Is it possible to cultivate a waitlist of ideal clients for your architecture practice? – Part 3
This article is the final instalment of a three-part series about architecture practice waitlists and project pipelines.
Part 1 dispels the myth that you need to be a world-famous architect to generate a waitlist for your services, and it outlines several Australian practices that have cultivated waitlists of dedicated and committed clients, who ONLY want to work with them.
Part 2 presents some of the benefits of cultivating a waitlist, and here in Part 3, I’ll outline how to use marketing techniques to build a waitlist – a client pipeline of the type of projects that you enjoy the most, and that are profitable and sustainable for your business.
How do many architecture practices go about sourcing new work (aka client acquisition)?
A lot of architecture practices are not pro-active when it comes to finding and seeking new clients. They respond to calls for tenders, Requests for Information, competitions, and they provide speculative concepts in an attempt to win work. However, much of that activity can be reactive, and can pull practices in various directions, often not of their own choosing.
Most architecture practices don’t have a waitlist of dedicated clients, who only want to work with them. But it’s possible to cultivate one.
© David Tran. Used under licence from Dreamstime.com.
An alternative approach involves developing and implementing a customised business development strategy that prioritises particular project typologies or clients, and deliberately positions your key team members as Subject Matter Experts.
As your reputation grows in your chosen area, new clients will actively seek out your practice and team to help them solve their problems and transform their places and spaces.
In marketing-speak, this is called “niche-ing”, and it’s not a strategy that many architects gravitate towards?
Why?
Well it goes against the grain of architects, who see themselves as the last great generalist profession. That’s one of the reasons that medium and large practices are prepared to take on everything from schools to aged care facilities, art galleries to community centres, public toilets and anything else that comes their way.
Of course, there are benefits in this approach, including being intellectually challenged by new typologies, and generating fees for months and years into the future if the varied work continues unabated.
It's my observation, though, that most architects are happy to accept any and every new project that happens to fall across their drawing boards, without applying much thought about whether it sits within their area of expertise, aka the Genius Zone.
Why is this a problem for architecture practices?
Focusing your attention on a defined set of typologies and clients can help you achieve success beyond what might be possible if you’re open to every type of project in the market.
As a Subject Matter Expert, you’ll be able to cultivate and enhance your specialist knowledge, experience and insights around your chosen typology, approach or research. This gives clients a solid reason to seek out your advice and services, and potentially even join your pipeline queue, because their desire to work with you is so overwhelming.
You might think that only architects of the calibre of Glenn Murcutt – Australia’s only Pritzker laureate – can enjoy a client waitlist, in which case you’ll probably be surprised to find out which practices in your city already have one.
Part 1 of this series contains a list of practices that run waitlists – some of which you may have never heard of before. A quick analysis of their positioning and marketing reveals common factors such as strong and clearly articulated corporate values, distinct differentiation from their competitors, and high public profiles in their respective markets.
So what’s the magic ingredient that you need to generate a waitlist?
© Artellia. Used under licence from Dreamstime.com.
In order to create a waitlist of committed clients who only want to engage you, you need to differentiate your practice and service offering in a very crowded market-place.
You need a point of difference – or unique selling proposition (USP) – that sets you apart from other architects, and any other design or construction service providers who are vying for the same clients as you.
It might appear difficult at first to work out your point of difference, but there are several methods you can use to determine your area of highly marketable expertise, or your “zone of genius”.
There is the Japanese concept of Ikigai which has a very appealing graphic, but I’m concerned that this idea may have been misrepresented in its translation into English. That’s why I prefer The Hedgehog Concept, which Jim Collins outlined in his book Good to Great, and revisited in B.E. 2.0, co-authored with Bill Lazier.
Collins introduces The Hedgehog Concept this way:
“Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’
- Jim Collins, Good to Great
Collins then provides three questions that can help you define your own hedgehog concept. These are:
The Hedgehog Concept, from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins.
© 2016 Jim Collins, All rights reserved.
What are you deeply passionate about?
What can you be the best in the world at?
What drives your economic engine?
As a management researcher and business expert, Collins has studied the qualities and attributes present in some of the world’s most successful companies – the ones he calls the “good-to-great companies”.
Through his analysis and observations, he identified that leaders of these companies pursued a singular focus and purpose.
He wrote:
“Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.”
You can read more about Jim Collins and The Hedgehog Concept here, and I encourage you to purchase and read his books, too, regardless of the size of your practice; his advice is useful for anyone who wants to excel at business.
When I’m working with new clients, they often tell me that they’ve struggled to identify their USP, which happens for two main reasons:
Firstly, they are too close to the problem to actually see their zone of genius, and
secondly, they don’t have sufficient knowledge of their competitors’ to understand what’s different about their own service offering.
In my CPD course and Review + Reset consulting package, I can often spot an architect’s expertise quickly and easily, because I’ve worked with and interviewed more than 2000 architects over the past 20 years. As a result, I can tease out the qualities and attributes – and any proprietary processes and systems that you’ve developed to benefit your clients – that set each practice apart from others.
Once you’ve established your hedgehog concept – or specialist niche – how do you choose your preferred projects?
I encourage my clients to think carefully about the types of projects and clients that they want to attract into their practice.
To determine whether a new project is good fit for your practice and circumstances, you can consider these key questions:
Is it a project that you actually want to work on; does it fulfil your purpose, and will you enjoy it?
Do you understand the explicit and implicit needs of the client? Or do you have the skills and experience to gain that understanding?
Do you have the knowledge and ability to deliver the best outcomes for the client and any other end-users?
Will it be profitable for you to take on this project, especially if it’s a new typology or sector for your practice, given that you may not be aware of some of the potential pitfalls and obstacles you’ll face?
Being rigorous about the type of work you take on – applying the same level of rigour and intention that you draw upon in design work – enables you to be more deliberate in your practice. You can choose the kind of work you’ll accept, and act out of your values and integrity once you’ve decided upon your course.
It pays to remember that architecture client acquisition is a long game – sometimes clients can be waiting in the wings for months or even years before they approach and then commission you. In fact, the sales cycle is longer than for most other goods and services.
So I’m not suggesting that you can make this kind of change overnight, but when you become intentional about choosing projects and clients that are enjoyable, profitable, sustainable, and fulfilling (and that motivate you to get up each day), you can start to build a practice that nourishes you (and your team) in all sorts of ways.
(See Part 2 for the benefits of having a practice with a waitlist, and let me know if you can think of other benefits).
How to build awareness of your speciality and enhance your practice reputation
Once you’ve decided upon your Hedgehog, or your zone of genius, it’s time to tell your prospective clients about your specialist knowledge, approach, processes, research and findings, experience, and expertise.
To that end, I recommend that Architects use six main channels to market their services to prospective clients. These are, in order of importance:
Referrals
Email newsletters
Social media
Publishing
Awards, and
most important of all, your Website.
In the same way that all roads leads to Rome, your top five marketing channels should lead your prospective clients towards your Website. Image by SLD.
Another marketing tip that not many architects appreciate, is that it’s important to provide your potential clients with different types of information – about your services, approach, processes, fees and contractual arrangements – depending on where they are in their customer journey.
Prospective clients move through a Customer Journey to reach your practice, and they need different messaging - and access different channels - depending on where they are in the journey. Image by SLD.
One common misunderstanding among architects is the belief that prospective clients understand what’s involved with commissioning and working with an architect. This happens because architects take the complexity of architecture for granted, and forget that to people outside the profession, it’s a mysterious and dark art.
That means that your marketing materials must be easy to digest and client-centric. Your messaging throughout the customer journey should speak to your clients’ evolving issues, concerns, pain points and objections, and provide reassurance at every step that YOU are the right person for their project.
This sounds complex – is it?
Just like architecture is a complex undertaking which has many moving parts and requires contributions from various people – from stakeholders to approval authorities, and from consultants to contractors and suppliers – to realise each successful project; marketing is a nuanced process that benefits from intentional strategy at the conceptual stage, and rigour and consistency throughout the implementation stages.
Great architecture marketing – the type that results in a waitlist – requires regular effort. This starts with solid foundations, followed by the steady development and refinement of content and marketing materials over time (not just when your workflow dries up unexpectedly, and you need a new project, fast!)
You may have already learned the hard way that if you fill up your days, weeks and months with projects that aren’t ideal for your practice, you’re destined to remain on a treadmill. because you’ll struggle to find the energy, money or time you need to invest in attracting your ideal clients and projects, the ones you most enjoy working on.
So when and how should you start building your client waitlist?
The best time to start strategically marketing your architecture practice was years ago. The second best time is now. Photography by author.
As I mentioned earlier, architecture has a long sales cycle, and your projects can take two years or more to design deliver, so the timeline for strategic marketing is a bit like planting trees: the best time to start was several years ago, and the second-best time is now.
One caveat: designing and delivering your ideal practice, marketing that practice and building your client pipeline are not easy tasks, and there are no quick-fix results.
And you can’t use generic modern marketing techniques because architecture has several unique characteristics that set it apart from other industries. Also, you’re unlikely to have learned these business and strategy techniques at university or via CPD (until now!)
Are you keen to cultivate your own practice waitlist?
There are two ways to learn how to implement Sounds Like Design’s six-channel system to design and deliver your ideal practice, to develop a own client waitlist:
You can enrol in Architecture Marketing 360: a CPD course for architects, here.
Complete the Review + Reset one-on-one consulting package with Rachael directly (find more details including pricing and the next available start date, here).
You can also sign up to receive SLD’s newsletters on the Contact page.
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