If I can just clarify a couple of points, one is we did not write InfraGuide. The FCM and the National Research Council wrote InfraGuide, just to be clear on that point.
We are not contractors. We are professional service providers. We are licensed under provincial statutes, like doctors and lawyers and others, and we have an obligation. Our lifeblood is customer satisfaction. We're not looking for blank cheques. For projects to work we have to have our objectives aligned. That's the same for any professional service. You want to make sure you and your lawyer, you and your doctor, have the same outcome in mind. We work better under those circumstances. Our contention is that what we need to do at the very beginning of the procurement process, very early on, is to make sure our objectives are aligned, and then we can have fees that are both fair to the taxpayer but commercially viable to the firm. We're looking for sustainability in our industry. We're looking for a fair return on both our investment and the risk, because one of the motivations for the public sector to hire consulting engineering firms is to transfer risk. That's fine, as long as the return on investment is there.
The truth is we have a lot of case history in the United States. A report is being printed, literally as we speak, and it validates what the infrastructure or the InfraGuide committee has always suspected but couldn't quite put numbers around. We're seeing less price creep, less schedule creep. We're seeing better innovation. We're seeing better customer satisfaction and we're seeing a better business case for the firms, and I think that's a win all around, because then we can improve our capacity, we can provide better service, and we can grow as an industry, as you said.
You've talked about large firms, and, yes, we have very large firms, but again I want to emphasize that one-third of my members are firms that employ 15 or fewer employees. As I said earlier, as evidenced by awards juries and as real evidence on projects, they can deliver high-quality projects as well.
The industry is uniform. We like this document. We're surprised, because when a public agency says they're going to write a procurement document, we usually hide under the desk and hope it passes over, but we were quite pleasantly surprised by the outcome of this document because it was prepared by the public sector for the public sector. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but we had a contingency plan as to how we were going to discredit this document if it came up with an answer we didn't like, and lo and behold there it is.
We can live with this. There are other things we'd like, and unapologetically we want to be commercially successful, but this is a good proposition for us because it allows us to provide you and other clients with service we can be proud of with a fair and reasonable return, and I think that's the win all around.