What business development goals are you pursuing in your architecture practice this year?
(aka: will your architecture practice be enjoyable and profitable?)
We’re well into 2022 now, and hopefully your awards entries are nearly finished, if you are entering any projects into the Institute’s Chapter programs this year.
Awards are a useful tool in your business development kit bag – they are one of SLD’s six channels – because they have the potential to greatly increase awareness of and interest in your projects and practice.
If you are investing significant time and money to enter your projects into awards, you should also ensure you are ready to capitalise on any new interest or attention that your entries generate, either in the media or when the winners are announced in a few months’ time.
So I recommend that you pause for a moment to consider – and perhaps reassess – your business development goals and priorities for your practice this year.
What are your aspirations and ambitions for your architecture practice?
Do you have a clear sense of your business development goals and how to achieve them?
This may seem like an easy question to answer, but there are many different ways to enhance your professional reputation and the overall performance of your practice.
Essentially, business development goals fall into two main groups – the first is goals that are primarily focussed on improving the success of your practice, such as:
Attracting more clients
Positioning yourself as a trusted advisor
Positioning yourself as a thought leader
Promoting your practice’s unique service offering
Promoting your role or innovation in a particular project, and
Promoting a project, product or service you designed
The second group centres on advancing the profession, within the broader contexts of the construction industry and regulatory and policy circles, and these include:
Conducting advocacy for the profession
Conducting advocacy for heritage or a particular building
Lobbying government for policy improvements
Promoting your involvement in new policy development
Promoting your involvement in new research
Campaigning on a professional issue, such as gender equity, zero carbon buildings or mental health.
Many architects and practice owners invest the majority of their extracurricular time and energy into the second group, sometimes to the detriment of their own business development goals and project pipeline aspirations.
So it’s helpful to consider how much time, effort and money (your time = money, right?) you currently invest in activities that may not have much impact on the overall health and sustainability of your practice.
It’s great to be passionate about architecture; but it’s not enough to make an architecture practice enjoyable and profitable.
Because, basically, if you can’t sustain your practice, you won’t have the ability to undertake advocacy for the profession over the long term. It’s a bit like that air travel adage of: “put on your own oxygen mask first.”
If you think this sounds like you, ask yourself these three questions, and write down your responses in a notebook or journal (so you can review them in a year and observe any shifts or progress you make):
1. What business development, marketing, advocacy and promotional activities do we regularly focus on at our practice?
2. What impact do these have on our practice’s ability to attract new clients and generate new work?
3. Is our practice winning the types of work that we want more of; that we enjoy doing; and that helps us to maintain a sustainable and profitable business?
What did you observe in your answers?
What targets will you set - and monitor over time - to improve your business development processes and create a pipeline of the types of projects you love to work on?
Is your practice heading in the direction you intended?
Are you undertaking activities that will propel you in the direction you want to go?
Or do you need to change course and reprioritise your time and energy?
If you do – and you’ve decided to place more emphasis on business development goals that aim to bring in more of your preferred projects and clients – it’s useful to take stock of where you are now by benchmarking your current position, and then regularly tracking your progress over the coming months.
There are many ways to improve your practice’s overall health and performance, and it’s important not to make too many changes at once, or you won’t be able to discern which activities delivered results. You might choose to incorporate some of these marketing metrics into your monthly reporting systems, depending on your goals and ambitions this year:
Expanding and enhancing your digital presence (ie, social media, website, email subscribers etc);
Expanding and enhancing your digital presence (ie, social media, website, email subscribers etc);
Increasing your brand awareness in the market;
Establishing or enhancing your authority in particular sectors as trusted advisors or thought leaders;
Expanding into new market sectors;
Growing the number of invitations you receive to submit EOIs or tenders for new projects;
Developing new marketing materials to promote new products or services;
Generating new prospective client and project leads;
Enhancing brand loyalty among existing and past clients;
Increasing your Lifetime Customer Value figures across past and current clients;
Growing your market share of a particular sector/s (and potentially less enjoyable and/or profitable sectors);
Increasing the minimum value of new projects;
Increasing the number of new projects you win each year;
Increasing total revenue goals;
Increasing your profits as a percentage of project value;
Increasing your billable hours; and
Increasing your practice size, in terms of staff numbers.
Keen to take action on your business development and marketing goals?
Getting clarity around your practice’s business development goals – and then taking intentional and clear steps to achieve them – is fundamental to the success of any business, but it’s surprising how many architects haven’t spent much time considering these important issues.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Sounds Like Design can help you define your business development goals, and then build a project pipeline to achieve them, we offer three services to architects, ranging from two-hour Acupuncture Sessions to the three- month Review + Reset consulting package.
If you haven’t explored my six-channel system, you can get a feel for how it works via the free Marketing Metrics tracking spreadsheet – and a video that describes how to use it – here.
If you’d like a short, sharp injection of architecture-specific expertise – to talk about any business development or marketing issues you’re grappling with – you can book an Acupuncture Session here. You can choose the topics we discuss, and tap into my knowledge, experience and connections to access insights that are customised for your practice.
You can enrol in the self-guided online program - Architecture Marketing 360: a CPD course for architects - and get started straight away, here.
If you’re interested in my consulting package, you can find details about Review + Reset here. (I have a waitlist for new Review + Reset clients, and that’s what I aim to help you achieve for your architecture business, too).
Lastly, if you have any questions about this blog post, or any of my services, please click here to email me. I’m always happy to hear from architects who want to improve the way they communicate their value to future clients.