DEVELOPER MESSAGE

Gloomy. That seems to be the unanimous outlook regarding the economy and the A/E industry. Recently, McGraw-Hill Construction has projected a 7% decline in construction starts for 2009. And that's on the heels of a 12% decline in 2008!

Here's what we can look forward to in 2009:

• Single-family housing down 2%
• Multi-family housing down 6%
• Commercial buildings down 12%
• Institutional construction down 3%
• Manufacturing down 32%
• Public works down 5%
• Electrical utility construction down 30%

My perspicacious  mother-in-law is fond of saying "when life hands you lemons - make lemonade." In a moment, I'll share with you the Orange Loft recipe. At this point however, your firm should be carefully assessing your 2009 budget, staff needs and how you can adjust to the circumstances.

It's easy to make money when times are good. The test of well run firms is how they weather storms and even prosper in the face of adversity. At Orange Loft, our mission is to help ensure that your firm is equiped with the tools to help you prosper.

Moola: Hopefully, you're all looking at your financials to see where you can improve spending if not reduce it. We suggest a good place to start is reassessing your firms' insurance needs and premiums. General Liability, Health and Professional Liability insurance companies may be more willing to negotiate with you now then previously, especially if they want to keep your business.

Cut back on discretionary spending such as travel. Rather than sending staff across the county to attend conferences, look to have in-house training events. Vendors, manufacturers and reps should be clamoring to come in to your firm to provide educational opportunities and tout their wares. Do not eliminate necessary growth items such as staff training. In fact, if projects are slowing down and deadlines are not as pressing, this is actually a great opportunity to enhance your staff's skills in things like CAD. You know that BIM technology you've always been meaning to implement but never had the time? Well, now you do. 

Skills: One of the most powerful aspects of our ArchiOffice software is its ability to report profitability based on project and service types. Use this to assess which areas are really contributing to your firm's plan. Assess which project types exploit your firms skills and result in profit.  Market these.

ArchiOffice helps you identify if you are consistently losing money during certain project phases (like construction administration). Consider negotiating contracts where these services are provided hourly or modify future contracts accordingly.

If your firm has expertise in a niche that is waning, consider how you market to this segment. But also begin to adapt your staff so they can respond to your firms short-term needs and provide equally skilled services in the markets that will be in demand.

Knowledge is Power: Use our software and empower your employees to access the data. By sharing with your staff project budgets and comparing them to actual data - they will have a greater appreciation for the problems and even work better to correct them. It's amazing how smart individuals can take good information and make it work for them (and you).

At Orange Loft, we're so convinced that by properly using our software, your firm will not only make it through these difficult times, but prosper. If you or your staff need additional training to utilize our tools, now is a great time to request private training from one of our skilled support staff - or visit our tutorials on the website to familiarize yourself with best practices of working with the software.

If you would like me to personally visit your firm, help you customize ArchiOffice and work with you and your staff to get you to the next level, contact me to arrange a visit.

Steven Burns, AIA

AMAZING OFFERS FROM ORANGE LOFT!

As mentioned in the Developer Message above, Orange Loft would like to help you make lemonade from these lemons. We have two different recipes that may interest you.

If you don't currently have office, project management software like ArchiOffice or EngineerOffice and realize that it will help you control your firms finances and project management, we would like to offer you an additional 15% discount off your total purchase price. This amazing discount is in addition to our standard volume discount incentive!

TECHNICAL TIPS

EMPLOYEE REIMBURSABLES
In a recent update of ArchiOffice, we added a new checkbox in the detail view of a Time or Expense entry. This "Employee Reimbursable" field allows your staff to enter out-of-pocket expenses that they would like reimbursed. If these expenses are tied to a project - they will be invoiced to the client (unless the user selected the "non-reimbursable" checkbox). By running a report for open employee reimbursables, you can create expense reports. Once reimbursed to the employee, authorized users can mark these expenses as "paid-out" so they don't get reported again.

CUSTOM ON-LINE TRAINING
Are you using ArchiOffice to its fullest potential? Are you maximizing your investment in our software?  As mentioned in the Developer Message, this might be an excellent time for you to have key staff trained in the areas of ArchiOffice that can help you better manage your projects and identify profit centers as well as where you are hemorrhaging.

Are you using important management features such as our comprehensive and customizable checklist system? Our checklists not only help you with quality control, but are a wonderful means for project budgeting and tracking completeness.

Have you set up each project's budget and used our ingenious "QuickView" layout to monitor profitability and track actual versus budgeted phases.

Are you using our Logs area to track all phone calls and notes? And have you also tried customizing it to meet the needs of your firm?

Let us open your world to these and many other possibilities. 1 hour ($95). Contact Support to arrange training.

NEW CUSTOMERS

This month, we would like to welcome the following new customers who are dedicated to improving their firms efficiency and productivity with ArchiOffice or EngineerOffice: