Title:برنامه ریزان وحشی شده اند

این وب‌کست فقط برای مشاهده در دسترس است. برای اعتبارات AICP CM قابل استفاده نیست. ۰۳-۰۱-۲۰۱۳ مجری: سینتیا هویل ارائه دهندگان: گراهام بیلینگزلی، جوآن گارنت، و کارول ریا توضیحات: چه اتفاقی می‌افتد وقتی گروهی متشکل از شش مشاور برنامه‌ریزی تصمیم می‌گیرند یک شرکت مشاوره جدید در آخرین رکود بزرگ ایجاد کنند؟ بشنوید که چگونه این گروه از مشاوران برنامه‌ریزی یک‌بار مالکیت انحصاری تصمیم گرفتند تا به نیروها بپیوندند و یک شرکت مشاوره‌ای جدید را با انقباض بازار راه‌اندازی کنند… و موفق شدند. چه چیزی طول کشید؟ چه درسی آموختند؟ چه ابزارها و استراتژی هایی بهترین کار را داشتند؟ چگونه مالکان انفرادی که عادت داشتند خود رهبر باشند، با شرایط عادی جدید عضویت در یک شرکت شش نفره سازگار شدند؟ بیاموزید که چگونه می توانید موفق شوید و چه چیزی برای پیشرفت در بازار امروز لازم است.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: ۱۰ days are in listen-only mode hello my name is Benjamin Lee and I just want to welcome everyone it is not 1 p.m. so we’ll begin our presentation shortly today on march first we’ll have our presentation on planners gone wild where help during today’s webcast please feel

Free to type your questions in the chat box found in the webinar tool bar to the right of your screen or call one eight hundred 263 6317 for content questions please feel free to type those in the questions box and will be able to answer those after the presentation here is a

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Today’s webcast please go to planning org slash iam so that today’s date March first and then select today’s webcast this will be available for 1.5 cm credit and please use the event code to 26 28 we’re recording today’s webcast and it will be available to available along

With a 65 per page PDF of the presentation at this time I would like to introduce Cynthia will be our moderator for today and who will introduce our presenters presented hitters for today hello Thank You Ben I appreciate that and thank you everyone for joining us we wanted to share some

Information with you about how you could set up a consulting business and my partner’s are going to be joining me i will introduce everyone now at the beginning so that our presentation will be seamless you can see the information about me up there I am a planner who’s

Been working on a variety of levels in both private and public sector I have been doing consulting for some years now I specialize in creating livable multimodal communities and I have over 30 years of experience in planning next we can go to Carol Carol ray has over 25

Years of experience both in public and private sector her specialty includes planning group facilitation ordinances and regulations for training permitting code enforcement and customer service prior to Orion planning group of which she’s a plant a founding member she had her own firm ray consulting and served communities in North and South Carolina

She was previously the Assistant Director of Planning development for services in York County South Carolina she is the past region 2 director of the American Planning Association Board of Directors and we are happy to have her with us today next we have Graham Graham has almost four years of experience in

Practice and he’s also worked both in public and private sector he has a edge occation in planning a landscape architecture and architecture and his practice in all three of those fields for 23 years he was in the public sector first chief planner for urban design

With the city of Dallas and for 18 years he was the land-use director in Boulder Colorado he was responsible for a department of over fifty seven employees and that included the divisions you see planning building safety inspection services GIS and resource conservation he has developed land use codes and

Connected studies on projects and comprehensive planning housing economic development in downtown revitalization demographic and economic analysis Landscape Architecture historic preservation urban design and has served as an expert witness in numerous land use legal cases he’s a founding partner of Orion Planning Group and prior to that he had his confirm billingsley

Consultants in Boulder Colorado and last but not least we have Joanne Garnett who also has over 30 years of experience as a professional planner in public and private sector and she has focused on issues relating to urban rural and regional planning including comprehensive plans master plans community development and alternatives

Analysis housing assessments land use research and analysis transportation assessments trails and pathway plans zoning subdivision regulation and growth management strategies she is also past president of the American Planning Association and has over the years served our profession and number of roles she had her own firm prior to becoming a

Founding partner in Orion Planning Group hey Joby plans and she is in Sheridan Wyoming we do have one poll question for you we thought it would be interesting to find out who is interested in listening in to the webinar so you can respond by clicking on the response

Bullet and you can also as bin SIDS Nick questions or comments so we wanted to know whether you are currently a public sector planner but interested in being in the private sector if you’re in the public sector and do consulting on the side or if you are consultant in a large

Firm or a consultant in a small firm those of you who have studied planning history know that planning started off largely as a private sector function and is now largely a public sector then is going to give us information on the responses that you provide and we

Will proceed on with our presentation so one person been by the way did put in a question they said that they can’t see the poll on their iPad yeah unfortunately the poll function does not work with iPads or smartphones okay so please just put that on the question but

Please also seventy percent fold it will close in in a minute someone did ask about what the process is for getting a copy of the presentation that will be posted it or bin can send it to the participants now it will be uploaded on Utah APA website so it’ll be up end of

This week or you can always email me at planning webcast at yahoo com and I’ll send it to you this weekend okay we’ll close the poll now and we have thirty four percent said they work in public sector but interested in private sector seven percent said they work in public

Sector and consult on the side and eighteen percent said they they are consultant in the large firm twenty-five percent said they’re in a small firm so that’s it for the poll great Thank You Ben so it looks like a lot of people are interested in working in the private

Sector and so we’re going to share with you information about how and why we did that and I will turn it over to our first speaker Thank You Cynthia what we’ve answered a number of questions about the firm figure that was a good way to start what we are is a very broad

Base playing for abroad in a number senses we’re three women and three men and Carol talked a little bit we’re women own firm we have a broad range of skills most of us have a couple decades at least the planning one of us who happens to be speaking at the moment has

About four decades and we’ve done almost every sort of planning there is at one point in our career the second thing is we have a very broad geographic distribution we’re in where there’s six of us in we’re in five states and each of those regions of the country has a

Little bit different take on planning and and how playing is done and what the important issues are and this gives us a ability to mix and match the partners with a project the why is each each of us have a different reasons for performing most of us didn’t want to go

On our own and any of you that twenty-seven percent are in a small firm I think probably going to understand that several of us had sole proprietor operations going and we found almost all our work was done by partnering with other consultants the one of the reasons

That cuts through for all of us is that we like working with each other and we like the dependability of having a really good planners to work with and so we felt that there was a better chance of success together than separate our success is more like the bottom right

Than that left and I think one of the things when you start a firm you have to understand that success is never gonna almost never going to look like that top left line almost always like the lower right and of course some of those some of the temps don’t actually get up they

Did go around around in circles I really takes a certain amount of luck and a real marketing presence the why I think it’s true for all of us we each wanted to be surrounded by planners who are better than we are and I think we may do

That as I said we like each other quite a lot and wanted to work together now several of us Joanne and I had done some consulting together by Blanchard night done some consulting together Caroline I had attempted to my writing some proposals together so we already understand an understanding of each

Other our work ethic and our skills and that sort of stuff and we so we were attracted to each other in that way we also found in our early discussions when we discuss this that we had very similar values and similar desired outcomes for farm we started discussing in the fall 2010

October I think and we had several Skype meetings and which we discussed this when the general email went out to each of us asking if we were interested somewhat surprised everybody said yes so then it really was a matter of just figure out how it would work whether

Whether we thought we really were compatible where everybody was and in relation to existing working jobs and what the transition to people we had a very its excuse me someone did put in a request they’re apparently having a little trouble hearing you okay yeah nipped closer to the mic thanks sure we

An hour we had a last serious conversation shortly for Christmas of 2010 and then we spent the next few weeks putting all the documentation together and registering the firm with the Colorado Secretary of State once we made that decision was really quick and easy to set up the firm and get started

Okay this is Joanna know and I’m going to talk a little bit about in the next five slides just who the partners were how we were selected how we gelled chose a form and then where and how we chose our main office and this kind of builds

On what brand was saying and feeds into more of what Carol and Sippie and Graham will be seeing further on in our discussion here so first off house who has noted there are six practitioners from around the u.s. that all indicated they were very interested in somehow

Joining together one of the people at the outset was a full-time public employee one was a part-time public employee another one was doing special as needed for a consulting firm as well as having his own firms and all of us were also sold proprietors for our own

Firms four of us like Graham noted had worked together previously or attempted to work together previously but the bottom line is we really wanted to keep this at a fairly small number making it more manageable for us as we’re trying this new venture and making sure that it

Was really going to be feasible so the next slide how we gel first off that we have significant AP and a ICP connections all of us were a former APA chapter presidents some of us had overlapped in our terms everybody has national involvement on committees task

Forces we have people that were on the APA board and people who have been on or are on the AICP Commission and Graham noted we found that we had like-minded philosophy both file APA and planning not necessarily about politics but we do have it for where it really matters for

Us mostly which is the planning in the APA side and again most important of all we enjoy each other’s company and I think that camaraderie and the friendship is what we always have at the end of the day some of the six of us knew each other better than others but

All of us knew one another by reputation and the reputation was good so that was all well and fine all of us I think you would say are curious people we like challenges we love our profession and all of us have given back to our profession whether as speakers or

Trainers or participants on webinars such as this what we also found that we all be heard working with colleagues on projects rather than going the law of what I would call a lone ranger brauch and it made a lot more sense for us to jail together to maximize the results by

Forming as one from we did have success as sole proprietors but it was limited and we really believe and you found that we do better by joining together next slide so in terms of choosing form that we took as noted we are totally coincidental three women three men we each

Contributed startup cash to put into the creation of the fire it wasn’t an astronomical amount but it was enough to show that you are truly committed to being part of this firm we decided to have the women the three of us pay a little bit more into this and that way

Then you could be identified as a woman on business the thought is that that designation may be helpful in submitting proposals to local governments that’s not necessarily the case of every state but it is certainly a factor in some of the states where we operate we agreed

That we should have one partner who would be the treasurer and financial clearinghouse more or less for writing checks sending invoices and tracking our finances and that lucky individual is brand and we’re very happy to have them doing that we hire a CPA tax time for transparency of our operations and we

Always think it’s a good idea to have another pair of eyes just looking everything over it that’s a good protection for Graham too we agreed in addition that one partner would be the business manager was possible for setting up partner meetings taking care of the agendas reviewing contracts and

Gentle hurting of the calves I think you could say we hold meeting preferably once a month started out first by conference calls then graduated to skype another with zoom and yes Graham noted we completed the paperwork it ultimately did file as an LLC which will be explained a little bit farther in this

Discussion next page so the firm name we’ve had a lot of fun watching how people watch you pronounce Orion and absolute quite a few varieties but it is Orion like the constellation and weirdly enough when we six decided to create a somebody threw out the idea by email of

A constellation named and this was then taken and a couple of other people suggested Orion I know in my case I like to Ryan for the fact that it was the one constellation I can identify the site’s a big difference so I was perfectly fine with that and ironically is very quickly

We all agreed that it would be Orion Planning Group next we developed a logo we hired a professional designer to create the local that was probably the most contentious part of anything we did have some discussion internally whether we like the logo or not like the logo or

Want to tweak the logo eventually got there at that is done and we’re all happy not with Arlo boats had business cards printed up created our letterhead and then created a firm profile along with our website and with that got down to the task of notifying all of our

Friends and contacts about what it is we were doing and how excited we were about this new opportunity next slide and I would note that all of us have been a public sector employees for the bulk of our careers and have made the decision to go into the private sector but I

Would say that the majority of our work is done on behalf of local governments just to be clear about what it is that we’re primarily interested in doing as far as where we have two partners in Colorado one in Wyoming one Illinois 1 Alabama and one Mississippi so we were

Truly everywhere ultimately we decided it made the most sense to go with Boulder as our headquarters because number one that’s where our treasurer is and where the invoices were coming from Graham has an excellent home office setup that he took care of the people with the registered our firm in Colorado

Which was a very efficient process alder has a fantastic reputation as a whole learning long-standing growth management applications hip university town with the great outdoor five it’s well-known medium-sized city in the Front Range of Colorado with Denver down the road and Estes Park up the road so it just seems

To be like it was the perfect location in a good focal point for us and that is our identified headquarters so with all that that is our framework and that was now in place to quiz me thank you thank you joining this is Carol and I’m going

To take over the how we function part which is really about the management of Orion as brain said we move fairly quickly i think it was no more than three months between hey you know do you guys think this would be a good idea let’s talk about it to having our

Registration completed with colorado and hitting the ground running the next step is really to get organized and to establish how we were going to function key part of that was our a form that we chose which was the LLC there are two pieces of that that are really important

To get filed one is an operating agreement and in the operating agreement it lays out a number of things some in general some specific but it covers all manners of operation from the formation of the company to the capital commitment of each member which we call partners but in operating agreement were all

Members it talks about profits losses salaries memberships etc the certificate of authority is simply a statement that we file that says who has the authority to transact business on behalf of the company so let’s take a look at the LLC and a few key reasons why we chose that

Form all of us have had like we said a significant amount of experience working in consulting in our own firms and those that had taken a number of different formats under my previous firm was a subchapter S corporation other grains had lots of experience with LLC’s others with just simple sole proprietorships

So anybody interested in establishing a company like this really needs to look at all the different options available and decide which one best fits their need and the way they want to operate for us that was the LLC it mixes elements of corporations and partnerships which we liked it provides

Limited exposure to personal assets which is also something that we liked very much it has passed through income taxes the company itself does not pay income taxes the income taxes are paid by the partners and llcs are relatively simple to establish we we did not have a

Hire an attorney to to do this we did have some some assistance from accountant who had helped structure a couple of organizations like this and of course we also had internal experience but it is it is pretty simple the other thing that we liked about LLC’s is it

Gives us a flexible structure to so right now we have six partners and that’s it we don’t have any plans to change that but if we did decide to change that we could add employees we could add additional partners so we do have that flexibility under the LLC as

Joanne said we are women old firm 51% we meet monthly with face-to-face meetings excuse me with a face-to-face meeting annually the monthly meetings are remote we do operate very much in a virtual office environment five and six partners use home offices which I think we find very effective managing partner and

Treasurer are key positions in the company that helped keep the day-to-day functions working and keep those especially the treasurer keep those paychecks coming next slide we we do have a managing partner I had been designated as the managing partner for opg one of the things that the operating agreement does not

Lay out are the specifics of what the Managing Partner role will do for that reason if we allow you to do I think right but yes yes that we it’s generally in there but the specifics we laid out in a separate policy we adopted other policies to help also round out and fill

Out the detail needed for day-to-day operations such as billing and pay rates outside employment handling proposals and requests travel expense reimbursements and quality control all the things that you would normally see in a company you know we do have in some form or fashion the duties as determined

By the partners for the managing partner include the ones you see on your screen I did put it at the bottom that managing partner can delegate and actually does delegate it would be very inefficient for us to have a true top down type of operation where I had to see and do and

Approve everything I do review contracts but once the contracts have been reviewed and go back to the partner who is heading up a project that partner has been delegated the authority to sign that contract on behalf of the partnership so that’s an example of delegation the treasurer has some very

Important duties summarized into four bullets here prepares the preliminary budget manages financial records works with the accountant to Joanne mentioned that we do hire on an annual basis to handle all of our business tax accounting needs as well as producing the K ones for each of the partners and

He handles all of our accounts receivable and payable which has been real real handy going to have the things that we often do under or we had to do under finance that are just if you are setting up your own firm you will have to do the same thing you’ll have to

Determine how you set your rates that’s one of the first questions once we got into the nitty-gritty of the company that we had struggle better deal with so let me just tell you what the parameters were the variables that went into our factoring of our rates won the type of client so

As a government client and on private client a private sector client we consider that we consider the size especially when it comes to nonprofits and government what is the size of that client the third is the geography as we all know things are a little bit more

Expensive and say Colorado than they are in Red Cross North Carolina or Paducah Kentucky or you know Anniston Alabama so we do take into account the geography of the area mainly because it affects the next variable which is competition we as a new firm especially we wanted to be

Competitive in the areas in which we were going after work so those were the factors that that we took into account as far as payroll goes we do not have payroll none of us are salaried employees we do not have employees of company period we are all partners so

The way this works is we had to decide what portion of our income which is based on our hourly rates for any given project what portion of that was going to go into the company in order to support the company needs and what portion of that was going to come back

To a person doing the work so for example I work on a project and I get paid based on the amount of time that I put into that project amount available time I put into the project and when that bill is sent out and comes back into the company the company gets ten

Percent and that ten percent is what funds our company operations and then I in turn get ninety percent and that chick comes to me and that’s how I get paid and then I report the taxes on that portion that I make the budget budgets really important the first year we did a

Budget it was we were probably halfway through the year on you because we were still getting all of the details down but we have been very good in the last two cycles last year in this year getting a proposed budget out there and having a good meaningful discussion about what types

Of things did we want opg to pay for and here is what we are funding this year for partners we find a telephone allowance we fund professional news and we fund registrations along with an expense allowance for attending conferences and workshops for the company which benefits all the partners

We are funding marketing which we feel like is very very important son software this is software that we use for internal company business we fund our accountant and what they do for us and we fund our website which is also party marketing but those are elements that we

Fund for the company managing the workload sorry that’s not how you’ll catch up with managing the workload has holes yeah managing the workload is something that is an ongoing process and I think even if you talk to consultants who have been doing this for many many years managing the workload is always

Going to be a challenge but I think it’s important to have some standards or some criteria that you use to choose new projects and how projects are assigned and that’s what I thought I would go over today because we have given a lot of thought to that the first thing is

Picking projects we don’t take just everything that comes down the pipe or everything that’s offered to us we actually spend quite a bit of time looking at project requests and making sure that our skills experience and interests match that project we look at the geography of the project is this in

An area of the country where we feel like we have a client base we our presence is it an area tree in which we want to have a presence you know where we want to expand our market area for geography we also look can we get there because sometimes you know the

Travel expenses are can make a break whether or not it makes sense for us to to go after that particular project also we look at competitiveness you know there are just certain parts of this country that are eyebrow deepen in consulting firms and it doesn’t make a

Lot of sense for us to go in there and you know try to duke it out when especially if we don’t have a proven record in that area to to fall back on but you know that’s these are all things that will evolve over time because as we

Get more and more experience than our the geography of our space expands then we will be more competitive in some of those areas and they choose later on to come back but we do look at that girls and also also have to make sure we have

A partner who’s willing to take the lead and has an interest absolutely we look for somebody who has a passion for that project and then they have to take that leap that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily the overall project lead certainly not at this point and I’ll

Talk a little bit about that in a minute but they are the OPG leave they are the one that internally we look to to is running the project and making sure that whatever partners are involved they are they are dogging it and setting the deadlines and making sure the work gets

Done the other thing that we look at is minimum dollars because we we do have to be concerned about that we have actually seen projects it’s it’s frustrating i grin we’ll talk about this a little bit later it’s frustrating that so few proposals come out with any given us any

Idea what the dollars are for project but when we do see dollars occasionally we’ll see where they’ve actually put in far less money and we think that we can and do the project for the budget basically is insufficient to provide the level of service requested or dictated

By our ethics ethically we just can’t do it for that we wouldn’t feel good about it secondly we’ve turned down work and we’ll turn down work when we just you know doesn’t pass the gut test it just doesn’t feel right so those are all things that we factor in when we

Consider work look now choosing partners and the firm lead this is we have a number of projects that we’ve done and none of the work has been outside of opg we’ve been able to handle it completely internally but one of the things that we decided early on was that we didn’t need

To have every potential skill set under opg there are some really good consulting firms out there who specialize in market analysis and sustainability and landscape architecture and you name it that we we would love to partner with and have partnered with on projects and we feel

Like that’s the best way for us to maximize what we can bring to a project and maximize what the client you get from a project so when we identify take a look at a project and we identify the skill sets and experience that’s needed for that project we start identifying

Partners firm partners so again we look at we look at I think we’re on the next idea thank you we look at skills needed we look at the workload is there you know do we perhaps it’s a type of planning project that the OPG planners could very easily do because we have the

Experience and the knowledge but we simply don’t have the hours and so we might augment our staff through contracting with another firm experiencing competitiveness perhaps another firm actually has more experience or they’re in a particular field or they are more competitive in a particular G ography you can bring that to the table

Lat this by far not the least thing we look at is are the people in that firm Thunder work with and and that’s increasingly more important we want to work with people that we enjoy working with and that we look forward to working with again so we do take that very

Seriously in choosing the lead firm we look at who is who has the time who makes the most sense if it’s a downtown planning project for example there is a firm that we frequently partner with and that’s pretty much what they do they specialize in downtown planning and so

On those projects we typically let them take the lead on those and we provide the support but this is always on a project-by-project basis the other thing the final thing is the budget dollars because everybody who wants to be involved in this project has to it’s got

To be worth it to them for the dollars you know we don’t mind sometimes even a little bit to gain experience where we lack it but we we all have in so we want to make sure that the dollars are worth it make you go to the next slide we

Could not survive without technology we are a cross-platform office we run when does an act and for those of you who have never worked in the cross-platform office and in might have some trepidation oh that I assure you had only had a few issues and none of them

Look a that we it caused a little bit of a wrinkle never a real problem so I wouldn’t say that that you know would let that stop me at all from mixing computers and platforms we use laptops iPads and smartphones to stay in contact when we’re in and out of the office and

Each partner is responsible for maintaining basic computer and software assets so when I updated got a new computer an updated Microsoft Office suite a couple of years ago that was all my pocket and that’s the way we are still operating for the types of software that the company purchases we

Use as I think Cynthia or Giants we started with a conference call we went to scape and although we like to skype if we like some things about it it became somewhat unstable we started having more and more glitches we’re shut Emma’s so skipped over to zoom which was

Pretty new at the time and we’ve been very very pleased with zoom unlike skype you send out email invites and it’s pretty slick both have screen share ability which has been great for us and I believe they both now have recording so if you have to record a meeting that

Works really well day to day we use basic off microsoft office products but the company did invest in Adobe Creative Cloud if you have been interested in getting into InDesign Photoshop Acrobat illustrator virtually any of the Adobe Creative Suite programs they now offer those online for some amazingly low

Price prices so for example for odg because we already had copies of InDesign and illustrator and photoshop etc we were able to work out a deal where for forty nine dollars a month all of our partners can have access to all of the adobe creative cloud products

Only two of us can be in any one product at a time so Segre only Graham and I could be in InDesign working on proposals at the same time but once we’re out when any other partner can jump in and work and then it really hasn’t been too much of a problem but

That’s a about a 3000 3500 dollar suite of programs that we have access to for a fraction of that we use Dropbox is our company’s server it works like a folder if you say does short tops to your desktop it works just like a folder on your desktop which

Can at times be tricky and hard to get used to since just like a desktop folder if you pick something up and move it it’s gone it’s moved and we have had to learn not to do that from Dropbox so that files don’t disappear on us but it works great it provides automatic

Previous version backup and I mean we can usually go back ten versions on a document so if we’ve been working away and decide you know somebody says well what was that previous language that we were considering well we can go back in our previous versions in the dropbox and

Dig it out support from dropbox has also been good as it has from zune so we’ve been pleased with those business development when I worked for myself this is my least favorite thing to do as I told my partners I found it very awkward to go out and market me but I

Can market my five partners to the cows come home I thoroughly enjoy these partners and have the greatest respect for them and you know enthusiastic about the marketing strategy and it’s been a real breath of fresh air to me to get in and be able to do this assist the

Partners with marketing our marketing strategy bottom line I think the most important thing meet and greet personal contact we don’t think anything takes the place of personal contact to early on before we actually hit the streets too much we got business cards we developed brochures flyers we are in the

Process of developing a banner to use as exhibit exhibits that conferences we sponsor we that’s both marketing strategy and a philosophical value of our company that we believe in sponsoring events that better communities and we believe in sponsoring chapters and divisions events that reach out and help to

Educate and bring knowledge to the planners across the country so that is one thing that we budget I think it pretty healthy amount for we also send out an annual letter we did our second one this year and that’s we try to make it pretty light but it it does get into

Some of the detail gives you an idea of what opg does the types of work it does and a little bit more about the partners and then of course there’s our website which is an important part of our marketing strategy and our philosophy there was to keep it simple you know we

Are continuing to upgrade and update you try to provide some more innovative web pages but you know we really felt like if the basics were there then we were good to go and we could work on it as we went that’s been our philosophy we have a list of preferred partners the and

These are not opg partners but these are a partner firms that we will be our go-to people when we get a project and it calls for transport via put some pretty serious transportation planning more than what Cynthia can do as a single transportation planner then we have one or two transportation planning

Firms on our list and they are preferred partners and we go to them first they can always partner with us but they are our first choice and we have those for any number of other specialized pieces of the planning pie probably the one thing that we stress a lot in it both in

The quality of our work the quality of our relationship ships in our communities is the fact that we love repeat business so we feel like if we produce quality product within budget within the time period allowed and we have built good relationships and we not only you know met our expectations and

Hopefully exceeded our clients expectations but we’ve hopefully given them reason to seriously consider us on a future project and we have had individually and now beginning as a firm a member of repeat clients who call us up and asked us to come back and help to another part of a planning projects this

Time I’ll pass it on we learned a number of things because we were friends um even though we approach this as a business we were still friends we decided that we would make all our decisions democratically that lasted of good six months and we’re technically if

The three members voted one way in the three men voted a different way two women one which was fine never never happened almost everything was for unanimous vote where we waited till somebody couldn’t make the meeting but you really can’t run a a firm consulting firm that way hardly because you you

Have to make decisions very quickly are you going to go after this project yes do we need a part do we need to find another firm of an engineer for example if so you really have about 24 to 48 hours to line that up for if they’re if

They’re a good firm before they get taken by somebody else so if you wait to have a meeting to discuss these things and decide who we might partner with we found pretty early on that we lost out so and it wasn’t just those kind of Asians but a number of decisions so then

We gave Carol more responsibility we gave me a little bit more responsible in the treasurer area that kind of thing the other thing is that we knew what we could do and we would see an RFP or an RFQ for a particular project and so well

We can do that we’ve done that number of times but it turned out that they didn’t know us that well in the market area know somebody in every region of the country knows at least one of the partners it seems like but it’s different than when you’re

Trying to market your firm so we learned that and and reduce that because it was a waste of our time to write proposals that we really didn’t have missed a chance to get so now we concentrate on those that we’re fairly certain we can get we should be able to get an

Interview for we you never know about the actual job but the goal is to get interview we think once interviewed will get the job we also learned how important sub consultants are and Carol talk a bit about that when we came up with this idea the preferred partner so

We didn’t so when we needed a project needed economic development we knew who we were going to go to and it was sort of a first refusal situation relationship that we have with them and they do with us and so that’s work out quite well also matching our skills and

Strengths project project requirements which we really did right at the start but then we discovered the nuances of some of the request for proposals were sites that we needed to be able to bury them with our skills and strengths on the things that they thought were important and then Carol’s mentioned

This I think Joanne may have mentioned it we found it we’ve all been doing playing long enough of engine doing consulting long enough that we only wanted the project if we thought we were going to enjoy it we want a really good product with a very happy client and if

We didn’t enjoy that project we probably didn’t give them as good a product as they would want so if if we’re pretty comfortable we’re pretty certain we’re going to have fun then we definitely go after her we also stuck because we hadn’t all work to get when

We didn’t notice at work we hadn’t all work together at all we had individually worked with each other some our first year we through as many partners as budget would allow on a particular project the problem is of course it’s it’s too many people it’s not efficient

It reduces the actual profit off of that job some we think that if anybody else starts up of firm of multiple partners we would recommend they do that don’t at the start the thing is to make sure that you’re comfortable working with your partners you know their strengths their

Tendencies their psychology you know their approach and it turns out that you know a number of us have similar skill sets but we have slightly different approaches to it so we’ve learned from each other a lot so that was really valuable but now that we’re fairly successful we were able to approach each

Project more more efficiently by having just the partners necessary as Carol said we don’t have in please so it is important that the partner have a significant role in in the project so that really led to a much more efficient use of our time and our capabilities the frustrations are the fickleness system

Communities and those of you listening in probably can tear your own stories but the one of the and this kind of goes to the next point as well one of the problems that we’ve run into is it will get our FB that lays out a scope that a

Proposed scope and you know and often they say well you know if you think of a better way feel free to submit that but then we find out that the selection was of a firm that didn’t have the skill set based on the proposal but they wrote but

The community decided that they really weren’t all that wed to what they originally had thought they wanted and they moved to something else we get some really really bad request for proposals it’s a it’s amazing and the reason we’re convinced is that most planners don’t write RFPs regularly they might write

One every four or five years or they haven’t have ever ridden one before so they’ll copy an RFP from somebody else is just similar projects not quite the same we got an RFP last fall from a community have barreled one and forgotten to change the name of the other community so that’s always

Interesting we’ve also been surprised at the length of time it takes to make a decision most many RFP say they have a calendar NSA is due on march first interviews will be held third week in march or fourth week at march decision will be made metal april and we find

We’re sitting in may still waiting to find out who they’ve selected to interview we had to really factor that in to our workflow and you can’t really i mean if somebody scheduled to go on vacation in may and they were going to be the project manager well you know

They go ahead and take the vacation you can’t plan on it and as i mentioned before seen a number of selections that do not match the stated needs in the RFP we’ve had some other situations in which we got higher than the staffer or leadership of the project but the

Community changed me we had one last year and which the community development director and the planner there were no other planners in the community both left the second week of the price of a 12-month project so those kinds of things really you got to figure out how to roll with that anybody

Any other partners most thrilling any other or lessons learned ah think you summed it up pretty well I pick the other thing the other lesson learning and trustees you alluded to this Graham is just the frustration we have with submitting proposals that we never hear another word back about an epidemic I

Know that’s not just us but that that is an incredible frustration is just waiting for some type of word yes or no or something so the moto there was a question how did we determine how much startup cash was needed there were two factors of that one was the decision

What we were all willing to pay ourselves and Carol mentioned the fact that we decided that the company at least at the start wasn’t going to pay for equipment or software any that kind of stuff we all had sufficient stuff so we so we created a budget for what it

Would take to start the company so that was to do the the basic costs of getting a logo getting a web page setup Print in the business cards printed brochures those kinds of things and then we just divided that number by six and I don’t

Know if it it is very it isn’t very much money to start from particularly since four of us were operating firms ourselves already I think if you started from skiff you let if you for example worked in the public sector today and wanted to start a fern tomorrow they

Never be significantly more start-up costs because you wouldn’t bring with you all those things that you had invested in over the over the years of consulting in graham you know it’s a factor of the type of structure that you think you know if you’re working in the public

Sector and you can’t imagine running an office without at least a part time if not a full-time administrative assistant helping you and you have to feel like you have to put them on staff then that’s going to dictate a much higher overhead then we have opg partners have used administrative assistants but we’ve

Also done it as independent contractors they are not employees of the company and they build time on projects just like we build time on projects they bill us we in turn pay them but it’s always on a pretty much on an on-call basis and so that’s kept our overhead really low I

Think that’s been good for us one of the things that we’ve run into and we’ve laughed about that is very very true and I think grams the first one who mentioned it but I know I’m in this boat this is my second foray into a consulting and I honestly could not do

This with got two small children I could not do this if my husband did not have really good health care and had me covered and had my family covered because that’s huge overhead in today’s world yes so if the decision was to have a central office that we rented the

Space for then it would be a whole different thing this is me mostly work home offices except for Joanne and joining us a nice setup that’s pretty low rent I don’t know we would have had to invest a significant amount of money to make sure that we can sign a year

Lease higher secretary or administrative assistant for a year that kind of stuff then you’re probably looking at a hundred thousand or something to start up we’re looking in tho thousands so we do have a number of questions that I will throw out there for us to respond

To we’ve had a number of questions about issues such as does the firm work on federal contracts or have we only done local projects and do have we worked most of our work come from responding to rfps or has it been a result of having relationships all of the involved

Several questions do n do it yeah really has all of the above we i would i would say just kind of cutting a quick swap here that the majority of our work at the moment is on behalf of local governments all of our backgrounds are preponderantly and local government as

Planners so it does come through that said we’ve done work for institutions such as the hanford nuclear site for AT&T and other private entities um and then I forget what the next one was question yeah they just the question about whether or not most of our work

Has come from responding or fees no actually yeah and I don’t think any consulting firm anywhere would say that most of the work comes from RFP get worried about its word of mouth follow-up work that kind of stuff the RFPs are important those are generally the bigger ticket projects the ones when

You know some town calls up so they can you do this for us you know that might be ten fifteen thousand dollar project our piece or 150 or more many of them so it’s a it’s a different thing so I I don’t know I’d say less than half of our

Works from our P’s and even this Grambling when you say even those many of those do depend on the network and the relationships we’ve built in the area I know in North and South Carolina that was has been significant it always helps it always helps if you’re if you have a good

Network that’s one thing I usually tell planning students when I go and visit programs is that the net don’t undervalue the network because you can see your credentials on paper and they might look really good but you know how is that person going to be to work with

How’s that person going to be to deal with on a day-to-day basis and I think those relationships that we have with people are they know they’re very comfortable working with us on a day-to-day basis it makes a difference I think I think it really does i think one

Thing though I’ve learned and in doing this is to never assume I haven’t in because of where I am because I usually don’t and Kenta yeah it’s highly competitive out there and I’m very clear with all of our prospective clients that that may be friends as well that I

Understand the nature of the business and while I certainly hope we’re hired you know I understand that sometimes that’s not going to happen the coin finis that I want a good understanding of why we did not get selected so we are the next time and everywhere every one

Of those we do like rancid we we’ve actually had some projects that we’ve responded to the proposal we’ve been given the project without an interview because they are very comfortable and this is how they want to go and that’s the other did so and that in that case

They did know our reputation and have some connections that gave them a high comfort level to just go with us it’s always nice to respond to an RFP in a community your you’ve just finished a project with because right you know they know you and well yeah again one that

When the credentials are equal and the proposals are equal on their face what can make a difference is your reputation and the fact that they know the type of work that you do and how you are to work with mm-hmm we’ve had a couple of questions 2 about

What kind of insurance we have about liability errors and omissions well we have a number of local governments are we they require liability professional liability insurance although you can’t it’s hard to find a attorney that says that they’ve ever had a case planners don’t get sued very often because we’re

Not we’re not doing life-and-death stuff so anyway we do so we carry the million dollars in liability insurance you know one of the one of the startup questions was health insurance and all that kind of stuff we weren’t at it at the point we still aren’t quite at the point where

We can afford those kind of benefits we’re hoping that we’ll get there but the personal insurance we don’t we don’t cover right we had some questions I think people are curious about how we manage workload and what the benefits of having a partnership in which we’re not

In the same place is and I think that perhaps it it wasn’t clear that we spend a lot of time working together on these things even though we’re not in the same location for when we have a project in which there’s multiple partners then we

Work together on the site yeah a two of the administrative assistants I’ve worked with as independent contractors of those two neither one of them lived closer than an hour and a half away from me and this was when i was with ray consulting i had a project doing a major

Edit on an in-house plan and the woman that I worked with as an editor I never I still to this day have not matter it’s it’s amazing the resources that are out there in the virtual community and how easy it is now to work in a virtual office environment and how much

You can get done and and you do build camaraderie and you can be very productive and Dropbox has helped tremendously in that I think when it benefits Joanna niall email 25 times a day on something yeah Blanchard I in particular often will zip will Eva’s une

Meeting a couple of times a day on projects we’re working on so you know getting up from my desk and going down the hall to meet women it really isn’t much different it really isn’t it’s very it was very efficient no problem I think the partners have have had is training

Me on dropbox severity I can’t find anything and I start whining but it’s gettin it’s gettin better and they are all them are right and in their pronouncement about Dropbox it’s highly efficient for us to do a draft whether it’s a proposal a portion of a plan a

Project coming up we save it on dropbox and each of us can take a look at it and provide our input add to it osman and make it better and it just works out it’s a much better product in the event very very cost efficient cool the other

Thing I was going to say that i think we probably have it said is that having partners means that if one of us has some sort of personal issue that comes up a death in the family an illness or something like that we have people who

Can step in and take over for us when you’re a sole proprietor that’s not really an option yeah I lost a potential client when I was working on my own and they basically told me that they thought that my credentials and my presentation were right up there but they chose a

Firm that had to planners because they were concerned that maybe I’d have a car wreck or something would happen and the whole project would go down the tubes now that wouldn’t have happened because I had other stock gaps and safety measures in place but they they didn’t know that and so having those

Partners as you say sleep is can be very important yeah we’ve had a number of questions to people asking about how much experience we think is necessary to start a firm and a number of things along those lines and I think it would be hard for us to say what is this for

Other people in terms of making those decisions but i thought i would throw that out there for you guys to address well i think it just varies so much by the depth and level there the experience if that individual has like if you’re doing I’ve always focus off pretty much

On long-range and comprehensive planning so I would think if you have 5-10 years of experience and I in that you’re you’re you’re free well on your way to be able to do that in the consulting side well that’s very very individual I don’t think I’d want to be new to

Consulting and planning at same time now you definitely need some experience and I think you need the network experience so that some people have had a opportunity to see how you work and you can bring that forward as part of what you were packaging we had one question I

Asked us what do we argue about the most i thought that was entertaining oh yeah we really haven’t had we have in mind you know in that sense if there have been issues or problems that have arisen if it as a group we have approached solving those problems not trying to

Figure out who was to blame or you know it was always a very constructive approach to resting whatever came up while we playing each other all the time and laugh about it so that helped and uh we did we have literally have different styles and some of our approaches of

Writing and thinking and definitely timeline but I think it’s been a really good learning curve but what we found in the end is we number one still like each other quite a bit we’re learning from it and I think we’re coming up with a much better um product yeah 3 we’ve had a

Number of people ask for further information about taxes and how how we handle the ten percent that is the companies and so I will let you Graham take that one well I I’m sorry I was trying to get to the end um I am I do old invoicing and I receive all the

Texts my deposit the checks and then I write a check to the partner who worked on so say for example to Carol and I worked on a project and 11 we bail out $5,000 3,000 for her in two thousand for me you know I get ninety percent of that

Once once we deposit that check then I write protect to me for 1800 I write a check for the Carol for 2,700 in that so that goes into the general account for opg to operate at as an LLC what you get is a you file a tax return there are no

Taxes owed but you have to file the return to show all of those guaranteed payments to the partners so there’s an accounting of you know how much money each partner got that’s on let’s put on a form called a k1 and sent to the partner and they file their individual income

Taxes instead of having a w-2 they’ve got a k1 and they just fill that income part on their income taxes and they pay taxes but opg doesn’t pay any taxes because it’s a pass-through sort of company that that’s what I LLC is so if you’re an employee now and another

Company you’re used to having all your taxes taken out of your paycheck and the firm cut you don’t even get because that’s not not what they quote you that’s not you know your salary they’ve already taken it out of what they charge the client ours is a little bit

Different in that the firm cuts what comes out of our check and then we are responsible for reporting and making whatever tax payments we make on the money that we burn now you have to remember the colors of that we pay also Security and Medicare yes there’s no the

Company doesn’t pay any of that so we’re paying a 15 point two percent every year in Social Security and Medicare words employee of a company it gets a a regular paycheck the company’s pan kana half yes half of that so for me I knew you know we all do our own individual

Personal bookkeeping and for me I track my payments I based based on what’s getting billed and then I show in my spreadsheet okay this is what’s getting build this is what I get after the firm cut and then I back out the estimated taxes on that and that gives me the

Amount of money i know i need to go pay taxes for yourself up it’ll totally automated taxes so we had a question about how often we update hardware or software and I think we address the hardware Commission earlier but I thought we could talk about the software

Well the software that we share is updated automatically by Adobe the other stuff when we haven’t come in that point yet I don’t think anybody’s updated windows the mac software’s free free to update until they come up with a whole new version but we would we do that as

Needed generally we keep everything up to date because it’s important working with clients that you have up-to-date software y and I think it’s fair to say that just because computers change and technology is rapidly changing that for me at least my software my major software upgrades like all Microsoft operating system and productivity

Software is usually going to buy a new computer which is about every two to three years right so we had a question about how we compete with large any firms that have national international experience sometimes well sometimes not mm-hmm sometimes we join them yeah we’ve partnered with someone well generally

Though and we’ve got we’ve got probably you know we’ve got international experience the Middle East and stuff as well but generally we compete by saying that you hire us you’re hiring the people you’re looking at where the partners we’re not a big company with a marketing well with a whole big

Marketing wing and all I have stuff are we compete because usually we know the people or the town or the region really well we know the local issues and we provide personal service from from us individually and not a staff of interns and and young planners all we have nothing

Against those so against those and I’ve had many many working for me over the years but we like to be able to provide the product that we know individually we can each give and so that’s our competitive advantage if we’re in a situation in which that makes a

Difference and I think that the fact that we all have a significant amount of on-the-ground experience working within four local governments on the payroll of cities and counties States regional agencies gives us a perspective that some of the folks working in the bigger consulting firms don’t have so for

Example if somebody hires us to write a code we could we know what it’s like to stand at the counter and have to explain to a very irate citizen what they need to do in order to get their permit to expand their garage or alternatively to stand in front of elected board and

Justify why a procedure or process is used so we’re very sensitive to that so we think that makes us more marketable if we had questions like how do we handle GIS work because they notice we didn’t include that in our list of software and I think that’s a good

Example of ways in which we partner with firms you have other specialties well we do have you have a arcinfo license Bob barber doesn’t but it’s not as professional somebody’s dedicated to it we have a firm that we use we partner with for any GIS work if its extensive

Right believed even if that we’ve got another one we use up outpost meant to so we’ve been able to find really good resources for that that’s one of those areas where they’re highly highly specialized and they do great work and it just makes no sense for us to try to

Duplicate that under our umbrella I agree we also had had a number of questions along the lines of you know what do we do about partners who want to work part-time or when we go on vacation how do we handle that no no we don’t let him

Go on vacation no actually each partner is in control of their workload to the extent that any consultant can be in control of their workload so when when we’re putting out that we’re working up a project calendar for example hopefully you know well enough in advance what big

Things you might have coming up they’re going to knock you out for a week here or week there and we plan around them we have to master calendar on we have the master calendar and drop box so we can see what’s going on and one of the

Beauties of our n veins of our virtual office is that I can do work and have done work from Maine to seaworld seamlessly clients don’t know you’re not sitting at seaworld talking to them well keep it barking seals in the back sometimes yeah you plan a vacation and

It turns out that you and you’re one of the two or three partners on a project it turns out the only time it’s going to work for Public Media’s during that time you’re on vacation you’re you’re just out of luck and you know you’re not villain for that time so you lose money

And that’s line we’re all comfortable that we pick out a very important but that’s what have a long hard as a partner Joanne can you say that again I think that’s why we all joined together as partners right yeah that’s right we had a question about the ratio of our time

The percentage of our time that’s been looking for projects doing proposals it is a post billable hours no way more we can keep track I would say something some weeks it’s ten to one every week since that it’s way more reasonable I don’t really know I’m good time it’s

Numinous thirty percent of our time looking for work maybe I oh oh probably not that yeah I don’t know it’s it’s it’s not steady and I was joking a little bit ago on the ratios but it is it we have peaks and valleys we have times when several of us are just

Crunching on proposals and then all of a sudden there are no proposals for the next two or three months or very little that we’re actually tracking the one of the hardest parts of consulting and this is true for my friends who are attorneys and the other group or you’re having to

You know worry about marketing and business development is that you always have to have time to think about and pursue new business and it’s going to often happen when you’re so busy that it’s hard to find the time to do it because of the way the work is we might

Be really busy now but we know that in three months we’ve got this project in this project this project winding down and we need to find work to come in behind that and so that’s one of the challenges but it’s also a little fun things we find our computers work just

As well at night on weekends though yeah you’ll find us working a lot more odd hours yeah than people in office we also had a question about the health insurance question because I think we might have given the impression that all of us have a spouse who provides

With health insurance and that is indeed not the case some of us are buying paying for our own health insurance right yes let’s see we keep having questions about sharing the presentation and one person asked we’re going to have a booth at the National Conference the presentation has been said will be

Posted on the Utah AP a site is also on YouTube we will not have a booth at the APA conference we will be offering this session again at the national conference and so live in carson and in fact we use to garnish yeah that the national conferences where we plan every year on

Having our meeting in person for all of us to be there and i think we’ll all be in the room you know before the four of us will be the primary presenters but all the partners will be there and we will introduce all partners and I think

Too you know we thought of this topic because of the fact that we chose to create a firm in the middle of a great recession and at a time when somewhere we’re closing or being consumed by larger firms we chose to go off as a small group and blaze our own Trail and

And I think we’ve done a really pretty darn good job of it in the two years that we’ve been in existence and we’re looking for even more of it in the future so hopefully we’ve given you some tips and ideas for for how we’ve done it

And now consider doing it on your own as well but make sure you team with really excellent people it makes all the difference in the world and particular those that laughs at your jokes one last question since we’re starting to run out of time here there were a number of

Questions about marketing and I I think that chair all talked about that a little but one thing I wanted to clarify is that we all market our firm ourselves as we are working and going to conferences and doing a variety of things I don’t know if anybody else wants to say

Anything about that yeah we do not have any one dedicated to that we’re all doing it just like you say yeah I was gonna say we have everybody dedicated to that mm-hmm that’s right does anybody want to share any closing thoughts since we have about three minutes left I could

By philipp lahm philosophical part no actually no no all right this was enjoy thank you everybody thank thank you all for joining us and we will be providing this information bins going to wrap it up for us here but we appreciate your questions and interest all right thank

You for the great presentation and answering the questions for us Cynthia Graham Carol and Joanne and we really hope to see you again and this concludes today’s session and I want to thank everyone again for attending for further questions regarding the presentation please contact the presenters and if you

Have questions regarding webcast series and logging in cm credits please contact me at planning webcast at yahoo com you

ID: hKrhlbAtbys
Time: 1362168341
Date: 2013-03-01 23:35:41
Duration: 01:28:29

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