ADF Strategic Development and Deployment

"Why is ADF not Growing?"

For the first twelve years of existence, we had been successfully growing our business, progressing from a single discipline company to a full-service, multi-discipline engineering company. However, for the past three years, growth has been stagnant or declining. After peaking at $7 MM in 2014, our revenue has retreated and this year is projected to be only $6 MM. Several factors have contributed to the recent slowdown. These factors include:

· Changing Client Expectations – Our clients have evolved from a having a clear understanding of the impact of scope changes on schedule and budget to a more challenging expectation of having fixed schedules and budgets regardless of change. This includes both existing clients with newer and inexperienced project engineers and new clients, who lack basic understanding of project execution processes. Our management style did not adjust to meet these new client success factors.

· Quality – We have allowed quality issues to occur that have hurt our important client relationships and future business. Despite recent efforts, accountability has not been adjusted sufficiently to prevent these issues. This lack of accountability issue impacts the quality of our projects, management, design functions, and interoffice communication.

· Fierce competition – As the market shifted, new competition has appeared, causing us to compete against larger A/E firms.

· Sales – Our sales efforts relied on a network of repeat clients that have not been successfully maintained and their revenue stream has steadily declined since 2014. Our efforts to diversify the business to new clients and industries alone have not covered this change.

· Resources – We have not had the right mix of technical expertise and have become “siloed”, making it difficult to maintain bench strength for multiple simultaneous projects, while achieving competitive blend rates.

Our business is reacting to deal with all of the mentioned challenges. However, more pro-active actions will have to be taken to “make ADF grow again”.