Full Sail Partners Blog | Professional Services (19)

Full Sail Partners, a Premier Partner for Deltek and the Client Feedback Tool, is pleased to announce the hire of Amy Balassone in the role of Direct Marketing Associate. In this role, Amy will work with the marketing and sales team to communicate the value of Deltek Vision to the professional services industry. With more than 12 years of customer service, sales, and marketing experience, Amy will conduct market research on management consulting firms to extend the Full Sail Partners brand beyond the AE industry.

“What has impressed me most about the company is their customer service and dedication to their clients, “ says Amy Balassone, Direct Marketing Associate. “I feel privileged to be a part of a company that takes a consultative sales approach to ensure prospects are the right fit for the software. That customer focused mentality is what makes this company great and easy to work for.”

Amy will support the company’s growth goals and provides the firm with the brand awareness development experience needed for Full Sail Partners to help project-based firms develop their systems and processes.

“Amy’s tenacious, yet easy-going personality combines the right touch needed to target new verticals,” said Sarah Gonnella, Full Sail Partners’ Vice President of Marketing and Sales. “We are extremely honored to have Amy join our team. What is most impressive about Amy is her drive and resourcefulness. Her varied experience with marketing and sales along with her previous experience in the Navy as a data systems technician brought the right mix for this position.”

Deltek AE Clarity Report.png How did your firm perform last year? Did you do better than the prior year? I’m sure the majority, if not all AEC firms, evaluate their performance in comparison to prior years, but do they evaluate how they performed against similar firms within their industry? Fortunately, the Deltek AE Clarity Report provides unique insights into the AEC industry that make an accurate comparison possible.

Each year, Deltek working in conjunction with ACEC, ACEC Canada, and SMPS, conducts an industry study that draws from over 250,000 data points provided by more than 350 US and Canadian firms of all sizes. This one of a kind study provides real insight into the AEC industry to enable firm leaders to make strategic decisions to increase their competitiveness and help their firm’s growth. As part of this study, Deltek takes an in-depth look and analyzes participants’ financial condition and market outlook, including:

Operating Profit
Net Labor Multiplier
Staff Growth Rates
Backlog
Utilization Rate
Net Revenue Per Employee
Current Ratio
Other Key Financial Metrics

Real Results Your AEC Firm Needs to Know

Prior results from AE Clarity Reports provided industry-specific insights about the most profitable trends in the AEC industry. Some key findings from the 36^th Deltek AE Clarity Report were:

Firms that work on water, wastewater, and storm water projects, expect their work in the market to grow by 59%, the highest percentage of all surveyed markets. Additionally, markets in which more than half of respondents work in expect their business to grow. These include commercial sector respondents who expect a 58% increase, roads and bridges markets with an increase of 57%, and surveying and GIS sector with an increase of 55%.
Markets in which respondents are least optimistic for growth are public facilities with an increase of 38.4%, the hospitality sector with an increase of 38.5%, and a 45.4% increase in the residential sector. Nonetheless, these are still encouraging numbers!
AE firm leaders reported that the top three factors influencing the success of their companies are the right people, which was cited by 75.7% of respondents, long-term relationships with clients was by cited by 74.7%, and 65.5% of respondents said their firm reputation influenced their firm’s growth. How does client retention affect your profits? Learn the formula to calculate this here!
There’s even more positive news in last year’s AE Clarity Report. Of the AE firms that participated in the survey, they responded that they had a proposal win rate of nearly 50%. Further positive news is that 42.9% of respondents reported that their win rate has increased either slightly or significantly in the past two years. On the other hand, 12.3% reported that they experienced a drop in their win rate during the same period.
The top choices for business development responsibility were the executive team that drove 84.7% of their efforts and project managers who drove 68.6% of the business development efforts. One might suspect this comes from developing meaningful relationships with existing clients.
Overall, about 60% of AE firms said they employ a go/no-go process in at least some situations. Of these, 29.2% said the employ process for all opportunities, and 30.6% for specific cases, especially “strategic” opportunities.
Top ranked project management challenges included accurate project cost forecasting, and difficulties with collaboration and communication. On the other hand, one statistic showed that 75% of projects were currently on or under budget for the majority or survey respondents.

So how did your firm stack up against these results from the 36^th Deltek AE Clarity Report?

What’s New in the 37^th Annual Deltek AE Clarity Report?

Great question! But just as important, what do you do with this information? Learn what Deltek experts think and how they use this information at an upcoming AE Clarity Tour stop near you. The 37^th Annual AE Clarity Report will be out soon!

Full Sail Partners and Planifi announced their recently formed strategic partnership. This alliance brings together Full Sail Partners’ world-class consulting services with Planifi’s industry-leading resource planning software “Project Analyzer” to provide architecture and engineering firms with a better way to manage their resources.

Project Analyzer is a visual resource planning software that enables project managers to quickly schedule, budget and staff projects. This graphic project management tool empowers firms to improve project planning by focusing on predictable and profitable delivery.

“We are excited to introduce Project Analyzer to our clients,” said Scott Seal, Full Sail Partners’ Vice President of Consulting. “We believe that Project Analyzer aligns with our core principals of helping professional services firms improve their business processes. Our clients will benefit from the increased visibility needed to make informed decisions around firm staffing, performance and revenue forecasts.”

Additionally, Michael Kessler, Principal Consultant at Full Sail Partners who successfully helps firms implement and utilize resource planning said, "I am looking forward to offering a powerful new planning solution to our customers. The reporting capabilities of Project Analyzer have been on my clients’ wish list for years."

This partnership will focus on enabling architecture and engineering firms to center their business on the project performance analytics that support better decision making by project managers and firm executives.

“This is a big day for Planifi,” said Tom Vandervort, Planifi founder. “This partnership will enable a whole new group of architecture and engineering firms to choose Planifi for their resource planning needs. Customers will benefit from the ability to select the solution that best works for them, all guided by Full Sail Partners’ expertise. Planifi customers will also benefit; as we are now able to offer enhanced consulting capabilities and solutions to our customers through Full Sail Partners.”

You know you have spent your whole workweek devoted to a specific project, but you’re only showing 35 hours being billed/charged to the project. Where did the value of those 5 hours go? In many cases, these missing hours can be attributed to non-billable labor, and many AEC firms overlook the importance of documenting how this time is spent. However, accurately accounting for non-billable labor is extremely important to track accurate project performance.

How Can My AEC Firm Track Non-billable Labor?

If your AEC firm utilizes Deltek Vision, then tracking non-billable labor is relatively simple. Before we get started, it is important to make a distinction between the labor we are billing clients and the labor that contributes to the cost of our project. With cost in this case being the “burn” or “retail” value of this labor. Within Vision, users are able to remove the labor from both the invoice and the project ledger in two ways:

A non-billable labor code under billing configuration
A zero billing rate attached to a person, code or category in the billing tables

Keep in mind that best practice states that the only time we would use either of the above is if the labor is invoiced and costed through a Unit for activities such as surveying or lab testing.

What Are Reasons for Non-billable Labor?

There are several possible scenarios that would warrant not invoicing a client for time charged to a project such as:

On-the-job training
Rework
Discounts

While all of these are valid reasons, the costs associated with this effort should be included in the project sub ledger. This is missed opportunity cost or potential lost revenue. If labor cost is nullified using any of the above, the true performance of the project becomes misstated. When reviewing project financial reports the missing cost is not there to net against revenue thereby creating a false and overstated profit amount.

What Happens to Non-billable Labor?

Ah ha, the Million Dollar question and you won’t even need to phone a friend. There are actually at least two ways to accomplish removing time from an invoice while ensuring it remains as cost for project metric measurement:

Write-off the hours/cost in Interactive Billing. This removes it from the invoice, but appears on the billing status in the Project Detail Report. This allows missed opportunity cost to be valued into the overall project profitability or more commonly known as a loss.
Allow the labor hours/cost to be included on the invoice. Then using an Add-On, create a discount to remove the amount. This will provide your client with the visibility of the benefit you are providing them. Additionally, it will ultimately be reflected accurately in project reporting since the overall impact is a reduction in revenue.

Following these simple rules will create accurate reporting and prevent any misunderstanding in regards to the projects true performance.

Asset Management Professional service firms don’t traditionally sell products; rather they sell their time and expertise. Increasingly, they ARE selling products and time, and are spending a great deal of capital on tools to deliver both.

A common problem is that many firms can easily see the profits generated from their services, but overlook the contribution (or lack thereof) of the inventory AND fixed assets used to deliver the service by not managing both. Even worse, they frequently manage and track them in the same manner.

Inventory management and fixed asset management are not one and the same. Read on to learn the difference between the two and understand the importance of utilizing proper accounting for fixed asset management.

Inventory Management

In the professional services world, inventory management is only slightly different from the retail and the production world. Inventory assets represent the items sold or the materials used to create a final product that will be sold. Inventory assets in professional services firms represent the intangible or intangible assets sold along with the service. This could include software or equipment. This is not to be confused with immaterial items, which are usually expensed as overhead. For most professional service firms, the inventory asset is a relatively small percentage of total firm assets.

Most importantly, unsold inventory appears on the balance sheet as an inventory asset and sold inventory appears in the Cost of Goods Sold on the income statement. This is an important standard of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP).

Chances are, if you are selling goods as a part of your service offering, you are likely following the standards and hopefully using the Vision Purchasing module for tracking and control. But what about Fixed Assets?

Fixed Asset Management

Like Inventory, fixed assets exist and have specific accounting treatments for professional services firms, retailers, and other types of businesses.

Fixed assets are purchased assets of the firm for long-term use to support ongoing business operations. For example, fixed assets are laptops, desks, software, and vehicles, just to name a few. Since fixed assets are transferable within the company and will be used for multiple projects and multiple accounting periods, GAAP dictates a different accounting treatment than would be used for inventory management. More importantly, fixed assets in professional services firms are typically a large percentage of the total firm assets. In today’s world, the computer, machine, and installed software are the main tools used in delivering the services and often are given the least attention in the firm.

Why Is This Important?

Inventory management is a relatively simple task, but fixed asset management presents several challenges such as:

Knowing the location of an asset to ensure you can deliver your projects on time
Maximizing the usage of an asset to ensure the maximum ROI is gained from the asset
Knowing the history of similar assets to make informed about purchases of new assets
Tracking the depreciated value of an asset for tax and insurance purposes
Keeping the Balance Sheet clean and free of historical errors to provide accurate ROI and other metrics

Overcoming these challenges doesn’t have to be difficult and can be easily accomplished by deploying an asset management tracking system. When choosing to implement an asset tracking system, it’s important that the system is integrated with your project management, purchasing, and accounting systems to ensure information about the asset is accurately maintained and easily accessible.

AEC Infrastructure I came across an article the other day written by ASCE Past President, Andrew W. Herrmann on the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary celebration. The article Celebrating ‘Built to Last’ – Which Actually Demands a Lot of Maintenance, discussed the investment of on-going infrastructure maintenance and it got me thinking. The AEC industry touts about the government investing in infrastructure and how neglecting airports, highways, and bridges is more costly if it isn't maintained. The IT world has been saying the same about IT systems and databases. Is your firm guilty of not maintaining your IT infrastructure?

Let's take a look at some on-going maintenance that your firm may be overlooking:

Backup Mistakes

Unfortunately, for municipalities and governments, there is no backup for when a bridge or building falls apart. That is to say, there is no way to restore the bridge with a click of a button in the same way your firm can to restore lost data. Preparing for failure and implementing a reliable backup plan is essential to maintaining the integrity of your data.

The problem is many people believe this is an easy and mindless task, but often make some very common mistakes.

Many firm’s only test their backups periodically, and it either becomes a forgotten task or done improperly. Verifying backups is a useful practice to ensure data is intact, readable, and can be restored if data is ever lost.
Many firms that have their own servers tend to only backup data and not the server’s operating system and applications. While this practice saves time and valuable memory on the server, it can often be more costly in the future if the server itself fails. For example, it is much easier to restore the operating system, the applications and then the data than it is to manually install the operating system and setup the applications.

Server and Hardware Failure

Normal wear and tear of the roads and bridges is the primary reason for the need to perform ongoing maintenance. It is required to ensure physical integrity for years to come. Likewise, many firms overlook the parts of their IT infrastructure that are prone to wear and tear. Although most of the components of servers and hardware are electrical, they also contain a few mechanical parts that tend to be more prone to failure. The reality is, as these components age, they tend to experience wear and tear that will inevitably result in a failure.

Interesting enough, failure can be avoided if you’re aware of common warning signs.

Servers and hardware are designed to operate while creating minimal noise. If you start hearing a clicking or grinding sign coming from your server or computer, it’s likely you’re going to experience a failure soon.
Mechanical failure is the result of wear and tear, plan on replacing servers and hardware more frequently to avoid the unexpected and dreaded failure.

Avoiding Updates

An ACEC whitepaper titled, Our Infrastructure Crisis – Your Turn to Act noted that one of the consequences of under-investment by municipalities and governments is an aging and outdated energy infrastructure. Aside from the inefficiencies of using outdated technologies, the cost to update the energy infrastructure is going to be massive. The problem is that the energy infrastructure has to work in sync, therefore updating one component means other key components will need to be replaced so the overall system can continue to work in harmony. These same consequences can affect a firm using outdated software.

When deciding to update your antiquated software, you may also have to update other enterprise software your firm uses and maybe some hardware as well.

Firms using older software that runs on unsupported operating systems, such as Windows XP, will have to update their hardware to support the new software.
Also, even if your operating system may support some newer software, those can potentially impact other software that are reliant upon them.

The take away here is that using supported and current software versions might seem expensive, but in the long run, it pays to stay up-to-date. By not being on the most current software, your firms' productivity and efficiency can greatly deminish.

The Big Picture

Just like municipalities and governments failing to maintain the roads, bridges and airports, AEC firms can experience significant costs for failing to maintain their IT infrastructure. The big picture is that maintaining your IT infrastructure requires you to ensure you backup your information, proactively prevent server and hardware failure, and most importantly, stay-up-date.

Project Planning Blog Graphic Congratulations! Your firm just won the largest project in its history and it’s time to celebrate, or is it? Unfortunately, winning the big project doesn’t guarantee success and big profits. For project-based firms, project management is synonymous with profit management, but many projects start in the red making it nearly impossible to make a profit. Here’s a look at some common pitfalls project-based firms face before they ever start a project.

Accurate Job Costing

If you have been on a proposal team, you know the feeling of relief that overcomes you once you finally submit the proposal. Weeks of working long hours reading and writing exhilarating technical content and attending meeting after meeting. All this work and time exhausted by several people when in reality, your final price is the biggest factor in winning. But, can your firm deliver the project on the proposed budget?

Accurate job costing requires accurate information, and most firms believe they have the right systems for their business model. Excel sheets and the time clock work, but these systems don’t communicate very well. Even more, consider the unreported overhead time to reconcile these systems and the mistakes made during this process.

“If it works, don’t fix it” doesn’t always apply, and information in more than one system doesn’t work when trying to maximize profit. When it comes to job costing, you already have to worry about inaccurate estimates from suppliers. These are costs you can’t control, so be sure to take control of your internal cost monitoring to create profitable bids you can deliver.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are various quantifiable measurements used for determining the success of the project. The KPIs establish a guide to the project and are used as the basis for critical decision-making. More importantly, not executing on a specific KPI can affect the project’s profitability for your firm and your client’s satisfaction.

Here’s where some project-based firms struggle. In many cases, several of the KPIs are destined for failure before the project starts. The problem is that defining KPIs is truly challenging and your clients usually lack experience with the process. All too often, this results in KPIs that are unrealistic and unmeasurable.

Establishing realistic KPIs is the first step to managing the profit of a project. As the project manager, it’s in your best interest to have a strong role in creating the KPIs. Good project KPIs have values that can be accurately measured and clearly reported on. Further, they need to be understood and agreed to by all parties. To learn more about project KPIs, click here.

Risk Management

Projects are full of unforeseen obstacles and predicting these is not always possible, but this doesn’t mean your firm can’t minimize the impacts. They just need to have a formal risk management strategy. Although this might be a time consuming process, it’s a necessary process required to protect your profit.

A study by Info-Tech Research Group found that organizations with a formal risk management strategy are more than half as likely to have project management success than those with a reactive approach. To put it another way, having a risk management strategy before the project gets started is critical to the project’s success and profitability.

A risk management strategy starts with identifying common risks such as unrealistic schedules and requirements that fail to align with the strategy of the project. Once these risks are identified, evaluate the impact each risk will have on the project. From there, make a contingency plan that has a pre-planned response to the unexpected event.

Become a Profit Manager

Don’t start your next project in the red. Project management starts with project planning, and not having the right systems and processes in place can hinder the success of the project. If your firm is falling into any of these pitfalls, consider the changes that you can make to become an effective profit manager.

American Football Positions2 It’s finally fall again and you know what that means, the leaves are changing color and the temperature is dropping, but most importantly - football is back and the wait for our favorite teams to take the field is finally over. Nevertheless, what does football and resource planning have to do with each other? Simple, coaches are like project managers, their resources are the players, and the project is the season. So what we can learn from football coaches to become more effective project managers?

Monday Morning Quarterbacking

A good coach always reflects on each game to identify plays that worked and plays that need work, and of the players, who played well and who under performed. They spend hours watching videos of the previous game to develop a plan to overcome shortfalls. Successful coaches know planning forward cannot occur until they’ve planned backwards.

Smart resource planning starts with planning backwards. Like football coaches, project managers need to think back on the previous week and evaluate their performance. This is a time when you ask yourself how efficient was your previous plan?

Let’s say you planned a task to take 20 hours and it was really done in 10 hours. Is this a result of a great resource or an over-estimated work duration? Identifying what went well and what didn’t go so well allows for continuous improvement throughout the project lifecycle. As a result, project managers can make cost saving decisions and improve resource utilization.

Have the Right Playbook

The playbook is the lynchpin to a winning team in football. A team can have all the best players, but without a plan, they can’t play as a team. Even more, the teams they play each week change and players get injured. To build the right playbook, the coach needs to know what to expect from the other team and which players they have available.

So who are your injured reserve resources and who do you have available?

Let’s start with your injured reserve. These resources are allocated to non-billable work such as marketing and business development or out on PTO. These resources don’t have 100% availability and this needs to be taken into account when developing your playbook. Therefore, non-billable work needs to be aggressively maintained when resource planning to make sure resources are not over utilized.

Now think about your shared resources. Are other project managers keeping their project plans up-to-date so you know which shared resources are available? Shared resources availability may change throughout the lifecycle of a project and it may change several times. As a result, they often become over utilized. A shared resource’s time has to be updated regularly to ensure project plans across the organization stay on track.

Be Prepared to Call an Audible

The playbook is complete and now it’s game day. Everything is going as planned and the plays called by the coach are unstoppable. Then all of a sudden, the opposing team changes their formation on the line. The coach then instructs the quarterback to call an audible.

Like the coach's playbook, your plan needs to be flexible. Being blindsided by unforeseen circumstances in project management should be anticipated. Don’t let dependent tasks get disrupted and destroy your plan. By adding contingencies to dependent tasks, you can avoid major disruptions to your project plan and be ready to call an audible.

Earning the Gatorade Shower!

Every week, coaches are revamping and tweaking their plans. They evaluate their bench and design plays based on their available players and their individual skills. Constantly trying to improve and continue to win all in hopes that their resource planning throughout the season earns them the championship and they receive the coveted Gatorade shower.

Client Focused All too often, certain words and catchphrases are overused in business meetings to the point they have become trite and serve little to no real purpose. These words and phrases are used in business blogs, articles, websites, and day-to-day business emails. One such term, "client-focused", is thrown around as a marketing gimmick for professional services firms, but what does it really mean to be client-focused?

Before we get too far, here’s what you need to know:

There is a difference between saying you’re a client-focused firm and actually being client-focused.
Your firm’s culture dictates the level of service your clients receive.
If your firm isn’t using technology to support your client relationships, you’re already behind.

The Firm-Focused vs. Client-Focused Professional Services Firm

Being truly client-focused depends on how your firm sees their clients. Sure, it is easy to talk the talk, but putting words into action is where things tend to get difficult.

When a firm places an enormous emphasis on the needs of their clients, they are firm-focused. A firm-focused business makes decisions based on the benefits to themselves and not with their client’s best interest in mind.

On the contrary, truly "client-focused" firms make decisions that are determined by their client’s needs, as they are at the center of all such business decisions. They understand exactly what their clients need which helps to promote a symbiotic relationship between the firm and the clients.

Through the delivery of top-notch service aimed directly at the needs of their clients, a company will see a simultaneous rise in business performance. After all, the services provided were determined with the client and their needs in mind.

Living the Firm’s Culture

Who are your clients? The answer might surprise you, but in the business world, there are two types: internal and external clients.

Internal clients are members of your organization that rely on the help of other members to perform their job. These individuals can fall anywhere on the spectrum of your chain of command, from coworkers to upper management and executives.

On the other hand, external clients are clients in the traditional sense of the term. They are the buyer of the services your firm provides.

Do you feel you receive great service from the other internal customers within your firm? If you’re not receiving great service from within your own organization, imagine the service your external clients are receiving. Your firm’s culture is a reflected by the employees, and your clients can see if you live by the values you market.

If you’re not satisfied with your internal customer service, start communicating and living the values that define your firm. Your clients will notice the difference.

How Technology is Changing Playing Field

Keep up with the Joneses - In order to be competitive and effective within an industry, your firm needs to ensure it is using innovative technology that helps promote success. Failing to innovate hinders a firms’ ability to adapt and grow while the "Joneses," aka your competitors, employ the use of industry leading technology enabling them to leave you in the dust.

With a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software, you can take your company to the next level by keeping the functions of your company in a centralized system. This helps promote a conducive work environment in which the sales and marketing teams, and administration and finance teams can better work together to achieve client-focused results. To learn more about the basics to Deltek Vision CRM, click here.

An additional benefit of using innovative technology and software is that it enables you to access your work on-the-go. Today we have access to everything on our smartphone devices. From banking to entertainment, email to ordering pizza and everything in between, we can do incredible things with just one, single device. Having mobile access to your CRM allows you to -update client information on-the-go and enables other members of your organization access to the most up-to-date information about your clients.

The Takeaway

The importance of understanding what it means to be "client-focused" cannot be overstated. Your firm should define itself by its actions and not by catchphrases.

The goal of being client-focused is to nurture client relationships to retain clients and win more work. Remember, your existing clients are the lifeblood of your organization. According to Bain & Company, it cost 6 to 7 time more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. It seems smart to try to keep the clients you already have.

Full Sail Partners, a Client Feedback Tool and Deltek Premier Partner, recently announced it has earned a spot on Accounting Today’s 2015 Top Value-Added Reseller (VAR) List. Accounting Today is a leading provider of online business news for the tax and accounting community, offering breaking news, in-depth features, insightful editorial analysis, and a host of web-related resources and services.

Each year a select group of 100 organizations are honored for their accomplishments as VARs. The top VARs are selected from organizations focused on sales and implementation of accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Criteria used to determine the winners include 2014 revenue, number of offices, and staff size.

According to Seth Fineberg, Technology Editor of Accounting Today, “The Accounting Today VAR 100 list is comprised of top accounting and ERP software resellers throughout the country, ranked by revenue. This select group represents those in the world of accounting software resellers that are truly ahead of the pack and we are pleased to honor them in this special report.”

Full Sail Partners provides on-premise and cloud-based solutions for architects and engineers, energy and environmental consultants, and professional service firms across the United States. Full Sail Partners' team, collectively, brings more than 200 years of experience with Deltek solutions. The firm represents unique technology solutions that integrate with Deltek Vision including Deltek’s Kona social collaboration platform, the Client Feedback Tool, and Vision Unleashed.

"Last year Full Sail Partners was listed as one of the VARs to watch and we are extremely honored to make our return to the Value-Added Reseller Top 100 List," said Sarah Gonnella, Vice President of Marketing and Sales of Full Sail Partners. "Our firm continues to deepen our bench strength with Deltek Vision experts, allowing us to be the go-to firm for consulting, customization and integration. Jumping to number 85 in Accounting Today’s Top 100 Value Added Reseller list is a great accomplishment and demonstrates our ability to engage our existing client base, as well as, target new project-based firms beyond the AEC industry.”