Archive for August, 2008
Posted on August 22, 2008 - by Elliott
Reno Picnic 2008
Every year, the Reno office hosts a picnic for employees and their families. It is always a good time. This year it was held at Caughlin Ranch Park. Here are some photos. You can find the rest on our flickr page.
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- The Gang Sits Down to Eat
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- The Gang Gets Some Food
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- The Gang Gets Grillin'
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- The Gang Helps Out
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- The Gang Gets Friendly
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- The Gang Plays a Game
Posted on August 18, 2008 - by Pete
Key Performance Indicators
All businesses have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The purpose of a KPI is to provide a number that can quickly and easily give you a feeling for how well your business is doing. For example, I have a friend who sells Cellular Phones and Service. One of his KPIs is number of people walking in the door. Since he knows how much, on average, he makes every time someone walks into one of his stores, when his foot traffic starts to increase or decrease, he knows that he needs to adjust his business plan accordingly – either increase marketing, hire additional staff, reduce costs, whatever.
Now, this may surprise a lot of people who work with architects and engineers, but Architecture and Engineering are businesses also. Therefore, we need to have KPIs in order to manage our activities. One of BJG’s most important KPIs is Utilization. Utilization is the ratio of time working on projects to total time worked. BJG has a companywide target Utilization Rate of 62%. However, the Target Utilization Rate for individual BJG Staff Members varies significantly. The maximum Utilization Target is about 80% and the lowest is 5% or so for administrative staff. While the 80% maximum may seem low, it is important to consider that Total Time includes Vacations, Personal Time Off, Mandatory Training, etc. so 80% really doesn’t leave a lot of time for non-billable tasks when one is at the office.
What makes Utilization effective as a KPI is that is that I can track BJG’s profitability fairly accurately by tracking Utilization. When Utilization drops, it is time for us to ramp up our marketing. When Utilization gets too high, we know that we need to hire more staff or our current staff will start to burn out. The other great thing about Utilization is that we can get results immediately and in real time – as long as people fill in their time sheets. I can plot companywide Utilization and compare it to monthly revenue and/or profitability and the graphs align nearly perfectly.
Another of BJG’s KPIs is Employee Retention. At BJG we strive to be the employer of choice for talented, motivated and ambitious design professionals - we work hard to make this a great place to work. If I am doing my job as the company’s president, BJG’s staff are engaged and excited about their jobs. Engaged employees generally don’t leave so I can track how I am doing keeping employees satisfied by tracking employee retention.
In addition to the above, BJG has a few other KPIs that we track such as client satisfaction, revenue factor and core value conformance. All of these help us run our business which, in turn helps us better serve our clients. When our business is running smoothly, we can really focus on being Responsive to our clients’ needs.
Posted on August 18, 2008 - by Elliott
Welcome to Our Blog
This is the blog of BJG Architecture + Engineering. We are a design firm made up of passionate, responsive and fun people. We are headquartered in Reno, NV with offices in Las Vegas, NV and Pleasanton, CA.
Thank you for visiting. Poke around a bit and please leave a comment. Tell us what you think.
Posted on August 9, 2008 - by Elliott
August Engaged Employee
Pete is the Engaged Employee of the Month. Pete spends time helping the Boy Scouts by serving on the board, running meetings and teaching communications. Thanks Pete!
Posted on August 7, 2008 - by Teresa
Beach Day
The sites at our company meeting on July 22nd were much different than a typical meeting. The room was filled with flip flops, floppy hats, sunglasses and even zinc noses.
In pursuit of Core Value #10 - Have Fun, it was BJG Beach at Work day. Congratulations to the potato salad contest winners Cathy and Kim.
Everyone enjoyed the opportunity to relax a bit in the name of fun! Stayed tuned for results from our next “fun day” which will be coordinated with National Bad Poetry day!
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- Kara, Mary, Kim and Cliff
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- Jim at the BBQ
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- Monica at the beach
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- Noko, winner of beachiest look
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- Kim and Kara
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- Jon with his beach bod
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- Pleasanton at the Beach
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- Las Vegas through the video conference
Here is a presentation Monica made about Beach Safety tips!
Posted on August 4, 2008 - by Elliott
Our Online Toolkit
To have a successful blog, we need to interact with potential readers in as many ways possible. In this post, although a little off topic, I will share the ways we are trying to gain eyeballs.
Delicious
Delicious defines itself as
a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
When an interesting link gets past around the office we make sure to put it into our delicious bookmarks, which can be found here: http://delicious.com/bjgisresponsive. Readers can subscribe to our bookmarks, become our friend through delicious (that way we can share links directly to one another). I am also working to get our new links posted on our blog once a month for more crossover activity.
Twitter
Twitter is a
service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
What does that mean you ask? I think of Twitter as a chat system/blogging platform and social networking all rolled into one. Your entries are related to 140 characters (pretty hard sometimes). You can “follow” people and then get their updates almost immediately. With twitter, you can have conversations with people halfway around the globe that have common interests.
At first I didn’t know how to find good quality people to follow. Twitter, at the time, did not have a search function. But a website called summize.com did. Summize, which recently was acquired by twitter, built a search function on top of twitter using twitter’s api (application programming interface, a fancy way of saying twitter opened it’s data up to summize).
Using summize, I searched for key words (revit, leed, usgbc, architecture, etc.). Whoever said those words, I “followed”. The true twitter-ers want a conversation, not spam pointing them to your blog. That is the difficult part, but also the fun of twitter.
Come start a conversation with us. http://twitter.com/bjgisresponsive
