If you are here, you’re probably an environmental consultant that has been tasked with doing Phase I ESA. I’m imagining you fall into one of two categories. You’re either starting-out as an independent environmental consultant (90), or your company doesn’t do Phase I ESAs as a main line of business.
A3 Environmental Consultants want to help you out.
We do about 800 projects a year and we are efficient at getting them done to the high-quality standards we hold ourselves to.
Here’s one of our tricks.
Formsite is online survey software that we use for our Phase I ESA questionnaire. The link below is the questionnaire we use with our clients.
Formsite Phase I ESA Questionnaire
Here are some very cool features about this Formsite Phase I ESA questionnaire you may find valuable:
- It’s interactive. The questions change depending on who you are with regard to the transaction. If you are a buyer the survey software serves to you different questions than the seller, which are different from a refinancer. This allows us to email one link to anyone in a transaction and the appropriate data returns.
- It’s a website. We found in this day-and-age people have a really hard time printing out a PDF, filling it out, and scanning it back into an email to us. Even building an interactive PDF has all sorts of technical glitches depending on the software your clients are using. Websites are the All-Terrain-Vehicle of communications. They work the same on your computer as they do on a cell phone. The link can be emailed or texted. A shocking number of people use their smartphone exclusively and going to a computer to fill out a form is a burden.
- It’s cheap. It costs $20 a month.
- It’s fast. When we switched to using this online ESA questionnaire we stopped chasing people around, begging them to finish. They quickly and easily got their surveys done. The time-saving aspect of this shift cannot be understated.
It’s fast in a different way too. The questions are “scored” with points assigned to questions with concerning answers. So the question, “Do you know of any underground storage tanks on the subject property?” if answered YES, gets a score of +1. When the answers come back we look for the total score. If it’s zero, we don’t have to read the questionnaire. If it’s >1, we find only the question with a score above zero. This saves enormous amounts of time.
However; if you’d like PDF versions of our environmental questionnaire you can find that by clicking HERE for the USER and HERE for the OWNER.
By the way, the user environmental questionnaire is very different from the owner’s environmental questionnaire. That’s by design.
Back when we started this I predicted you fall into one of two categories. Either you don’t do a ton of Phase I ESAs, you’re starting as a freelance environmental professional or somehow starting up an environmental consulting business.
We want to help you even more.
If you are an environmental professional but Phase I ESAs aren’t your specialty why not just hire us to do the project and mark up our work? Generally speaking, it doesn’t pay to do a Phase I ESA every once in a while. First, quality suffers which can harm your relationship with your client. Second, unless you’ve built a workflow to get these projects done efficiently, you usually spend more time than you should.
Ask your boss if Phase I ESAs are your new product line. Are you going to be marketing them hard? If the answer is no, then let me get you a price to get you a finished Phase I ESA in 10 business days anywhere in the country. You can do the final QA on it and upcharge your client. Nobody will know we did the work because none of our marketing will be on the report. In the meantime, you can be doing other projects.
If you just started as an environmental contractor or spooled up a new environmental consulting business, WELCOME! We love you guys. We have about 120 freelance consultants across the country we work with. We’d like to work with you too.
FORMSITE: Link to Independent Environmental Consultant Onboarding Questionnaire
Click through the link above, fill that baby out and we’ll throw you on this map.
When we have a project in your area we’ll call you to help us with site visits.
Also, if you’d just like to talk about the environmental biz and how we can work together, feel free to give me a shout (Tim 630.507.9014). We love collaborating.
Finally, the results of the sample Phase I ESA questionnaire which we linked to above and which has no branding come to me in my email inbox. Don’t feel weird about filling it out with dummy data, it will only show up in my email inbox. In fact, if you’d like me to call you make sure your contact info is real. I’m big on calling everyone.
Finally, If you get your own Formsite account I can make a copy of the questionnaire template and send you it for your use.
