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Webinars
Our webinar series is created by acclaimed architects, engineers, and business consultants designed to help professional services run their firms more profitably while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Earn AIA Continuing Education Credits for Attending!
Upcoming webinars
The 60-Minute MBA for Architects & Engineers
Thursday, June 1st, 2023
1PM ET | 10AM PT
In this session, we will learn the fundamentals of all successful AE firms and provide the basis for making well-grounded business decisions. We will learn how firms can transition from being professionals providing services, to highly tuned businesses that can identify the needs of the marketplace and create services and products that are appropriately priced and yield consistent and greater profits.
Pre-Design to Post-Construction: Strategies That Maximize Profits For Architects & Engineers
Wednesday, June 7th, 2023
1PM ET | 10AM PT
The primary objective for every firm is to generate value. This value stems from the loyalty and trust you cultivate with your clients. From initial interactions with potential clients to delivering exceptional service through effective project management, your responsibilities extend far beyond the completion of a project.
This webinar reviews each step of the ideal project process and includes 10 strategies your firm can implement to achieve financial stability and increase profit margins, which will not only alleviate financial stress but enable your firm to recruit top talent, attract the right clients, and grow.
Eliminating Time-Sucking Work: Transformative Business Automation Technologies Beyond CAD & BIM
Thursday, June 8th, 2023
1PM ET | 10AM PT
Industry surveys show that many AE firms rely on outdated software or spreadsheets to manage their business information, leading to inefficiencies and reduced profitability. In the webinar, we'll cover new business automation technologies, beyond CAD & BIM, that boost efficiency and engagement for all firm members, regardless of size. Join us to learn how you can break free of these obsolete tools, eliminate repetitive, mundane work, and return to doing the work you enjoy most.
Improving Project Profitability: The 10 KPIs Your Consulting Firm Needs To Be Tracking
Tuesday, June 13th, 2023
2PM ET | 11AM PT
Join us for an engaging, live webinar presented by entrepreneur and founder of The Well-Designed Firm, Steven Burns, FAIA, as he explores 10 project performance KPIs that, when tracked properly, will transform the way your business operates, and subsequently how profitable each project is.
Strategies for Successful and Profitable Project Management
Wednesday, June 21st, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 6 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Great project managers are sometimes underappreciated and overlooked. They are not the architect who designs the building or produces the drawings, but they are an integral role for any A & E firm. Most small and medium firms rarely have proper training or mentorship for project managers. In this course, we will discuss an overview of the skillset and training necessary to hire or manage an effective project manager.
Firm and Project Profitability: Understanding the Difference & What It Means for Your Bottom Line
Wednesday, July 19th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 7 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
There are many ways to analyze profit and understand profit. Typically, principals and accountants alike look at how much money is in your firm’s bank account at the end of the year. In this webinar, we will go much deeper and review the metrics and tools necessary to understand both your project profitability and your firm profitability. We will define a critical KPI, the cost rate multiplier, and review the difference between utilization rate and efficiency rate. We will also define what your billing target per month should be in order to reach your goals.
Management Through Measurement: Essential KPIs to Optimize Your Firm
Wednesday, August 16th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 8 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
A real-time view into the activity of employees, projects, and firm financials through dashboards, reports, and scorecards is required to maintain a profitable practice. Tracking this information shows trends over time and provides critical information you need to adjust your business decisions around staffing, business development, and even firm culture. During this course, you will discover the most important KPIs to look at and learn a system for tracking this information month-over-month to reflect your firm's trends.
Structured For Success: How to Build an Org Chart That Increases Alignment and Improves Output
Wednesday, September 20th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 9 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Creating your ideal business structure is more than just deciding if you are an S Corp, LLP, or sole practitioner. This webinar dives into the various options of business structures and the benefits of each type. Equally as important, we’ll develop an accountability chart and define the difference between an organization chart and an accountability chart. Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will guide you through this process whether you are a 1-person firm, 5-person firm or 25-person firm.
Aligning Your Firm to the CORE: How to Create Core Values & Mission Statement
Wednesday, October 18th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 10 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Establishing core values and a firm mission is a critical step to define who you are as a firm. It determines the type of staff you want to hire and, as importantly, it qualifies your ideal client. During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, shares a step-by-step process to define your core values and mission-vision statement. He will talk about storytelling and how your story reflects your values. Are your clients aligned with YOUR story? In addition, he will discuss using an analyzer tool to confirm if your employees, clients and projects are in alignment with your core values.
Your Business Blueprint: Creating a Plan to Succeed
Wednesday, November 15th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 11 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
How many of us take the time to create, update and review our firm’s strategic plan? This does not have to be overly complicated, but you do need to put a flag in the ground and define where you want to go. Your strategic plan defines the overarching vision of your company and ensures that your team members know what they can do to make a difference and help your firm achieve its goals. It helps answer questions like: Who is our ideal client? What are our strengths as a firm? What are our leading and lagging indicators to track success along the way? During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will teach AE firm leaders how to select, tweak and manage essential KPIs in their strategic plans to set their firm up for success for years to come.
Marketing & BD Essentials: Creating Sustainable Growth & Predictable Revenue
Wednesday, December 20th, 2023
1pm ET | 10AM PT
Part 12 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Most firms are extremely thoughtful when developing their designs, but often let communicating their brand or actively pursuing ideal clients fall to the wayside. Although marketing and business development both contribute to firm growth, there is a big difference between the two. While marketing establishes your brand and (hopefully) generates qualified leads, business development focuses on strategically developing relationships with potential, new and existing customers. During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will reveal his system for gaining and tracking leads and sales opportunities that works for teams of all sizes.
On-demand webinars
Cash is King: A Consultant’s Guide to Managing Cashflow for Profit & Growth
Most consultants strive to collect cash for their services within 30 days, but many wait 60, or even 120 days, to receive payment from their clients. In this training, we will examine the complete project lifecycle to understand how cashflow can be increased or decreased. Participants will gain valuable tips to improve cashflow by improving timesheet practices, reducing the billing cycle, and improving client relationships and collection practices.
Improving Your AE Firm’s Profitability Through Business Intelligence
Business intelligence opens up a world of possibilities for A/E and Design professionals. It gives you unprecedented visibility into your practice and makes it simple to identify—and seize—opportunities for growth. Attend this webinar to discover the practical applications of this cutting-edge technology, which boosts profits and positions your firm as a leader in the years to come. You’ll learn how principals, partners, CFOs, and other managers are using business intelligence to streamline their daily tasks, gain a competitive advantage, and grow their organizations like never before.
Data-Driven Success: Streamlining Your Business Operation
Join Steven Burns, FAIA, Founder of The Well-Designed Firm, as he walks you through how smart technology can help you save time on repetitive tasks and unlock the meaning to your valuable stream of data. During the webinar, Steven will share the lessons he’s learned while working with over 1,300 AE firms and demonstrate how your firm can leverage this mine of precious data to achieve greater organization, efficiency, and profitability by adopting best practices and taking advantage of modern, user-friendly, and affordable computing technologies.
The Smart Practice Method for Managing an Architecture Firm That Doesn't Get in the Way of the Architecture
This free, live professional development webinar reveals a simple approach to end the chaos of business and get back to what you love: architecture.
Recession Roundtable: Maintain a Thriving AE Firm During Uncertain Economic Times
A recent poll of economists from The Wall Street Journal stated that the chances of seeing a recession in 2023 are 61%. However, while most industries and families may be tightening their budgets, quite the opposite may be true for those who work for architecture, engineering, and construction firms. According to the AIA Consensus Construction Forecast’s 2023 update, “this year is expected to produce further growth in construction spending, but at a more moderate pace.” Join four seasoned AE thought leaders as they review the facts, give advice, and take your questions about how to keep your firm thriving during uncertain economic times.
The 60-Minute MBA for Architects & Engineers
In this session, we will learn the fundamentals of all successful AE firms and provide the basis for making well-grounded business decisions. We will learn how firms can transition from being professionals providing services, to highly tuned businesses that can identify the needs of the marketplace and create services and products that are appropriately priced and yield consistent and greater profits.
The Art of Estimating Fees: Creating a Simple Process for Success
Ready to start mastering fees and better understand what they mean for your bottom line? To do so, let’s start at the very beginning—when you receive a request for a proposal. In this course, you will learn how to define your project scope, develop a Rough Order of Magnitude of construction cost, and estimate your project hours. We’ll finish off with how fees are broken down and explore a simple system to improve your overall project profitability.
The CORE of Their Success: How These Firms Turned Project Insights Into Action
Join us as four different CORE customers discuss their experience implementing and utilizing CORE, as well as the wins, losses, and lessons learned along the way. At the end of the session, we’ll take questions from the audience, so you can hear answers and feedback from real customers.
How to Make 2023 Your Most Profitable Year Yet
This session will share techniques and technologies that your firm must embrace to have the highest efficiency and profitability. Your firm can apply the same rigor and discipline you apply to your projects but focused inward. Learn best practices for Client Relationship Management (CRM), marketing, project management, billing, and accounting.
RAISE Your Value and Charge What You’re Worth
This session is based on the new book by June Jewell, RAISE Your Value: 5 Steps to Uncover Hidden Value, Design a Winning Advantage and Charge More. You will discover that with the right approach, understanding and language tools, it is possible to transform your client relationships and business practices away from accepting unprofitable work towards a value-based business partnership. This presentation will focus on how to understand and communicate your value so that you can have better, fairer clients and higher profits.
Scope Creep: Identifying and Reducing this HUGE Project Management Pitfall
All AE consulting firms want their projects to be as profitable as possible; however, most will identify their biggest project management pitfall as: doing work outside of the scope (aka scope creep), which greatly reduces profits. Depending on the size of your firm, scope creep could cost you thousands, or even millions, of dollars annually.
While this is a common and debilitating challenge that MOST firms face, the reality is that by installing a few simple processes you can greatly reduce scope creep on your projects. These strategies should be learned and implemented by every project professional as early on as possible in their careers.
Digging Into the Present & Future of Work in Engineering & Architecture Report 2022
Join experts from ActionsProve, LLC and the Engineering Management Institute as they review an in-depth study of the state of the A/E industry and talent market.
The new research uncovers key workplace issues in a fast-changing world and how employers can attract and retain top talent amidst the Great Resignation and position themselves for greater growth and prosperity.
Seven Pillars of Highly Successful AE Firms
Culled from experiences working with more than 3,000 AE firms over 25 years, this session will examine the seven common denominators of every successful firm. Success comes in many flavors. For some, it’s money; for others, it is peer recognition, awards, or fame; for most of us, it’s having access to challenging or exciting projects.
Regardless of how you measure success, by adopting these Seven Pillars you will create the framework from which you and every member of your firm can achieve their professional goals.
Your Office is Leaking Money: How to Identify Losses and Plug the Holes
Most A&E firms don’t apply the same rigor, discipline, and consistency that they use when executing their projects. We will show how easy it is for your firm to be well-organized, efficient, and profitable by applying best practices and utilizing modern, effortless, affordable computing technologies.
Join us for an engaging, live webinar presented by Steven Burns, FAIA, Chief Creative Officer at BQE Software, as he shares lessons learned over 35 years working with over 1,000 A&E firms.
10 KPIs Your A & E Firm Needs to Track for Maximum Project Profitability
Key performance indicators (KPIs) track project success by measuring how your projects (or team, clients, and so on) are performing. Because each architecture and engineering firm has different goals and ways of working, your vital KPIs will vary from project to project.
Within the world of project performance and finance, certain KPIs should always be used to monitor and improve your success.
On demand: Masterclass Series
Time Management Strategies To Increase Your Firm's Profitability
Part 1 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
In architectural and engineering practices, time is money. Without proper tracking and allocation of time there is no way to understand and manage profitability on your projects. In this webinar, we will discuss time tracking via buckets, calendar blocking, and a work-life balance.
The Foundation of Financial Reporting: How to Organize Your Chart of Accounts to Understand Firm Profitability
Part 2 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
The Chart of Accounts is foundational to understanding your firm's finances. In this course, we will review basic terminology used in accounting, analyze a typical Chart of Accounts that will work for most small firms, and show how this chart of accounts can assist with understanding your flow of money and help to create your budget for the coming year.
The Art of Estimating Fees: Creating a Simple Process for Success
Part 3 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Ready to start mastering fees and better understand what they mean for your bottom line? To do so, let’s start at the very beginning—when you receive a request for a proposal. In this course, you will learn how to define your project scope, develop a Rough Order of Magnitude of construction cost, and estimate your project hours. We’ll finish off with how fees are broken down and explore a simple system to improve your overall project profitability.
Building a Better Proposal: How to Get Clients to Say Yes
Part 4 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
The proposal is a critical part of the client onboarding process. While there are multiple types of proposals, there is never just one that works for every project. In this course, we review what is included in the proposal, the difference between a proposal and contract, and terms and conditions to turn your proposal into a contract. We also highlight the importance of linking to your project setup and the valuable benefits of using AIA agreements.
Understanding Runway and Burn Rate: The Key to Cash Flow
Part 5 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Gross burn rate is an important thing to measure. Burn rate is the pace at which a firm is running through its capital ahead of it generating any positive cash flow. It allows you to answer the question: “If we don’t sign another project, how many months can we stay in business? How long is our runway?” This webinar looks at the key performance indicators associated with your runway and burn rate and teaches you how to estimate your projected income.
Strategies for Successful and Profitable Project Management
Part 6 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Great project managers are sometimes underappreciated and overlooked. They are not the architect who designs the building or produces the drawings, but they are an integral role for any A & E firm. Most small and medium firms rarely have proper training or mentorship for project managers. In this course, we will discuss an overview of the skillset and training necessary to hire or manage an effective project manager.
Firm and Project Profitability: Understanding the Difference and What It Means for Your Bottom Line
Part 7 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
There are many ways to analyze profit and understand profit. Typically, principals and accountants alike look at how much money is in your firm’s bank account at the end of the year. In this webinar, we will go much deeper and review the metrics and tools necessary to understand both your project profitability and your firm profitability. We will define a critical KPI, the cost rate multiplier, and review the difference between utilization rate and efficiency rate. We will also define what your billing target per month should be in order to reach your goals.
Management Through Measurement: Essential KPIs to Optimize Your Firm
Part 8 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
A real-time view into the activity of employees, projects, and firm financials through dashboards, reports, and scorecards is required to maintain a profitable practice. Tracking this information shows trends over time and provides critical information you need to adjust your business decisions around staffing, business development, and even firm culture. During this course, you will discover the most important KPIs to look at and learn a system for tracking this information month-over-month to reflect your firm's trends.
Structured For Success: How to Build an Org Chart That Increases Alignment and Improves Output
Part 9 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Creating your ideal business structure is more than just deciding if you are an S Corp, LLP, or sole practitioner. This webinar dives into the various options of business structures and the benefits of each type. Equally as important, we’ll develop an accountability chart and define the difference between an organization chart and an accountability chart. Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will guide you through this process whether you are a 1-person firm, 5-person firm or 25-person firm.
Aligning Your Firm to the CORE: How to Create Core Values & Mission Statement
Part 10 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Establishing core values and a firm mission is a critical step to define who you are as a firm. It determines the type of staff you want to hire and, as importantly, it qualifies your ideal client. During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, shares a step-by-step process to define your core values and mission-vision statement. He will talk about storytelling and how your story reflects your values. Are your clients aligned with YOUR story? In addition, he will discuss using an analyzer tool to confirm if your employees, clients and projects are in alignment with your core values.
Your Business Blueprint: Creating a Plan to Succeed
Part 11 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
How many of us take the time to create, update and review our firm’s strategic plan? This does not have to be overly complicated, but you do need to put a flag in the ground and define where you want to go. Your strategic plan defines the overarching vision of your company and ensures that your team members know what they can do to make a difference and help your firm achieve its goals. It helps answer questions like: Who is our ideal client? What are our strengths as a firm? What are our leading and lagging indicators to track success along the way? During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will teach AE firm leaders how to select, tweak and manage essential KPIs in their strategic plans to set their firm up for success for years to come.
Marketing & BD Essentials: Creating Sustainable Growth & Predictable Revenue
Part 12 of the ‘Designing Your Business’ Masterclass Series
Most firms are extremely thoughtful when developing their designs, but often let communicating their brand or actively pursuing ideal clients fall to the wayside. Although marketing and business development both contribute to firm growth, there is a big difference between the two. While marketing establishes your brand and (hopefully) generates qualified leads, business development focuses on strategically developing relationships with potential, new and existing customers. During this session, Douglas Teiger, FAIA, will reveal his system for gaining and tracking leads and sales opportunities that works for teams of all sizes.
Management Through Measurement: Essential KPIs to Optimize Your Firm
Seven Pillars of Highly Successful AE Firms
Tracking Invoices for a More Flow-Friendly Business