Real Estate and Construction
Keeping it simple
How to overhaul your policy manual
By Abby Cymerman
Smart Business Philadelphia | November 2008
Page 1 of 2
Tom Caramanico
co-owner and CEO, McCormick Taylor
If you want to get the best
work from your managers, don’t force your own leadership
style on them, says Tom
Caramanico.
As co-owner, president and
CEO of McCormick Taylor,
Caramanico understands that
the leaders of his 11 offices
all use different styles to manage their portion of his company’s 380 employees. But
there are four things that are
nonnegotiable, and he’s created a list of rules to be followed by everyone at his engineering
firm, which posted 2007 revenue of $46 million.
“Those four rules are results-oriented, and if you are achieving those results that are
described in those four rules,
then whatever way you’re managing is probably OK,”
Caramanico says. “What’s
important is the results, not the
style. The key for any successful
manager is being able to accommodate those different styles
and still get the work done.”
Smart Business spoke with
Caramanico about his four
rules for keeping a company
healthy and its employees
happy.
Keep your clients happy. It’s a
communication process. First
of all, our clients are government agencies that hire
through a public competitive
process. When the client identifies what the project is about,
what tasks they want you to
do, what products they want
you to deliver and the time
frame, that makes your job —
in terms of understanding
what the client needs — a little easier from the start.
They have a written scope
that they will give us. Talk to
the client and understand
them. Say, ‘I can read what
you’ve written here. Tell me
exactly what it is you’re looking for.’
The second way to keep
clients happy is working for the
same clients over and over. You
really get to know them, and
they get to know you. Our project managers deal with clients
day in and day out, and they
ask the client how we are doing
and if this is what they wanted.
How do you measure
whether the client is happy?
It’s whether they hire you
again. The client might write
us a letter and say, ‘We were
really pleased to work with
you. The bridge you designed
turned out perfect, and we’re
very happy with it,’ but if they
have another bridge to design
next year, and they don’t hire
us, I would say they weren’t
happy enough.
Stay billable at all times. Are
your people billable? That’s
not so much a financial thing;
being billable means you’re
getting the work that clients
need done to people very efficiently so that everybody is
productive every day, working
for some client and keeping
the focus on the client’s needs.
We measure the billable time
by group, subgroup and by the
whole company every week.
One of the basic rules when
you’re dealing in people in
business is that people will
pay attention to the thing that
you measure.
The only reason for us to be
here is to do work for our
clients. So, every hour of every
day, you should do something
for some client for some project.
If you did something for five
hours that was of no value to
any client on any project, why
did you need to do that? If you
are doing something that’s of
some benefit to some client
every hour of the day, then you
will be 100 percent billable.
