and fun are absent from their work. Not all learning comes from employee handbooks or training sessions. Trusting and empowering each other will lead your team to success.

Define Your Successors
From age to experience level, by the end of the session you'll know how to choose the right candidates. 

It’s 2020…are you still marketing like its 2002? If you are a Principal or Marketing Executive at an A/E/C firm, there have likely been times when you have questioned whether or not your firm's marketing and business development efforts are as effective as they could be. If you're still relying on word of mouth, relationships, and your website, you are behind. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has been used by the world's leading B2B brands for nearly two decades, and A/E/C firms are rapidly adopting the methodology. ABM enables your firm to align your marketing and business development resources with the highest value clients, targets, and key pursuits. It's a strategic methodology that yields enormous benefits, including:
• The ability to actually measure marketing ROI 
• Increased efficiency and reduction of marketing waste 
• Alignment of strategic business goals with marketing and business development investments
• Faster speed to market with affordable scalability 
• More accountability for seller-doers, business development professionals and marketing teams
• Increased win rates with the clients you covet the most. 

Learn:

• Why A/E/C firms are flocking to ABM now 
• How adopting an Account-Based Marketing strategy streamlines your costs and achieves better results
• How to use ABM to elevate your brand visibility with specific customers 
• How A/E/C firms are actually generating qualified leads online
• How online campaigns can gain a competitive edge on specific project pursuits. 

As a leader within an A/E/C organization, you know your most valuable asset is your people — but how are they coming across when communicating with clients, prospects, and subs via virtual meeting platforms? 

Your team needs professional presence to meet with clients and embody your brand. They need stage presence to inspire and influence when speaking and presenting. But now, they also need screen presence to carry themselves powerfully on-camera in the Zoom, Webex, Teams, and other virtual platforms that make it harder to connect to clients, show team synergy, and collaborate with prospects and clients.

Winning screen presence is an elusive skill but MUST be developed. It brings a swirl of questions—so bring yours, and this interactive presentation will help you topple the barriers in the way of teams, leaders of teams, and individuals who need to wield command, humility, clarity of point and persuasion in all the moments that really matter.

Typical questions: "How can I get my team to network?” "How can my team speak in one voice about the firm?” "How can I help even out the presentation skills of the team?” "How can we differentiate ourselves?” “How can we get anxiety out of our way?” “What engages an audience?”

In this session, you learn:

• Reliable techniques to project confidence and warmth on-camera
• Universal story tools for concise messages and sound-bites
• Successful techniques to connect meaningfully with remote audiences

While the design process benefits from unrestrained creativity, the best solutions often come from greater constraints, and disciplined attention to a linear progression that maintains project profitability through a focus on doing the right things at the right time. Use the workplanning process to the maximize both client satisfaction and positive financial impact, and truly understand what your team is capable of. In this session, JLG Architects Director of Operations Nicole Washburn reveals how to: 

• Apply four valuable resources to creating, maintaining, and monitoring an actionable workplan
• Help PMs critically think through a project’s needs
• Evaluate a PM’s workplan and measure project progress 
• Evaluate tools to implementworkplanningsteps 
• Improve thebottom lineimpact of a workplan 

The CARES Act provides businesses with a host of tax saving opportunities. For instance, businesses can now generate additional losses in 2018 and 2019 through a variety of means including 179D Energy Efficient Commercial Building Deductions, Cost Segregation, and QIP reclassification.  A/E/C firms can now use these losses to generate significant tax refunds in prior years, and in turn claim additional tax credits and incentives like R&D tax credits from otherwise closed tax years. Learn how to leverage tthe R&D Tax Credit and the 179D Energy Efficient Commercial Building Deductions and how they fit in with these new opportunities for tax savings.  

• R&D Tax Credit brief overview and updates
• 179D brief overview and updates
• Recent case (Quebe) (case study)
• CARES Act Implications
• 2020 planning

A/E/C firms, like many other professional services, are more than just the technical work we do for clients. Most often we measure project success by the quality of our work products, our ability to meet schedule milestones, and adherence to budgets. Many of us know that these attributes are “table stakes,” our ability to meet minimum customer expectations and be considered a viable player, whether we’re at the poker table or the boardroom table. With the onslaught of competition, the bar is significantly higher now. 

Exceptional client service can be a differentiator, and offer a competitive advantage for your company. In this session, we’ll explore the key aspects of your Client Service program: 

• Planning: main program elements, and questions to ask as you establish your framework 
• Implementing: what you can do, corporately and individually, to drive the Client Service mindset through your organization 
• Measuring: design a system to obtain feedback and help you set a course for improvement 

Use Client Service as a competitive weapon to create raving fans and build your business into a client- centric fortress. By the end of this session you'll be armed to: 

• Implement a framework and components of a formal Client Service program 
• Explain to staff how they can contribute to advancing Client Service 
• Think…differently…about Client Service 

Even pre-COVID, most architecture, engineering, and construction companies struggled to stand out from the competition. Today's marketing and BD  professionals, project executives, and seller-doers are facing intense pressure to win work during a global pandemic that's boosted business uncertainty and busted face-to-face communication. While virtual meetings are not new to the A/E/C industry, client meetings and project interviews now require attention to different details, so teams make a positive virtual impact that results in selection success. Veterans Hilari Weinstein and Barbara Shuck will share proven strategies to optimize verbal and visual effectiveness so attendees will walk away knowing how to manage the media, messages and messengers that build memorable and winning virtual connections.  

• Avoid the pitfalls that could diminish your image with clients and prospects. 
• Implement strategies that ensure effective virtual connections. 
• Design verbal and visual presence that separates you from the competition. 
• Demonstrate qualities that teams should employ for optimal virtual impact. 
• Integrate new ideas into your A/E/C firm's virtual meetings or interviews. 

• Woodard & Curran’s Diversity & Inclusion journey and how it led them to create a full time DEI Manager position
• The design of a 3-year D&I strategy and 2021 Action Plan with KPIs
• The launch of seven Employee Resource Groups to drive effective change

Are you taking full advantage of current rules and legislation governing the Federal Research and Development (R&D) tax credit, given how it applies to A\E\C industries? Learn 4 common mistakes A/E/C leaders, and their trusted financial advisors, make when evaluating the merits and alignment of this incentive within the design industry. If you are a Shareholder, Principal, Financial Advisor, CPA, CFO, Controller, Owner, Business/OPS Manager, as well as supplier to the AEC industry, this is the session for you. If you are curious to find other avenues of reducing overhead rates (specifically direct labor expenses), increasing cash flow, increasing profit-To- Earnings Ratios, permanent tax savings, reduction in effective tax rates, and an alternative source of cash to fund growth in technical-based jobs, this will be the most valuable session of your THRIVE experience. Join us for this breakout session to: 

• Leverage the congressional intent of this federal incentive program 
• Get a real-world understanding of how Congress defines R&D activity; much different from Wikipedia 
• Recognize activities your firm is doing that qualify for the R&D tax credit 
• Discuss the mechanics of the tax credit calculation

Profit Improvement Studies have traditionally been performed with a heavy on-site component: interviews, meetings, wrap-up discussion, presentation of results. There are many firms with below par profitability that want to make significant improvements, but are postponing a study because of the pandemic. Join A/E/C profitability guru Brian Flynn for an eye-opening case study of a firm running out of optionshoice- they are losing money and in danger of serious long-term damage.
You'll learn:

• What's "subpar" performance these days?
• Profit improvement as a means to robust long- term resiliency
• How to perform a profitability study without any direct face to face contact
• How to develop and own an action plan for profit improvement
• How to set up a study for success-regardless of environment

Facing the Shortlist Presentation was hard enough already, but the advent of the virtual interview has made it that much worse, distancing us from our prospect, separating us from our team, and essentially making us “on-camera talent.” Just as we’re adjusting to the two-second delay (and with it, the choice to either hold back or potentially step on another speaker), we’re now facing the hybrid, where live and remote participants combine, while wrangling the issues of social distancing, creating a whole new venue, and answering scores of questions. This session sets to answer your questions with a unique set of perspectives from a 20-year veteran of A/E/C interview coaching who happens to be a former filmmaker. Dean Hyers of SagePresence – a highly interactive Q&A-driven speaker – bridges the gap between live, virtual, and interactive media with presentation, conversation, and simple group activities to explore: 

• What does it take to make a warm connection in each format? 
• How does messaging, point-making, and elaboration change across the formats? 
• Why is “team synergy” a completely different game virtually than live? 
• When do the rules of “screen presence” differ from “stage presence”? 
• Where is the future of interview venues is likely to take us?.

Earned Value Management (EVM), the A/E/C project management best practice that evaluates data to gauge the performance of a project or group of projects, is widely used in our industry to maintain profit margins. But could you be making some of the common mistakes that limit the effectiveness for managing project scope, schedule, and cost?

Join Rich Wilkinson and Gerald Cox to understand how to set up a simple EVM solution for your firm that gives you the ability to track performance and cost. And how to avoid missteps that keep you from getting the most accurate data, executing projects profitably, and winning new business: 

• How EVM can help promote success across your projects
• Key benefits of tracking EV
• Common errors A/E/C principals and PMs make when applying EVM
• An EVM Roadmap from proposals through baseline
• The most Important metrics, rearview and predictive, for measuring EV

Even in the midst of a global pandemic, citizens and stakeholders deserve to understand the impacts of design and construction projects. Yet, social distancing may not be possible for in-person meetings, and shutting down the public involvement process is not an option. Community residents deserve to participate, and architects, engineers, and contractors must step up and deliver public meetings via virtual platforms. 

This program features Sara Radil from HDR, a global A/E/C firm, who will share valuable lessons learned and helpful insights about how the company is using technology to conduct public involvement outreach meetings with skyrocketing engagement results. She will share specific examples so the audience walks away with more knowledge about platform strategies and helpful tips so their virtual meetings can proceed without a hitch, too. Barbara’s role is to add colorful “play-by-play” and help the audience apply “So What?” lessons to other virtual event and client engagement scenarios. This session promises to provide not only project-related lessons learned, but also valuable take-aways that improve planning and delivery of virtual events. 

Learn how to:

• Offer feedback about current virtual event experiences using an online engagement tool. 
• Implement strategies that ensure participation and engagement at virtual events. 
• Design virtual events that appeal to many audiences, especially with wide gaps in digital device usage. 
• Demonstrate how engagement tools and event design enhance project value. 
• Integrate new ideas into your organization’s virtual events and community meetings. 

As the “Silver Tsunami” hits, more and more A/E/C business owners are reaching a point where they must have an exit policy as they approach the end of their careers. One strategy is to sell the business to another firm. Another approach is to develop the next generation of owners from within. Creating an ESOP is one strategy but it is also possible to develop the next generation of business owners through a thoughtful Ownership Transition Process without creating an ESOP. This session describes important factors you must consider when developing an Ownership Transition Plan, the risks and pitfalls you'll encounter, and the benefits that can be obtained with a successful transition. Hear from a second generation owner of an engineering and architecture company, including the process of transitioning ownership to the next generation(s) of employees.  

• How to finance stock purchases
• How much time is required to successfully transition
• How to train employees to become business owners
• How much information and authority to share
• Challenges of transitioning ownership when the company is going through strong growth and in an economic downturn
• Benefits of having an Ownership Transition Plan  
  

Having strong business development practices has always been an imperative in the A/E/C industry.  But as the industry emerges from the COVID crisis, bringing your “A-game” to your marketing and business development practices will be more critical than ever.   Join the aec360 team to learn 10 intelligent strategies for identifying and winning more work, optimizing your firm’s relationships, and generating more revenue.

You learn how to:

• Tap into artificial intelligence tools to identify potential leads
• Leverage internal and external relationships to create more opportunities
• Utilize predictive analytics to make informed pursuit decisions
• Highlight your experience to win a higher percentage of your bids
• Much more!

Are your firm’s leaders aware of factors that contribute to it? Have you designed and implemented solutions to reverse and prevent this revenue killer and position your firm to grow in a new workplace, marketplace, and recruiting space? Learn from a leading expert on A/E/C burnout how work-life seasons and ongoing shifts can shape how you design personal and organization-based solutions that keep key contributors fully engaged and growing. He explains how to:

• Embrace a new approach to talent management that aligns with demographic and societal shifts
• Reverse the Burnout-Disengagement Cycle hitting the A/E/C industry as remote work isolation takes its toll.
• Increase leadership awareness of the problems inherent in the WFA shift
• Measure true employee engagement, and how to increase it in the COVID era.
• Attract, engage, and inspire our best employees by design for more than an “experience”