2018 At a Glace

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It’s a New Year and we wanted to take a second to step back and reflect on last year and give some updates for what to expect in 2019.

Here are some quick stats for our 2018 year:

  • 19 Projects contracted and either completed or still in progress.

  • 4 different invoicing and time tracking software systems tried out until we FINALLY found the one we LOVE.

  • 3 staff additions! This brought us more efficiency and the ability to better serve you!

    • Amanda as a Lead Designer

    • Zhanna as our Renderer

    • Jena as our Design Assistant

  • One trip to Vegas to see the latest and greatest in market trends/design at the Summer Market at Las Vegas Market. Read more about that here.

  • Countless new partnerships including, but not limited to, deep relationships with Sustain Interiors and Hood River Engineers. By developing deep relationships and identifying how we can streamline/integrate services, we were able to collectively save our clients time, money, and energy.

  • Our first StruckSured baby was born to Amanda this year and we have another on the way from Jena. I consider that the greatest gift of all!

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As we look to the new year, we have put our thinking caps on and formed a list of ambitious, but attainable goals for StruckSured. Here are some of the things we are looking to integrate and bring your way:

  • This year our greatest goal is to be more effective and efficient with our communication and processes. We know there is always room for improved communication to help dissolve stress and keep things moving more smoothly. To better serve each of you, we are going to be implementing the following:

    • Tête-à-Tête Tuesday’s. What the heck does that mean? It means that every Tuesday you are going to see an project update from Jena with a list of status items and where they are at. We know that there are a lot of details to manage and we want all of you to rest easy knowing that we have got you covered and that the details are being handled. And, we are all for weird names and funky spelling……

  • Samantha will be sitting for the NCIDQ exam this April. She applied last year and was accepted to sit in and take the test! Wish her luck on her continued education and future testing! What does this mean for the future of Strucksured? It simply means that we will be able to take on more commercial work and be certified to do so for special contracts.

  • Continued growth! We are still busting at the seams with the work load we have and are looking to add a CAD drafter to the lineup. We are taking our time and wanting to make sure it’s the right fit for our team but please send all your good thoughts and well wishes as we continue to search for an all star draftsperson.

  • Invoicing — we will be sending those out each month. With all the software work around and testing, we were fairly inconsistent with our monthly billing while still tracking our time and billable hours diligently by hand. Now that we have landed on our new Ivy software, we will be sending those out each month and Jena will be the person in charge of all invoices and payment processing.

  • Lastly, we will be raising our fees by 15% this year. Of course, if you secured a contract in 2018, we will be honoring that rate through completion of your project. But, all new contracts going forward will have new rates. What was the reasoning behind this?

    • Our team is made up of three moms and StruckSured is as always committed to paying a living wage and be respectful of the fact that we are all sacrificing time with our kiddos (at a huge expense) to work here.

    • We have tried our best to keep our rates lower to be more accessible to a wider range of client budgets, but we are now well below market average and we need to pay our designers according to the talent they bring!

    • Even with the increase, we will still be roughly 25% below the average rate of a Portland based design company.


We hope this year will be our best year and feel so grateful for those of you that have journeyed with us this past year. What an adventure it was! Please continue to send all your good thoughts and well wishes as we continue on this journey and grow this business to support more talent in the Gorge and be able to serve more clients from the PNW and beyond.

Cheers!
Samantha Struck & the StruckSured Team

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