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Architects and engineers tend to have a complicated relationship with business data.
They understand its importance. They know project margins matter. They want to know where their people are spending their time, which projects are performing well and whether the firm is actually making enough profit to survive — maybe even thrive.
They would also, generally speaking, rather be designing a building.
That’s understandable. Architects and engineers chose careers built around creating things, solving difficult problems and doing meaningful work for clients. Few dreamed of one day spending an afternoon exporting three reports into Excel so they could answer a question about utilization.
Yet that’s exactly where many firms find themselves.
The problem isn’t a lack of business intelligence — it’s being able to harness that intelligence quickly enough to make better strategic decisions while running a busy practice.
“A&E firms have more data than ever,” explains BQE CEO Matt Cooper, “but data only creates value when it can be distributed to the right people, presented in a way they can understand, and inspected deeply enough to answer the questions behind the numbers.”
Think about the critical business questions that come up in an A/E firm every week.
Which projects are actually making money? Why is cash taking longer to come in? Are we using our people effectively? Which clients and project types should we be pursuing more aggressively?
Most firms can answer these questions eventually, but “eventually” is not good enough when it comes to gathering data that might impact a firm's very existence.
Certa Building Solutions experienced this as the firm grew across multiple offices. Director of Administration Liz McKenzie found herself combining reports whenever leadership wanted an analysis that didn’t already exist.
“[The owner] had specific reports he wanted to review... Before I couldn’t do it or I’d have to run three or four different reports and then extrapolate information and build a completely new report for it in Excel or Power BI.”
For plenty of firms, that probably sounds like every other Tuesday.
Even when the information is surfaced, many firm leaders have neither the time nor the inclination to fully analyze and gain real insights from it. The brutal truth is that many firms have mountains of data and still run much of their business on gut feelings.
That delay has become increasingly difficult to accept. “In a climate of tighter margins, rising labor costs, and greater uncertainty,” Cooper says, “firms can't afford to wait for a monthly report to tell them what happened. They need to be able to see what is happening and understand why, so they can be proactive about their futures.”
Thankfully, help is at hand with the introduction of CORE Insights, a new way for BQE CORE users to work with their firm’s data.
Insights includes dashboards that are ready to use while giving firms the flexibility to build and adapt their own as questions arise. Users can drill into a margin, balance or metric to understand the projects, clients or PMs behind it. Firms already using Power BI can also work with the same live data inside CORE.
But what is the real value of more organized data to an architecture or engineering firm?
Knowing what happened with a project is useful, but understanding why it happened is where things get really interesting.
If a project finishes below its expected margin, the number itself doesn’t tell you what to change. There are many possible reasons for such an issue: maybe one phase consumed too many hours, or the original fee was too low, or additional services weren’t billed for.
Once you understand why the margin disappeared, that project data becomes an actionable guide that can help you price and manage the next one differently.
The same thinking can help firms decide which work they actually want.
Winning more work doesn’t automatically create a healthier business. Some projects generate strong margins and repeat opportunities. Others keep everyone extremely busy while somehow forgetting the part where the firm makes money.
Data can expose the difference.
Which clients are most profitable? Which project types routinely consume too much fee? Where does the firm consistently underestimate the effort required? Where should business development spend its time?
Better answers can lead to better pursuits, better pricing and better use of the firm’s limited capacity.
There usually isn’t one dramatic decision that suddenly transforms profitability.
It happens when a PM catches a budget problem earlier. A principal prices the next proposal using actual experience. Finance rectifies a billing bottleneck. Leadership realizes that a certain kind of project consistently underperforms.
Make those decisions across dozens or hundreds of projects and the effect adds up.
At Certa, greater visibility into utilization and labor value has helped leadership understand where revenue is actually being generated. McKenzie is careful not to suggest that software created the firm’s growth. What made all the difference was how clearly they could see their own evolution, so they could act upon it.
“We’re still growing as a company,” says McKenzie. “Right now we’re 10% up on what we were last year for profit, and it’s just a lot cleaner and easier to see using Insights.”
That’s an important distinction — data on its own doesn’t create profitability. It helps people see what is creating profitability, and what is getting in its way.
At BQE, we are firm believers that business data shouldn’t belong exclusively to finance and leadership. The more people in a firm who have easy access to these fundamentals, the more motivation there is to succeed as a team.
For example, many of the decisions that determine profitability are made by project managers every day. They’re managing fees, assigning work and responding to scope changes, usually while also trying to deliver the actual project.
The last thing they need is another reporting obligation. What they do need is useful information that’s easy enough to find that it becomes part of managing the work.
Certa saw that when it began putting Insights directly in front of its PMs.
“I found my PMs actually like looking at [the data],” says McKenize. “It’s helping them manage their projects, because they can see them as a snapshot. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is brilliant — this is where I’ve been looking for that information.’”
Finding out a project lost money after it closes might be useful for the postmortem, but seeing the problem while there’s still time to do something about it is exponentially more useful for the business.
This is ultimately where better business intelligence should lead. Architects, engineers, and firm administrators shouldn’t have to become professional data analysts to run profitable firms.
At Certa, a leadership reporting request that once required rebuilding information from multiple sources could be turned around in as little as 20 minutes. That’s not just reporting efficiency. It’s time — and money — returned directly to the firm.
That time can be harnessed to pursue better projects, to build realtionships with clients, to mentor employees. It carves out more time to design, engineer, and solve the problems people actually entered the profession to solve.
It might even mean leaving the office at the end of the day without one last spreadsheet open. Imagine!
The point of Insights isn’t to generate yet more charts. Most firms have enough of those. The idea is to shorten the distance between asking a data question, understanding the answer, and actually doing something about it.
As Cooper describes, “the long-term opportunity is to turn data from something firms periodically report on into something they actively use to run the business.”
A/E firms can’t control every challenge facing their business — projects will get delayed, clients will change direction, and hiring will be perpetually challenging. But firms can get much better at understanding what is happening inside their own walls.
The firms that survive and thrive won’t be the ones with the most data. They’ll be the ones that can use it to make better decisions about their projects, their people, and the work they pursue.
Then they can get back to designing, developing, and realizing outstanding built projects. Which, presumably, was the point all along.
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