Have you ever paid for a gym membership and realized it felt like throwing cash into a woodchipper because you rarely used it? Participating in a professional organization as a passive member can feel the same way. The greatest value of membership comes not just from belonging, but from actively participating.

Active membership can help you build relationships, shape chapter programs, develop leadership experience that may not be available at your firm, and become part of a larger professional community. Passive membership may feel easier, but it limits what you and your firm can gain from the organization. When firms see employees actively involved, they have more reason to cover dues, support event attendance, and recognize the value of credentials that can further your career.

A few weeks ago, I took a trip down to Manitou Springs to do the Manitou Incline—a 2,744-step hike that covers less than a mile of horizontal distance, making it famously steep. The average grade is 45%, with some sections reaching as high as 68%. By the time you reach the top, you’ve climbed more than 2,000 feet in elevation.

I had never heard of this hike before I did it. When I got invited to go, I looked it up and thought it sounded “fun.” That may have been  an ignorant thought.

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman

Imagine a tool that brings everyone—designers, marketers, and project managers—onto the same page in real time. Figma has become that tool for us. It’s a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that allows teams to create, share, and edit design files in real-time. It’s like if you took the collaborative system of Google Docs, where everyone can work together seamlessly on the same file, with Adobe’s intelligent and responsive design framework, and put them together in one application. After introducing  this system to my team, I watched our marketing and proposal workflow evolve from near-siloed and somewhat cumbersome to smooth, collaborative, and efficient. 

In this article, I’m going to walk you through how Figma has been such a game-changer and how you, too, can leverage its features to enhance team alignment, speed up your process, and bring a new level of precision and creativity to your proposals. More importantly though, why stepping outside your comfort zone with new software can be beneficial, even if your current tools feel adequate. 

In the dynamic AEC industry, we're continually on the hunt for innovative strategies and tools that will give us a competitive edge in digital marketing. One of the key challenges I've faced has been sourcing a platform that consolidates all the AI tools available, especially those I may be unaware of. Today, I'm thrilled to share a resource that I've been using for a while, one that maintains a current, comprehensive list of all AI tools available—FutureTools.io.

Congratulations on becoming a supervisor for the first time in your career! Or, if you’re not a supervisor yet (and would like to be), congratulations on being proactive! In our haste to create a comprehensive onboarding experience for our new “direct reports” (who will be referred to as team members moving forward), there’s often something lacking—onboarding for the first-time supervisor. 

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this (or said this) before when trying to fill a marketing position at your firm: “This candidate seems to have [insert desirable skills here], but doesn’t have AEC-specific experience, so we will pass.”

Raise your other hand if it’s been difficult to quickly fill and keep marketing positions at your firm: are both hands raised? Great, now do the wave because you’re amongst many.