SERVICES

Consulting | Research | Investigations | Training
Facilitating | Publishing | Fees & Costs

Consulting

Our consulting projects can be as brief and simple as a single phone call, or as extensive as a three-year project to perform and coordinate the necessary research, writing, design and technical review for a 500-page reference book. Sometimes clients need us to locate and coordinate the efforts of other consultants or provide our overall judgement based on their efforts, or to provide a consolidated report. When you call us, we will quickly assess whether our services might be helpful, or whether other firms might be better-placed to meet your needs.

Research

Research projects typically combine a mixture of technical and commercial issues. Other consultants are usually focused on either commercial or technical aspects of their clients questions. We often deal with both. For example, in a project for the Government of the region of Catalunya, in Spain, we researched and provided a report on the combined technical and commercial history of ventilation air treatment equipment in the U.S. between 1990 and 2005.

In other cases, the research is purely technical or commercial. One more technical project required surveying, field-testing and evaluating alternative technologies for increasing the drying rate of food ingredients. A more commercial project involved identifying and surveying end users, to determine their requirements for a practical instrument to locate hidden mold in buildings.

Investigations

Our work sometimes includes field surveys of problem buildings, to assist other consultants and building owners in sorting out the usually complex causes of moisture intrusion and migration. Similar field investigations are performed as a preventive measure, to help Architects, Engineers or building owners avoid those problems, or to assess the thermal characteristics of a mockup design detail with real-world measurements.

Training

Clients often use our services to develop specialized training courses and materials related to our subject areas. These efforts might be as brief as developing and presenting a one-hour seminar—on behalf of a client—to an audience of their choosing. On the other hand, training projects have been as extensive as developing six hours of course material for an engineering society.

Facilitating

We often provide services to facilitate and manage meetings which solicit and consolidate different inputs, or which resolve conflicting perspectives. Our experience in both technical and commercial issues helps groups and companies which have many disparate inputs, but who need to discuss and consolidate those perspectives into a summary plan which allows action.

Examples have included a company which needed to organize internal resources to focus on a problem. Also, both a government agency and a technical society which needed to recruit and coordinate the efforts of a variety of volunteers to achieve a short-term goal. Another example is conflicts relating to building defects. Attorneys and building owners are often confronted with conflicting opinions of different experts. We help organize and run such meetings for clients who can benefit from using a “neutral third party” for such purposes, and for clients who prefer not to use their internal resources to manage a meeting of unfocused or sometimes conflicting technical perspectives.

Publishing

Often, our clients wish to publish the results of one of our research or consulting projects. We have the experience and the resources needed to design, illustrate and prepare print-ready electronic files for full-color books, journal or magazine articles, videos and website components.

Much of our work has been published in technical or trade journals and magazines. We understand the technical content requirements, the typical writing conventions and the peer review procedures for journals, as well as the pre-press requirements for print production. We can coordinate with the Editor of the publication, write the text, generate photography and create the graphic art in fully-completed and print-ready electronic files.

Fees & Costs

When a project is very brief, or when the client wants ongoing access to our information, or needs advice only on an intermittent basis, we consult at our standard rate of $150/hr.

More frequently, we work on a project basis. Based on an initial no-cost consultation, we’ll develop a not-to-exceed cost estimate based on our standard hourly rate. This approach provides a defined result for a defined cost.

When a project is lengthy or complex, we usually suggest proceeding in stages, which allows the project to expand or contract as more is learned and as the clients needs become further refined in light of the information obtained.

We welcome your initial questions and inquiries by telephone. Our policy on telephone questions is simple. If the information is in our heads and we can relate the answer verbally... it’s free. We’re glad to answer questions and to have conversations on the telephone, including international calls.

Please note, however, that whenever a caller or client asks us to send an email response, or to locate and transmit information electronically or by mail, or asks us for any form of written communication, that effort is charged at $150/hr.

The only exception to the “free phone information” policy is any information which would compromise the interests of any current or past client. Naturally, their interests and their private information is held confidential in perpetuity.