10am - 11am PT / 11am - 12pm MT / 12pm - 1pm CT / 1pm - 2pm ET
Unless it maintains its profitability, a design firm can sustain itself for only so long. It doesn’t have to be that way; design firms can be both professionally and financially successful.
This webinar provides easy-to-follow steps to successfully begin planning for profitability. These tools provide a blueprint that enables any size firm to properly manage their finances without the need for an intensive financial management education. Guidance is offered on developing an annual budget and profit plan, and calculating seven (7) key financial performance indicators that provide the critical metrics to facilitate appropriate financial management business decisions and become more effective stewards of the firm’s financial resources.
Participants will learn to:
- Develop the firm’s annual budget and profit plan.
- Establish the overhead and break-even rate for every employee, as a first step in targeting a desired profit for every project.
- Set-up, interpret and evaluate the Profit/Loss Statement and Balance Sheet, calculate seven (7) key FM indicators so financial trends can be recognized so the balance between workload and staff size can be assessed and overhead more effectively managed and controlled.
Steve L. Wintner, AIA Emeritus, is the founder and sole proprietor of Management Consulting Services, a Houston-based firm specializing in professional design firm management with an emphasis on financial management/profit planning, for a national clientele.
Steve is the co-author, with Michael Tardif of, Financial Management for Design Professionals: The Path to Profitability, (Kaplan Publishing, December 2006). He is the author of the chapters titled “Project Fee Budgeting” in New Directions in Architecture & Engineering Practice, and “Architectural Accounting Systems” in The Encyclopedia of Accounting. He has also written a monologue of 12 articles entitled Management Tools that focuses on issues of professional design firm management and has contributed numerous articles to AIA Best Practices, the AIA Project Management Digest and AIArchitect.
Steve has developed and presented numerous iterations of his financial management workshop for the AIA nationally and locally since 1994 and his professional career of more than 40 years includes executive positions for several internationally prominent architectural firms, including being the former managing principal of his own architecture firm. He has been a licensed architect since 1968.