Project Management · Module 1 · Week 1 Module
Module 1 · Project Pursuit · Week 1 — Self-paced
Before you manage a project, someone already decided to chase it, priced it, and staffed a guess. This week opens the hood on that machine.
Module Content Overview · the complete walkthrough · companion to the interactive Economic ModelThe cold open
Before you read another word — look at the five points below. They're out of order on purpose. Click the one you think comes first.
The earlier you're involved, the more you can shape it. Join later, and your first job is to understand and verify.
Neither position is wrong. But they're different jobs — and this whole course keeps asking you to name which one you're in.
How we make money
Weston & Sampson doesn't sell a product off a shelf. We sell expertise, delivered as hours — the time of engineers, scientists, planners, and designers, organized to solve a client's problem. A client pays a fee; we spend our people's time to earn it. That loop — sell the work, do the work, get paid — is the whole business.
One fact makes everything that follows matter more: we are 100% employee-owned. The people doing the work also own the result. When a project runs well, the value doesn't flow to an outside shareholder — it flows back to the people in the room, through the ESOP. That's the stake behind every decision in this course.
If you work here, you're an owner. Not symbolically — literally.
Where the dollar goes
Before any number means anything, know what becomes of a dollar from the moment a client pays it.
At the top is gross revenue — the full amount a client pays. Not all of it is ours: fees to subconsultants and reimbursable costs flow straight through. Strip those out and what remains is net service revenue (NSR) — the money we make with our own labor, and the number every firm metric is measured against.
NSR is then consumed in steps — direct labor, indirect labor and overhead, other expenses — and whatever survives is profit. Usually a thin slice.
Profit isn't a number we add on top. It's what's left after the waterfall runs its course.
Shrink that same logic to a single hour and you get a billing rate: wage, loaded with overhead, reaches break-even. Add the firm's target profit and you reach the target rate. The ratio between target and wage is the multiplier — one number that carries the whole model.
Why early decisions ride on data
Expected fee × win probability = weighted revenue. Sum that across every active pursuit and you get backlog — what the firm plans staffing and hiring against.
The math is simple. The hard part is that win-probability number. Someone typed it in — was it a calibrated read on the relationship and the competition, or a gut feeling on a Friday afternoon? The firm is about to make real decisions on that guess.
Good pursuit data isn't paperwork. It's leadership.
Carry into next week
Not because the PM doesn't matter — because by the time most PMs show up, the pursuit has already decided the price, the schedule pressure, the team, and the client's expectations. The earlier you're in the room, the more of that you shape yourself. The later you arrive, the more of it you have to go verify.
Next week you meet the opportunity we'll carry through the rest of this module. The Town of Millbrook needs a wastewater master plan. A former Weston & Sampson employee, now their town engineer, just flagged the RFP. It's a good story — and genuinely borderline: new client, tight deadline, a subconsultant we'd need, a competitor already doing the work. Some of you will find out you were involved before the go/no-go call. Others will find out you're being assigned after. It changes what your job is next week — and Millbrook won't sit still once you're in it.