For several months, I’ve struggled with how I can offer a valuable, meaningful message during what seems to be an increasingly difficult time. The anecdotes I’ve recently gathered from clients, other A/E/C firms, and fellow management consultants are, by and large, neither pretty nor encouraging.
In this issue of The Friedman File, I want to avoid trite pieces of business development (BD) advice focusing on targeting low-hanging fruit, leveraging your strengths, blah, blah, blah. Instead, I’ve decided that it makes more sense to focus on some less obvious, more complicated lessons learned that focus on human behavior so as to hopefully give you some future food for thought. It may be too late for this downturn, but since marketing and BD are best conducted on a daily basis rather than as if cramming for a test, your firm can begin to change its behavior starting today and position itself for future strength.
If I could sell discipline and focus to my clients, I’d be a rich man. These are the two attributes that seem to be most lacking in our industry when it comes to marketing and BD. I see that manifested in two primary areas:
Having the will to diversify when you know it’s the right thing to do. Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with numerous CEOs of A/E/C firms that have been clobbered because of client and geographic market conditions. A key to some firms being able to hang steady, while others have significant layoffs, is how diversified these firms have been with respect to public versus private and institutional versus commercial clientele. Public sector work, particularly infrastructure projects, remain comparatively strong. Many firm leaders recognized several years ago that their firm needed to diversify (or increase the pace of diversification) into the public sector. But again, having the discipline to actually achieve this in the face of nearly insatiable demand in the private sector truly takes a strong, visionary, focused leader and a culture that both embraces strategic planning and has the appropriate accountability systems necessary to make the plan a living document rather than one that collects dust.
As the CEO of (a formerly) 300-person nationally recognized residential development design firm (now down to 70 people) bluntly told me, “We didn’t have the discipline to diversify our practice. We didn’t make it anyone’s responsibility, and we approached it more opportunistically rather than strategically.” The president of a 25-person landscape architecture/land planning firm commented, “We’re suffering from a lack of diversity in project types — just like we knew would eventually happen. But we thought we’d have more time to adjust. Work stopped overnight.”
Making time for business development, in spite of other deadlines. Many firms are kicking themselves now for not being more disciplined about making time for business development outreach when they were flush with work. I admit that it’s a very difficult thing to do, but it can be done. It requires actually blocking out time, in advance , to complete specific tasks such as calling a past client, meeting with a prospective client, writing an abstract to give a talk, researching a prospective client on the Internet, or any of a hundred other things aimed at making something happen. (The BD truism, “If you don’t ask, you won’t get,” holds true in all economic conditions.) Equally important, it requires your company to recognize that this is time well spent and factor that into development of utilization targets.
If I could underscore anything, it’s that the worst time to conduct business development is when you actually need the work — by then, it’s way too late for your firm. Further, at that point, other firms are likely to be in the same boat as yours. Recently, I had a client tell me that a facilities manager for a healthcare system informed them that they were the 38th firm that had contacted him in the past two months regarding project opportunities.
Somehow, we’ve got to instill the culture among our staff that no matter how busy we are with project work or other responsibilities, we have to literally schedule in 30 minutes a day to plant the seeds of BD (a small amount of time in the scheme of things). This includes reaching out to your army of advocates: past/current/prospective clients, partners, sub consultants, professional association leaders and other buyers and influences. If not, you’ll soon realize that if you didn’t plant sufficient seeds in the spring, you’ll see a diminished harvest six months or a year later. To be sure, in this deeply penetrating economic crisis, even the most skilled BD farmers are hurting. But recognizing that your firm’s BD culture needs a facelift and taking the necessary measures to modify it is a huge step in the right direction. Hang in there, and my best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2009.
