Use Your Strategic Marketing Process to Shake Up Your A/E/C Firm

By Sylvia Montgomery

With less than 10 weeks left in the year, business planning is well underway for many firms. The strategic marketing process can look slightly different for each firm in the A/E/C marketplace. However, at the end of the day the goal is to:

• Reflect on what’s worked and not worked in the past
• Determine how to generate new business
• Grow the firm

 
Recently, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference for the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS). One of the many benefits of participating in an SMPS conference is that you get to mingle with both industry novices and seasoned marketers. There’s a great deal of discussion about what is and isn’t working for A/E/C firms and how to best encourage an organization to change and adopt new marketing approaches.

The keynote address was presented by Mark Zweig, Founder and CEO of ZweigWhite and a leading management expert for the architecture, engineering, planning, and environmental industries. Mark spoke about the need to shake things up in a business and how a leadership team can determine if it’s time to approach things differently. His candid and colorful discussion included a list of the Top 10 Signs You Need to Shake Up Your A/E/C Firm:

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The Amazing Story of High Growth, High Value Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Today marks the launch of our new book, Spiraling Up: How to Build a High Growth, High Value Professional Services Firm. To say that the book is an accident is perhaps overstating the case. But this much is true: it is not what we set out to do three years ago. No, our goals were much more modest. We just wanted to grow our firm. And being marketers, we reasoned that the first thing to do was to look more systematically at our target client group.

That first study of 100 professional services firms started a chain of events that led to a book that describes an extraordinary group of firms that outperform their peers on almost every measure of success.  They grow 9 times faster, are 50% more profitable and command a premium valuation in the marketplace. And amazingly, they do it while spending less than average on sales and marketing.

We didn’t start out looking for high performers, nor did we have any pet theories to prove. We just wanted to see what our target clients needed. But as we analyzed the data from the first study, we came across a group of fast growing firms. We isolated what they were doing differently, but were left with a big question: So what?

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There is a Better Way to Build Your Professional Services Firm

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

I pondered the title of this post for a while. I was concerned that it might come across as though I had all the answers. In fact, I know building a successful professional services firm can be devilishly difficult. But I do believe we have uncovered some of the answers — and each year we learn a little more.

Yesterday, we released our brand new research study on high performance professional services firms. This is the fourth in a series of studies designed to shed light on how to grow and manage a successful professional services firm. Our latest study provides a number of pointed and practical insights that should be of interest to any service firm executive.

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Tech Slowdown Predicted

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Tech Guru’s Forrester Research has just come out with technology spending forecasts’ for 2009. It will probably come as no surprise that they are projecting a slowdown. They expect a reduction in overall spend of around 3%.  Let’s first put that number in perspective. In the Tech bust of 2001-2002 the comparable number was over twice that much. By that yardstick it doesn’t seem quite so bad. It’s no picnic to be sure, especially when last year saw an increase of 8% or so.

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Overcoming the Real Economic Depression

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

The economic rollercoaster we find ourselves riding seems to produce an unending stream of nasty surprises. Just pick up the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post on any given day and be prepared for the old poker player’s expression… “read ‘em and weep.” The economic climate is routinely described as the worst since the depression.

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Cutting Costs in a Recession

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

I was having a conversation with one of the CEOs I work with on the topic of cost cutting during an economic downturn. It seems that this is a topic that is on a lot of people’s minds. When faced with declining leads, falling utilization and massive uncertainty, it is the only sensible way to proceed. Here’s my take on how to proceed:

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