”OUR ARMS ARE WRAPPED
AROUND THIS
LOG
FOR DEAR LIFE”
Mark Van DeWege, Anthony Wilder Design/Build—Cabin John, MD
WORDS TO LIVE BY
Even before the lock-down, the company made clear to the staff their priorities:
Protect lives
Protect livelihoods
Stay vigilant
The nature of their work is highly collaborative: the carpenters need to see what the architects are planning, the schedulers need to know about changes as they happen, etc. For this reason, working from home wasn’t a useful solution. This meant people who got sick needed to quarantine themselves quickly, and they did.
CASH FLOW
When things shut down, the million-dollar projects stopped coming in but, Mark says, the demand for smaller renovations, in the under $20,000 range, never dried up.
Before the pandemic they saw these smaller jobs as a secondary line of business. These small-scale renovations were viewed as a chance to cultivate new clients who might return for bigger projects.
However, once the big jobs evaporated, Mark says they put all their efforts into these smaller jobs and it paid off. The carpenters and other tradesmen were kept working. Along with the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) money, they managed to hold on to all but one position and kept the bulk of the staff on the payroll.
90 DAYS AT A TIME…
Anthony Wilder Design/Build is an architecture firm/building contractor all in one. They’ve got all the trade skills from architect to carpenter under one roof. And thanks to the progressive management ideals of Liz Wilder, the company practices open-book accounting, which means all the key financials are openly shared with the staff.
They say it keeps everyone focused on the bottom line by giving them all the information necessary to understand how the company makes its profits, and the true extent of losses during a crisis. Before the pandemic, the weekly staff meetings planned both short-term and long-term, but for now they are keeping a close focus on the next 90 days.
SHORT-TERM IS LOOKING BRIGHTER NOW
It’s mid-June now, and Mark says clients are starting to talk about bigger projects. He sees the past few months of suspended work more as a hiccup than a crisis. He says their clients (who tend to be on the wealthier demographic) seem to feel they’ve weathered the worst of the economic hit and are now confident enough to return to their goals for renovating their houses. The company has already signed up a few million-dollar-range projects, and they anticipate the company returning to the way things were.
LONG TERM CHANGES
Now that they’ve seen how the small-scale work sustained them during this crisis, they are going to continue to build that market with a special division of the company focused on cultivating these modest- scale jobs.
Several of the managers were able to work remotely and they took this time-out to reorganize a bit. One of the big changes coming out of the reorganization, and a lesson learned from remote working, is that they’re moving everything to the cloud. ”It’s something we’ve been talking about for a few years, at least,” Mark says: “…and this was the final push we needed to decide to make that leap.”