On-demand webinar
If you disappeared for 90 days, what would happen to your pipeline?
What you’ll learn :
- Three questions to test how dependent your firm is on you, starting with what happens if you disappear for 90 days
- How a 50-year-old firm that had never passed $2 million reached over $5 million within two years
- Why being more selective about clients grows revenue, and what "crackers and crumbs" means
- Why business development has phases just like design, and how to bring project managers and emerging leaders into it
Speaker :
Maryanne Hewitt
High Performance Coach · AEC
Frank Niekamp
Chief Growth Officer · USA
What's covered
Inside the session. Watch a clip, then get the full recording.
Maryanne lost her own design firm in the 2008 crash despite winning design awards that same year. Frank has spent seven years working with firms of typically two to thirty employees.
Can you grow without adding chaos? Can others help carry revenue? Is the business transferable beyond you? If you disappeared for 90 days, what happens to your pipeline, who owns revenue, and how predictable are the next six months?
When the owner driving business development fell ill, revenue fell to under $1 million. The new owners involved their team: over $3 million within twelve months, over $5 million within two years, with only three more full-time employees.
When everyone owns growth, no one owns growth. If the owner does all the work acquisition, a plateau is inevitable. With around 75% of revenue in a healthy firm coming from existing clients, project managers can own a large share of it.
Stop waiting for the phone to ring. Qualification criteria ended a flood of projects under $25,000, cut wasted proposal work, and turned walk-in work into "crackers and crumbs" rather than the meat and potatoes.
Under-leveraged associates feel stale and start looking elsewhere. A flat firm of owners and everyone else added a leadership tier and production roles, and profitability came up.
Handing work over without structure proves to yourself you should have done it yourself. Why people would want to take part in business development, and why it has phases just like conceptual design through construction administration.
A quick one-to-five self-assessment on defined growth roles, owner-dependent pipeline, proactive opportunity creation, team contribution and six-month revenue visibility, and what a score under twelve means.
Resources
Get the recording
Frequently asked questions
Common Questions
Because business development lives in the people, usually the founder, rather than in the systems of the firm. If the owner does all the work acquisition there are only so many hours in the day. Maryanne points out that architects are taught to design and implement, not how to bring work in.
In Frank's example, yes. A 50-year-old firm had been taking whatever came through the door, including far too many projects under $25,000. Qualification criteria and a focus on clients with repeat work helped lift revenue per employee from below $150,000 to close to $250,000 within two years.
No. The aim is for them to do as much as they need to bring in new work. Frank notes that in a healthy firm around 75% of revenue, plus or minus ten points, comes from existing customers, so a project manager or senior lead who faces that client every day can own a big part of it.
The panel gives several reasons: mastery of the profession, security in their role, the chance to earn more through more profitable work, and getting to work on the kinds of projects they joined the firm for. It does not have to mean making them shareholders.
Abdication is handing work over with no structure and no defined expectations, then taking it back when it goes wrong and deciding you should have done it yourself. Delegation has a structure that brings the person along at a level they can handle and that you can coach.
Ask what would happen to your pipeline if you disappeared for 90 days. The session's quick self-assessment scores five areas from one to five: defined growth roles, owner-dependent pipeline, proactive opportunity creation, team contribution to business development, and six-month revenue visibility. Under twelve out of 25 means you cannot keep putting it off.
The next step
Stop running on heroics. Start engineering revenue.
Whichever way you work with us, the same proven Revenue OS runs underneath. Book a growth session and we’ll show you where to start.