Yabba Dabba Doo! How will you celebrate?

As we mark the 50th anniversary of The Flintstones, whose star worked for the world's first construction company, we look ahead to tomorrow's World Day of Architecture in the U.N. This year's theme is "Cities, Magnets of Hope."

Will your firm do anything to toast the occasion? We'd love to see pictures!

ABI inches toward 50; when will industry see growth?

The Architecture Billings Index, the American Institute of Architects' monthly gauge of design activity, moved up for the third straight month in August from 47.9 to 48.2, but still reflects an overall decline by falling short of 50. AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker tells The Zweig Letter in an exclusive interview in the Sept. 27 issue he sees signs of life but thinks the ABI needs to reach the mid-50s before firms feel much of a difference.

What's happening at your firm? Are you feeling better about the ABI's direction?

Is economic stimulus a success or failure?

White House officials this week defended the $814 billion economic stimulus package -- more formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- as a success, saying it's created jobs and put people who wouldn't otherwise have jobs on payrolls across the U.S. Others -- most notably Republicans hoping to gain even more traction by the 2012 presidential election -- point to the 10% unemployment rate as evidence of the Obama administration's failure.

So, what do you think? Has your firm benefited from the stimulus? Were you expecting more?

A gift for the architect who has everything

As frightening as it may seen, the holiday season is fast approaching, so here's an idea for those who are stumped on what to get that special someone: architecture rings featuring some of the most famous landscapes across the world. Among the selections available are New York (shown here), Paris, Moscow and Archipolis. The rings are made from a variety of materials, including gold, silver, amber, cognac, gemstones, platinum and diamonds, so we're not sure these would appeal to the bargain shopper.
What do you think? Do you know anyone who would wear one? Would you?

Attend the Hot Firm Conference free!

Have you been thinking about whether your firm can send anyone to The Zweig Letter 2010 Hot Firm Conference in Washington, D.C., but still unsure if you can afford it? If so, there's a way you can head to the nation's capital for free at the end of October and enjoy the best celebration of the industry's brightest stars.

Here's what you have to do: prove that your firm has the lowest office space cost per employee by sending your total employee count and firmwide office rent cost to our new headquarters: The Zweig Letter, 320 Rollston Ave., Suite 102, Fayetteville, AR, attention Mark Zweig. Time is running out to qualify for this opportunity, as entries are due Oct. 1.

Where's the next emerging market?

Fret not, firms without the wherewithal to take their operations overseas. There are still opportunities for work here in the good ol' U.S. of A., but the design and construction industry is becoming an increasingly international endeavor. There continue to be lots of ways to put your stamp on a project - public or private in China, and Libya looks like the next hotbed of activity, following in the footsteps of Dubai for a few years.

Where do you see the greatest chance of work in the next few years? Do you expect domestic activity to rebound or are you looking to foreign soil as the saving grace for your firm?

Will Gulf of Mexico ever recover?

Less than a week after the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and with the specter of the BP oil spill still looming despite the apparent end of the gushing of contaminants, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Coast region was again at the center of the news this morning, when an offshore oil rig exploded there.

With hurricane season getting stirred up, this explosion couldn't come at a worse time for the downtrodden residents who are simply trying to rebound from two major disasters in less than five years. Will this region ever be the same?

Is there anything the environmental engineers in the crowd can suggest to stem the tide and rebuild the region?

This time, the Big Apple is the "second city"

AIA New York has launched its own architectural boat tour around Manhattan, following in the highly successful footsteps of its counterparts in Chicago, which datesback almost 30 years.

I took the Chicago tour a couple of years ago when our Hot Firm Conference was in the Windy City and was certainly impressed, as were many others on my cruise. Are there other cities where this could work?

ABI still struggling to crack 50

The American Institute of Architects' monthly gauge of design activity, the Architecture Billings Index, jumped almost two full points in July to 47.9, the second-highest score in almost two years, but remains well below 50, meaning there is still a dip in work across the industry.

“It didn’t move dramatically, but I think it is kind of back on track to the trend that we were seeing back in the first months of the year,” says AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker in an exclusive interview with The Zweig Letter.

Nevertheless, Baker says, a recovery isn’t looking as solidly in the cards as the pundits predicted earlier in the year. He expressed frustration with the up-and-down nature of the economic recovery, saying that none of his predictions of sustained recovery in the second half of 2010 have materialized.

When do you think the ABI will break 50 again? Were you predicting it would happen by now too?

Bring value to clients and stop wasting time and money

During a company-wide brainstorming session this morning, ZweigWhite Chairman Ed Friedrichs, former CEO of Gensler, urged everyone in the comany to think about two main ideas in everything they do going forward: "What value are you bringing to your clients?" and "What dumb idea we've always done should we stop doing?"

Meanwhile, ZW's new VP and director of operations, Eric Howerton, who will be spearheading our greatly expanded marketing efforts, says the goal of the company should be to be distinct, desirable and dominant.

How good of a job does your firm do in these areas? What value do you bring to clients? Where are you wasting time any money? How do you stand out from the crowd in an increasingly vanilla world?

Lots of changes at the new ZweigWhite

Mark Zweig offers an update on ZweigWhite's beefed-up management team:

It was 22 years ago this past July 13 that I started Mark Zweig & Associates, which later became ZweigWhite. We grew like a weed— being named twice to the Inc. 500 List of Fastest-Growing Privately Held Businesses in the U.S.— right up to the point we were acquired by a Chicago-based SBIC (Small Business Investment Corporation). I retired from active duty and moved to Arkansas to teach entrepreneurship and start my real estate redevelopment business. Our new owners merged us with a couple other companies, installed their own management, and we had some turnover. As the economy got tougher, our own performance worsened. It’s a classic story that has been told thousands of times before.

Help arrived some months back when our new parent company, Eli Research, came on the scene. After a period of observation and study, Eli Founder and CEO Greg Lindberg, an amazing entrepreneur himself, decided to make some changes. It’s been a wild six weeks or so! Here’s a quick rundown on some of the exciting happenings in our firm:

My old friend Ed Friedrichs has joined the firm as chairman. Ed is the former chief executive officer of the one of the largest and most successful and influential design firms in the world, Gensler, a global architecture, design and planning firm. Ed joined Gensler when the firm had 20 employees and helped lead the transformation of Gensler to a firm with 2,400 professionals worldwide. I have worked with Ed on a couple different boards of private companies and I can tell you that he is a veritable fountainhead of ides. Plus, anyone who can get that many design professionals pulling in the same direction is an amazing leader, if you ask me— and we are extremely fortunate to have him join our team.

Tracey Jeffers, MBA, CBA, CMEA, has joined the firm as head of our national business valuation practice and ZweigWhite is acquiring Tracey’s firm, ValuPath Advisors, Inc. ValuPath is a successful national valuation firm and will significantly enhance our valuation capabilities in the market. I worked with Tracey when she headed up the Small Business Development Center on the University of Arkansas campus. She is a tireless perfectionist who knows her stuff and knows how to get things done— just what our clients need!

Wendy MacColl has joined the firm as head of new product development and will serve as director of Distance Learning and Market Councils. Wendy will be working on several new innovative products for the AEC community to be launched in the coming months. I worked with Wendy (who is also a flat track motorcycle racer) when she served as the head of instructional design at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. She’s smart and her years of curriculum design experience for management education at a high level are going to be invaluable to us.

Jeff Clark has joined ZweigWhite as head of mergers and acquisitions in our Investment Banking Division. Jeff has worked for several years with ZweigWhite’s parent company, Eli Global, as an M&A consultant handling 19 successful engagements totaling over $150 million in transaction value. Before working with Eli Global, Jeff provided strategic consulting services to Syska Hennessy Group in the AEC space and for several Fortune 500 companies.

W. Hobson Hogan has joined the firm as principal in our Investment Banking Division. Hobson is a seasoned mergers and acquisitions professional with deep experience assisting AEC firms with strategy formulation and ownership transfer issues. Before joining ZweigWhite, Hobson was with FMI Capital Advisors, Inc.

I am very excited to announce that our Investment Banking Division is now offering full-service investment banking services, including a global capital markets team that can structure and place a variety of debt and equity products for our clients. We can help you raise debt and equity capital to help your business grow or complete an acquisition.

We have also expanded our advisory capabilities for acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, joint ventures, corporate restructurings, recapitalizations, spin-offs, and leveraged buyouts. ZweigWhite and its parent company, Eli Global, have extensive buy- and sell-side M&A experience to help AEC firms achieve their short- and long-term strategic objectives.

And finally, I have rejoined the firm once again on full active duty as our chief executive officer, and am working from our new office in here in beautiful and centrally located Fayetteville, Arkansas. I am really excited to be back involved with ZweigWhite in a meaningful way (and working about 80 hours a week!). We will return to the principles that allowed us to be named twice to the Inc. 500 List of Fastest-Growing Privately Held Businesses and reestablish our leadership in providing management information and advice to help make our A/E/P and environmental firm clients more successful. And we’ll have a heck of a lot of fun doing it!

If anyone has any questions about us or comments on how we could do better, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. My cell phone number is 508-380-0469 and my e-mail address is mzweig@zweigwhite.com.

Is IPD a four-letter word for some A/E firm leaders?

Joao Ferreira, managing editor for ZweigWhite's newsletters group, offers up this startling tale:

While doing some research for a story I’m writing for The Zweig Letter, I found that some people in the A/E world don’t know what the acronym IPD stands for (it's integrated project delivery, for the uninitiated in the crowd), or what the concept means. Really, are some people in the design and construction space really that disconnected? Or, is this proving that IPD is some kind of a fad?


Please interject. And don't be afraid to admit that you didn't know what it was until you read it here.

Best Firms in the spotlight

Today was a big day around these parts - and at your firm if you were among those chosen as one of the A/E industry's Best Firms To Work For for 2010. By now, you've heard from Marketing Coordinator Sarah Nasznic about your place on the lis, and soon some of you will be hearing from our writers about articles we plan to do leading up to the Best Firms Summit in Las Vegas in late September, when the complete rankings will be revealed, and beyond, in the Zweig HR Letter.

If you're one of the ranked firms, congratulations to you! If not, there is a lot you can learn from those who were fortunate enough to earn the distinction. Keep your eyes peeled for the articles and take their advice to heart. Who knows? Maybe your firm will be among the chosen few in 2011!

ABI inches up slightly. When will design activity increase?

The Architecture Billings Index, the monthly gauge of design activity by the American Institute of Architects offered perhaps the only glimmer of hope in a tough month, but even that good news was slight. The ABI stood at June is 46.0, up from 45.8 in May, but still below 50, meaning design activity continued to drop in that period. AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker called June’s results “disheartening.”

“I was hoping it would recover in June, but we now have a two-month soft spot,” he tells The Board Room in an exclusive interview. “We’re halfway through the year without any serious sign the design industry is recovering.”

Baker has been hearing more about the so-called double dip in the economy, meaning a second decline after a brief recovery period.

“There’s some concern the economy is reversing direction, but I’m not reading it that way,” he says. “I see it more as a period of being stalled out as we move toward a recovery. Nothing is coming easily in this recovery.”

Baker has more analysis of the June numbers and what to expect going forward in the Aug. 2 issue of The Zweig Letter.

Not what we signed up for with stimulus

Massachusetts politicos are being blasted for spending a half-million dollars on signs promoting the work being done across the Bay State under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, more commonly known as the $787 billion economic stimulus package. That $500,000 is about 10% of what all states have spent on signs.

This seems like frivolous spending when there are plenty of projects out there waiting to be done, and plenty of design and construction professionals waiting to do them.

The signs claim the projects are Putting America to Work, but wouldn't more people be doing more work if it weren't for all the money wasted on these signs promoting the fact that Americans are back at work?

How can you follow the leader if you don't know who it is?

Joao Ferreira, managing editor for ZweigWhite's four newsletters, says there are leadership issues at a firm near you:

A chorus of worries about who will lead the design firm of the future has increased in volume over the last few months of covering this industry. At the The Zweig Letter Hot Firm Conference last October, a panel discussion discovered that many aging owners don’t even have a leadership succession plan in place (read leadership, not ownership, which are not the same thing).

Now, at the SMPS Build Business conference in Boston, A/E guru Scott Braley tells us kind of the same story. Baby boomers, he says, haven’t invested enough on nurturing their replacements. The Gen X demographic isn’t as aggressive as the boomer generation, either, and this may create a leadership gap. Gen Ys will likely take advantage.

OK, it’s slightly confusing, but the reality in that boomers will become extinct in leadership roles in the next 10 years, and someone has to step up to the plate. Despite concerns that younger generations are more interested in flexible work hours and not necessarily in leading, some believe that we’ll be just fine. ZweigWhite founder Mark Zweig said as much during the Hot Firm event last year.

Now comes this from ZweigWhite principal John Soter: “I’m a boomer, and I think we forget that we were one end of the original ‘generation gap’. From Elvis and the Beatles to Mad magazine to sit-ins and Woodstock, we were written off as spoiled and lacking ‘work ethic.’ Well, I guess we showed them! I subscribe to the view that, given the opportunity and direction, Gen X and Y will prove boomers’ view of them completely wrong as they reinvent firms for the future, just like we did to those we followed.”

The problem, Braley argued is that boomers relished being thrown in with the lions and took charge; Gen Xers, on the other hand, don’t speak up.

So, how do you spot the next leaders and nurture them? Boomers, go get them, and Gen X and Y, speak up!

Any thoughts out from the trenches?

What's up with modern architecture?

The conventional wisdom is that the design and construction industry has moved forward as technology has improved and collaboration has increased. Not so, says Chicago Sun-Times columnist Roger Ebert, who says modern architecture "has grown tiresome." Gone are the beautiful buildings, giving way to corporate behemoth that tower over the landscape just to get into the record books. In other cases, firms are so worried about the bottom line that they set creativity to the side and take the safe route.
I think there's something to that, and it's not going to get better any time soon with continued worry about the state of the economy.

Celebrate the past, look ahead to the future

ZweigWhite founder Mark Zweig checks in today with a special announcement on a momentous occasion:

"It was 22 years ago that I started Mark Zweig & Associates--the firm that later became ZweigWhite. We built the firm to a twice-listed Inc. 500 Company with a mission of helping our A/E and environmental consulting firms be more successful. We did that based on practicing what we preach and by singing our own music vs. reading management books and regurgitating what the authors said. It was a successful marriage of industry focus, original research, training, and consulting, using a staff of full-time employees vs. a cadre of part-time consultants.

"I retired from the firm to pursue my interests in college-level teaching and design and development and have achieved some success with both of those endeavors. But recently, the new owners of ZweigWhite asked me to re-inject myself into the firm. While I was reluctant at first because I am already so busy, I quickly gained enthusiasm for the idea when I saw how entrepreneurial our new owners are. Last week, I just opened a new office for ZW here in Fayetteville. You are going to be hearing a lot more from us in the coming weeks and months about new people, new services, and more from ZweigWhite, and I am excited about our future!"

Mark

Lying your way to a project win?

The Boston Globe recently reported on a controversial decision by the state's highest court to allow a high school building project to remain under the auspices of a construction firm that misrepresented its credentials to get the job in the first place. Critics in the construction industry say the ruling undermines the spirit of the open, honest, public bidding process created by the Ward Commission after bid-rigging scandals in the 1970s, according to the article by John Ellement and Christine Legere.

What do you think of this ruling? How do you feel about lying to get work?

Etch A Sketch celebrates big 5-0

Today marks an historic occasion in many architects' lives: It's the day Etch A Sketch first went on sale 50 years ago. Are you or your firm doing anything to celebrate?

For me, having a typewriter as a kid launched my journalism career. Was the Etch A Sketch your gateway to the design industry? Does anyone out there still have one? If so, let's see what you can do with it. We'd love to display your best work -- and maybe you'll even win a prize for it!