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My last post was in October and indicated that due to work pressures I would post only once a week. Well obviously that did not happen. Part of the abscence has been due to work conflicts; however, the actual reason for the lack of activity has been due to not being happy with the direction of my blog content. I began to feel the content was becoming contrived and somewhat preachy.

Therefore, sometime in the near future I will overhaul the simplephilosophy site to focus exclusively on how to effect a positive change in your lifestyle and your life. The posts will draw from my personal journey over the past 9 months losing over 50 pounds through a significant change in my own personal habits and lifestyle. I will also draw from books I am reading that deal with cultural boundaries to personal change, developing the slight edge that will move you forward in life, and other related resources. My belief is if I am excited and happy with the content of the site, then I will be able to offer information that will truly impact others in a positive way. My true desire has always been to offer quality content that others will find beneficial in being successful in all aspects of life.

Watch for the changes and see you soon! Remember prior actions determine future options! Make today’s actions count so you can live the life you want tomorrow.

Steve

When I began my engineering practice about a year and a half ago, I was excited to have enough work to bill 20 hours per week. An architect friend of mine warned me that overnight it could go from just enough work to an avalanche. I remember saying it would be a nice problem to have. Be careful what you wish for, because it just might come true.

The Avalanche Hit!

Well, my friend was right! In what seemed like a sudden experience, I went from having a manageable backlog of work to being completely overwhelmed. Along with it came the stress, converging deadlines and clients wanting to know when their projects would be done.

I thought I had scheduled my work properly…I thought I had not overbooked. Looking back, the beginning of the end was taking on a project for a regular client with an unrealistic deadline. It appears his client had procrastinated getting the architect started, and then demanded that the plans had to be complete and submitted for review within 10 calendar days. Like a dummy (or at least now I know I was a dummy) I agreed. Subconsciously I knew it was a mistake, but I find it hard to say no when someone I like is in need. This caused me to push back other projects and the dominoes started to fall.

At this point a rational person might ask why I continued to take on additional work. Well, several projects were on hold for a variety of reasons (i.e. unresolved drainage issues, funding issues, permitting issues, etc). So I took on additional work to fill the void. Then the unexpected happened…all of the suspended work came back on line at once. Suddenly, I am buried, overwhelmed, or as we say in the biz, generally screwed.

Strategic Alliance

One day, as I sat at my desk, like a deer in the headlights, it suddenly occurred to me that I would be unable to make any deadlines without some help. Given enough time, the lack of performance would kill my business. Unfortunately, the project size I usually specialize in (small projects, with small budgets that turn quickly) is not conducive to hiring staff.

So I decided to enlist the help of a friend that was opening an office for a large engineering firm. Being a firm, that specializes in large residential projects, experiencing a waning housing market, they have a lot of surplus production capacity. After a trial project, we have formalized a strategic alliance where I will contract with them for design and production work on projects that I need to move along.

A strategic alliance is not a joint venture. It is a traditional sub-consultant/client relationship, the difference being that I will use them almost exclusively until my work is under control or perhaps in perpetuity. In one scenario, I can become a contract marketer for the company, using my client contacts to help keep their pipeline full and their employees busy. In another I can just use them to even out the workload peaks or enable me to take on larger projects than I could otherwise handle.

Cashing In on Opportunity Costs

What this arrangement allows me to do is capture revenue that I would otherwise forego. An example happened just last week. I received a call from a client that has a rush project that he wanted me to work on, but wanted to make sure I could perform on time. Because of my new alliance, I was able to assure him that I could handle the work. The result is I will be garnering 20% of a total fee that I would of otherwise turned down, and my friend’s firm will do the work and keep people employed. I am able to turn what would be a lost opportunity into cash.

This is just one example of a creative approach to managing an overwhelming workload. So far it is working well for me. If there are other innovative ideas, please comment on this post and share them with the readers. I am always interested in innovative ideas.

“Prior Actions Determines Future Options”. I first heard these words at a Public Works conference in Monterey, California in March 1987. Motivational speaker Steven T. McGee of Unify International spoke the phrase as part of his keynote address. They were the most profound words that I had heard then and now. That phrase has gotten me through more down times than any other I know.

What makes that phrase so special?

The example that McGee used was of Peter Uberroth and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Uberroth accomplished what no one else had ever done…he made a several million dollar profit with the Olympics. The money was ultimately distributed to local charities. Afterward he was mentioned as a potential presidential candidate, but instead he became commissioner of the American Pastime. The point is, as a result of his prior actions (successfully managing the Olympics) he had his pick of the best opportunities our country had to offer.

How did these simple words get me through tough times?

At the time I attended the conference, I had just taken a job that was a huge increase in responsibility, was a huge boost to my career, was the fulfillment of a dream, and was a huge decrease in pay. Couple that with inheriting a dysfunctional organization (that I was supposed to fix) and it is safe to say there were some really bad days.

I shared with my wife the words of Steve McGee and described the impact they had on me. She calligraphied the words onto a piece of tag board and mounted it onto black matte board. I hung the plaque on the wall above my phone, and whenever I looked at the words I was reminded that my future depended on how I handled that day.

Those words have stayed with me over the past 20 years …moving me forward and keeping alive the promise that life is a series of ordered building blocks and not a series of random actions. If a person engages in serious reflection and rids their mind of all preconceived notions, you will see, as I have, that prior actions do indeed determine future options.

Have you ever noticed how one bad day has a way of spreading to adjacent days?  On September 4th I wrote about a bad day that I had had and spun it around to talk about how finding your center could help keep you from making an otherwise poor coping decision.  It was the old “if given lemons, then make lemonade” attitude…trying to find the positive in something bad. 

However, all that post did was to lift my spirits, but I did not address the real issue…which was I had allowed myself to become sidetracked from my main mission, which is working on consulting projects and making money.  The result was two days of wheel spinning and allowing others to dictate my path instead of the reverse.

Lost Time is Unrecoverable

Our time is the one asset that cannot be remade or recovered.  Once a moment passes it is gone forever!  However, many of us trudge through life thinking there is an unlimited number of tomorrows.  Unfortunately, we have a precise amount of time allotted to us in our lives, but only God knows what that is.  It is therefore imperative that we make the best use of the time allotted to us.  While we must live intentional lives, it is even more important to be a good steward of our time and talents.  The best way to do that is to plan.

A Failure to Plan is a Plan for Failure

It is a fact that the average person spends more time planning a vacation than planning for their successful future.  What cannot be allowed to happen is for one bad day, and we all have them, to spread (as it did for me) into multiple useless days.

One of the best tools I have found for preventing the spread of time destruction is to create a “Perfect Day Schedule”.  To do this print out a blank sheet from the Outlook Calendar in table form and create a time schedule for your perfect day.  The attitude is “What if I had perfect control of my time…what would my most productive day look like”.  Then plan your day making sure to leave room for lunch, working out, time with your kids and family, etc.  The key is to be not only efficient, but realistic.  If your Perfect Day Schedule has you running non-stop and does not leave time for the important things in your life, then it will be out of balance and non-sustainable.

Whenever I have operated my day within the parameters of my Perfect Day Schedule, I have been happier, more productive, more creative and felt more  in balance, because I knew how my day would unfold.  It is important to strictly adhere to the schedule for it to work.  You have to strongly protect any extraneous stuff from infringing on the time blocks you have set up.  For instance, if you have the hour of 10 am to 11 am set up to return phone calls, then do not make any calls outside of the hour, no matter how important you think it might be (family emergencies or life and death matters are obviously exceptions). 

It is important that you know when you are the most focused and productive, so you can block out that time as a quiet time for uninterrupted work.  For me it is in the morning between 8:30 am and 11 am.  I make sure that I do not schedule Dr. appointments, meetings or make phone calls during this time.  It is my time to really make hay and get a massive amount of billable work done.  Then between 11 am and noon I return calls.  I find that I tend to get fidgety and unfocused in the afternoon; therefore, that is when I schedule meetings (if any), run to the bank, etc.  I always put Dr. appointments at the end of the day.  Always ask for the last available appointment and if it cannot be after 4 pm, then  opt for a different day. 

This avoids the tendency to be busy, but unproductive.  Remember in a fee for work situation, if you can’t bill it, you can’t earn it and you eventually can’t eat it.  If you are salaried employee, this will still work, because as a more productive employee you will stand out.  Most people try to find was to dork off on the job, instead of working at their peak.  If you continually follow your Perfect Day Plan, your work will improve (both quality and quantity, because it will be well planned and not rushed), you will go home with satisfaction having gotten your goals for the day accomplished, and will get more raises and promotions than the others because bosses reward success.

Along with this I have become a great list maker.  I make a list of the things I need to get accomplished in that day.  I first focus on the quick hits that make the most impact.  It is amazing how crossing things off a list can create confidence and positive momentum.  It also improves performance, because it eliminates the “what do I do now” question.  Whenever, I do not have my day listed out, that is when I get off track and off task.

So….how did I totally lose it this week and essentially waste an entire week?  I did not follow my schedule and I did not make a list of tasks to accomplish each day.  I also allowed appointments to creep into my productive time.  I was generally human and I let it get to me.  Deep down I knew better and I was beating myself up over it.  What should I have done?  Started the 5th with a focused list of things I had to get done and a new attitude.  I also should have posted the last two days, because there is no excuse for not doing the things that give you joy.

An increasingly pervasive attitude with today’s managers and business owners is that employees are nothing more than tools or pieces of equipment that exist to create and enhance the entity’s bottom line. If the equipment’s cost of maintenance begins to rise or if the fixed cost of the employee (ie from pay raises or increases in benefits due to time in grade) increases and it begins to degrade the bottom line, then it is time to replace it with a cheaper model.

Why Engineers Make Lousy Managers

Being an engineer and having worked for a wide variety of organizations over the past 27 years, I have come to believe that as a rule engineers make lousy managers. It is not because the engineers that get promoted to management are not smart people or they do not care about the health and welfare of the company, it is because usually the ones that get promoted are highly productive and have a very high utilization rate. As a result, they are more concerned about billability and production than they are about nurturing relationships. It takes time to build tight client relationships and usually much of that time is not billable or accounted for in project budgets. As a result, employees are told to stay off the phone, stay on task and bill, bill, bill.

Every Business is a Relationship Driven

During my orientation with a prominent water resources engineering firm for whom I managed an office, the senior VP who was my direct supervisor made a point of telling me to never forget that ours was a relationship business. The company had been built on strong client relationships that had stood for over 35 years. This group really GOT IT! It was a result of this philosophy that during my recruitment the top brass had seemed concerned over the number of jobs that I had on my resume. The majority of the decision makers had been with the firm for 25 plus years. They wanted someone who would be committed to building and maintaining long-term relationships. This company really understood that close client relationships meant they saved money on marketing. When an existing client called with a possible project, virtually all of the time spent with the client was billable from hour one. The only instance when the time was written off to marketing was when the project did not proceed further.

What Precipitated This Post

Today I just found out that one of my neighbors was laid off. But they were not laid off in what I would consider an honorable fashion. My neighbor was a regional manager for a company that operated in several states. The premise was he was going to be elevated to a more regional level and his company hired a lesser paid person to take over his territory. My neighbor even trained this guy! My friend was being asked to move his family to Washington so he could concentrate on the states of Oregon and Washington…areas that were weak for this company.

After submitting his weekly reports after an extended business trip to the Northwest, my neighbor’s boss asked if they could get together to discuss some things. The meeting happened on Monday in Gilroy, California (about 3 hours from Bakersfield). At the meeting, my friend was given a severance package and told he was laid off.

Management did not have the balls to give this loyal employee an inkling that something was up. They let him train his successor, put his home on the market (in a depressed real estate market, no less), and then summarily discharged him like a piece of equipment that had outlived its useful life in order to save a few bucks. The company was arrogant enough to think my neighbor’s contacts and his client relationships belonged to them. What they will find out is that once a trusting relationship has been created, it will survive almost any circumstance. The bottom line will temporarily improve, but over the long haul his old company will be the big loser.

Relationships are a company’s most valuable asset and the people who create them are indispensable.