If you have a good relationship with Clark Reder already, I would ask them about their responsiveness and politely
express you have concerns about recent performance. If they're in the thick of it, they may be able to have a candid conversation with you where they can step it up, be more mindful in the future, give you
feedback on how to streamline their ability to respond if there's anything you can do differently with feeding them information, or refer you to another firm.
As others have said, engineering firms across the board are overloaded right now. While Covid put the entertainment industry on life support for a couple years, the rest of the engineering business kept moving along at a strong clip. Many clients, especially theme parks, saw it as an opportunity to go full steam ahead without impacting
park occupancy. Project schedules have gotten more aggressive, concerns about supply-chains, cost escalation, and such forth have compressed design schedules to get construction projects out to bid sooner under the veil of trying to lock in pricing before another 6 months of inflation or interest rates hose the project budget . There's also the problem that many firms, my own included, spend a lot of time on rework these days. Projects that were on the drawing boards went quiet for a couple years and now are coming back from the dead with little notice, lots of changes, and an ambitious deliverable schedule. A recent high school project had a $135M budget -- when it was issued for bid it came in at $218M. In about 2 months, every trade on the project had to cut down to a goal of $150M and
send it out for a second bid. Nobody got paid for that extra effort, and in all likelihood, the project will still come in around $175M. That's a remarkably common problem in the
current market. I've seen a couple projects recently where after it was sent to bid/permit and there were fairly significant structural changes happening after the fact -- including complete redesign of the building
envelope and roof systems. It's gotten to the
point where we have clients emailing us at 2am about changes for a project that's going out for bid later that week.
This isn't unique to any particular firm. It's across the board in the engineering industry. It's a combination of unreasonable design schedules, rework for VE and rebooted projects, how hard it is to find qualified candidates for openings, and trying to navigate a volatile market.
Thank You for all your suggestions. Is this a situation where I need to find a company with previous experience working in the entertainment industry, or is any structural engineering firm sufficient? I am mostly working with
truss structures, and one of the nice things about working with Clark Reder is that I don't have to explain to them what
truss is, the different types we use in entertainment,
etc.
Find someone with entertainment experience. We have a large structural group ourselves. If you have an inquiry that hits one of the people who doesn't work on entertainment projects, they will
throw a larger fee at it because they don't understand the niche as well and expect to spend more time on it. If you catch one of the people who works in entertainment more regularly, you will get a much more reasonable fee because they know what they're getting into and how entertainment differs from architecture. The physics may be the same, but there's no substitute for an intimate understanding of the application.
But as I said, I would
express concern to Clark Reder first and give them an opportunity to respond and course correct. There's a fair chance they're aware there's a problem with responsiveness and won't take offense and that may be enough
restore their responsiveness to you.
