How to Build a Data-Driven Growth System for AEC Firms with ProjectMark's COO, Noel Brady

If your firm is still waiting for the RFP to show up before getting serious about winning the work, you are already behind.

 Katie Cash chats with Noel Brady, Co-Founder and COO of ProjectMark, the CRM built specifically for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. They talk about what it actually takes to build a firm that grows with intention. Noel challenges the deeply ingrained belief that winning work is about personal relationships alone and makes the case that sustainable growth requires systematizing those relationships so they become a firm-wide asset rather than a liability that leaves when a key person leaves. From pipeline conversion ratios to the go/no-go decisions firms get wrong, this episode is an honest guide to replacing gut instinct with clean, actionable data.

 Noel and Katie also dig into the cultural and behavioral shifts that distinguish firms that merely talk about being data-driven from those that actually do it. If your firm is ready to stop reacting and start leading, this episode is the place to start.

•        AEC business development

•        CRM for AEC firms

•        architecture engineering construction marketing

•        AEC firm growth strategy

•        go/no-go decisions AEC

•        pipeline conversion ratio

•        data-driven AEC

•        seller doer AEC

•        project pursuit strategy

•        RFP strategy architecture firms

Connect with Noel Brady, Co-Founder & COO, ProjectMark

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-brady-mscsi-mrics-aaaa4547/

ProjectMark: https://www.projectmark.com/

Connect with Katie:  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

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Transcript

Katie [00:00:43]:
Hi, everyone. If you've been around the podcast for a while and you're like any other architecture and engineering firm, you probably sit around the table and you talk about how you want to be data driven. But when you look at how firms maybe pursue work or how their systems might be disconnected, marketing is often managing proposals. You've got the seller doers managing the relationships. And sometimes they can be a little bit protective of those relationships and keep those cards close to their vest. But then you've got leadership looking top level at revenue and what pipeline looks like. Very, very few firms, from my experience have a really clear picture and an accurate picture of how all those pieces connect. In fact, I was just in Miami the other week and a CEO was like, hey, I know we've got all these pieces, but how do they work together and who owns what? And how can I really see what we're getting out of this? And I'm excited to be joined on the podcast today with Noel Brady, who is one of the co founders and the COO of ProjectMark, which is a CRM built specifically for the AEC industry.

Katie [00:01:47]:
Because we're new and different and special and we never want anything out of the box. So Noel started to make a new tool for us. And Noel, I love that you get to see how firms actually pursue work on the front end. You start to see how that friction happens and where data might start to break down, where there might be gaps when the opportunity arises. And we now need to pull some historical information. And you also see some of the biggest opportunities for growth. Cause you get to work with so many firms that are using your tool. So welcome to the show.

Katie [00:02:17]:
I'm so excited to have you today and to dig into our discussion on being data driven.

Noel Brady [00:02:23]:
Thanks for having me, Katie. Yeah, really excited to be here.

Katie [00:02:26]:
So this season, you know, on the podcast, it's all about change makers. We're talking to people that have really changed and influenced the industry, maybe philosophies that have changed the industry. And certainly a lot of conversation around tools and technology and how the industry has been traditionally very manual, very, you know, heavily traditionally operated and kind of changing almost on a daily basis. There's some new tool rolling out. So from your vantage point, let's jump into it. What is one belief about business development for professional, for service firms that you think needs to change this day and age?

Noel Brady [00:03:01]:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think the big one is historically we've just relied on individuals to be that growth strategy and the relationships that they hold and I think from our perspective, relationships are essential. The industry is, is absolutely built on those relationships and nobody's arguing that. But the relationship relationships that you can't track, you can't, you know, understand, you can't see, you can't hand off when somebody leaves your company, that ultimately becomes a liability. And what we're seeing is that the companies that are pulling ahead are actually building that data and they're replacing relationships with that data and they're using that data to protect the relationships or even activate them at scale. And so for us, I would say it's a, it's a wee bit of a mindset shift from you know, we win work because of our relationship to we're systematizing how we build and leverage those relationships at scale. And that helps you turn those individual relationships into a firm wide asset, a firm wide database of intelligence really. And so ultimately that's where we see the industry going, an intelligent relationship management system.

Noel Brady [00:04:12]:
Because those relationships will still win you the work, but it's the system that allows you to scale.

Katie [00:04:17]:
Yeah. You know, an AEC rarely is the art of winning work, I think a straight line. There's all these bumps and stops and turnarounds and go back and when you factor in how long it takes to develop those relationships one to one, and there may be changes on the client side that you're selling to or maybe internally there might be some role changes that happen. And there's more than one decision maker and we hear it a lot, you know, oh, you're going to take so and so fishing and you're going to get work and the seller doer or the rainmaker is like, yeah, I'm going to get work out of this fishing trip. I think today we know everybody's got a relationship when it comes to, you know, being a highly competent, well positioned firm. All of your competitors can say similar things. They're all going to be able to have someone advocating for them across the table that's been entertaining them and investing in building that relationship. One thing that you said while ago is kind of finding a way to systematize or operationalize those relationships at scale versus just kind of being these one off surprise and delight.

Katie [00:05:22]:
You know, I haven't seen Noel in a while. I should probably go take him to lunch. That's great, but you can't build a business on that. Right. So before we jump into tools and technology, I do want to talk a little bit about kind of how you perceive firms in our space pursuing work and you know, from where you Sit. What do you think is one of those common misconceptions that leaders might have at winning work? Or even maybe from the other perspective, the rising technical professional who's now been tasked with selling, and they're like, what I have to sell as part of my job, and nobody's really ever taught them the art of professional service sales. What are some of those misconceptions you see happening?

Noel Brady [00:06:06]:
Yeah, I think both of those probably kind of meet in the middle. It goes both ways. But like, the biggest thing I see with a lot of companies, a lot of leaders, is that they think that the, the opportunity starts or you win the work at the proposal stage, where in reality, by the time the RFP hits your desk, the outcome's probably 70% decided. There's so much work that goes to building trust, understanding the client's needs, just getting in the room before the opportunity is actually formalized. And I think that happens months and years earlier. The firms that simply chase RFPs, they're just playing catch up. The firms that win consistently, they're putting in all of that work. They're systematizing how do I go after repeat clients as a form of system for our business, or how do I actually enter new markets? And all of that is coordinated across teams.

Noel Brady [00:06:59]:
When you touched on there about, you know, we love wining and dining, you know, just. But that is all true individuals. I spoke with a marketer, I spoke like seven to ten years ago now, and he couldn't get marketing budget approved for a small piece of software. Thank God, the industry's changing. But at the end of this sentence, he said that his boss, they have a private jet in their business, that they take their, their customers or the wine and dying people, they take them and their families all around the country. And I'm like, how can you not get alignment between what the executives think is valuable and what the marketers are trying to do to assist you with that, to systematize how we build those relationships at a much earlier stage. And so kind of like answer your question. Those firms that only get the marketing teams involved at that later stage, when the proposal is actually starting, they're building these RFPs without that history of relationships.

Noel Brady [00:07:59]:
And all of that information is living effectively offline. It's inboxes and people's emails, or actually in a lot of cases, people's heads or spreadsheets, whatever. We need to consolidate all that. And we get everybody's into one single place. So firms without that, because of that misconception that winning the opportunity starts at the RFP stage, we're not making decisions with the full picture. And I think that's obviously a misconception that people have is that they think that we can win from that point on and it happens much earlier.

Katie [00:08:35]:
Yeah, I echo everything you just said. You know, I kind of grew up with mentors that described to me, hey, you know, the RFP is a feature of procurement. It is not a marketing initiative. You know, it's certainly the deciding factor as part of the sales process. And you know, we had a strong belief and it was part of the no go policy. If we didn't prime the pump ahead of time and know why the project was happening, how it was being funded, how they were going to make decisions, who was making the decisions. Like if we couldn't answer those questions, then leadership. Absolutely no go Ed it.

Katie [00:09:10]:
And I'll tell you, I've worked at a handful of firms as an in house AEC marketer where that wasn't always the experience. Noel. Like sometimes it was part of my job to scour RFP sites looking for opportunities for my firm to respond to. You know, and you know, we're sophisticated now. We know those are cold RFPs. And yeah, you might get a shot at one, you might, you might come in second, which really stinks, you know, putting all that time and effort into it. But then I've also been part of those cultures where, you know, marketing shows up and they're having the kickoff meeting for the proposal and they're just going through what's required in the rfp. And again, you know, I feel like that's just checks and balances.

Katie [00:09:54]:
If you're just answering what's on the page, you're selling your firm short of really selling the story and why you should be picked. But you can only really do that if you've got data to point to. And again, you know, why the project's happening, how it's being funded, what impact it's going to have on the organization that's asking for that, and then you can really start to speak to say the selection committee pain points, you know, maybe their concerns. You can really understand the underlying project driver. You know, is it schedule, is it budget, is it quality, Is it that they need the neighbors to not call the police every day because construction is starting too soon, you know, and it's outside the noise ordinance or. I mean, this was really interesting. I was prepping a construction team and they had long worked with this client and they had done something right next to the site and they were Getting ready to do a next phase. And they knew the soil was contaminated and that they couldn't risk that soil getting off the site because it was just going to continue to cause more issues.

Katie [00:10:52]:
But they only knew that because they invested in building in that relationship and they had it documented where marketing could reference it and be able to pull a story from it. So, you know, if you're a seller doer listening today and you've got all that information living in your head, I hope you don't win the lottery before that proposal drops because your marketer is going to need all of that information. And you know, leadership might want to know why we want to chase a particular thing and you've got all of it living in your head. So do your future self a favor and jot it down because the longer you wait, the more we forget. Yeah, you know, it certainly happens.

Noel Brady [00:11:30]:
I was that seller tour, I was on the technical side of Tishman Construction. And by the time it comes to crunch time proposals, we're being brought into the process and we're trying to share information that is only, only stuck in our heads. And there was no centralization of information across the board that puts both sides in a crunch. And so, yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there.

Katie [00:11:51]:
I'm also going to ask a very direct question. So, you know, I work with a lot of firms in this space. I think Smartegies has worked with maybe upwards of close to 400 firms at this point. Large and small, very sophisticated, you know, bleeding edge technology adopters and then some that are very traditional. But one thing I observe that tends to happen more than I would like to admit is firms say one thing, they want to be data driven, they want something to point to. But internally there is not a system of accountability for making that happen. And there's the excuse of where they're busy, the people are out in the field, they don't want to buy seats for everybody to have a license for the tool. And so it gets funneled and then there's a backlog.

Katie [00:12:37]:
What do you really see as being the bottleneck for firms kind of culturally adopting the mindset of embracing being data driven and empowering that data capture?

Noel Brady [00:12:49]:
Yeah, another one. I'd say there's two issues here. I think the first one, you know, historically tools have not been built for the AC industry, especially not for how they work. We have a lot of sewer door sellers. I actually said doer sellers because you do your job first or you do deliver the workforce. But there's no tools designed for how we work. We're traditionally we're on the go, we're having a lot of hand to hand combat, face to face conversations and generic CRMs or generic systems like that, they assume that we're salesperson sitting at our desk and entering data. And that's just not how we work.

Noel Brady [00:13:23]:
So AEC firms have these door sellers who are also running projects and they're not going to log every single touch point that they don't see as important to them. So data capture really breaks down and that's the first thing that becomes really hard to get adoption if you can't get the data in. Based on our research, the single biggest barrier to CRM and probably technology adoption is data management. How we get that data into the system and how we maintain it on an ongoing basis. And the second thing I would say is there's a cultural trust issue and that requires a cultural and behavioral shift from the very top. You need to have those leaders who have historically just made decisions based on experience, based on relationships, based on gut, as people like to say. Even though there's strong gut there because we hold a lot of knowledge, we make good, good, good decisions generally, I would say. But asking those types of people to change their behavior, you have to show them why and you have to show them the data that actually leads to better outcomes.

Noel Brady [00:14:26]:
And so that takes time and it takes a lot of proof points. And so the firms that kind of break through are the ones where the principals are championing the adoption of new technology and not just the marketing team, because the marketing team I feel are on the bleeding edge and they don't always have that alignment, as I mentioned with executives. So the ones I feel are most successful with this behavioral shift is if it comes from the top, tie it to a bonus structure, tie it to other outcomes. But activity leads to win inputs leads to successful outputs. In our opinion.

Katie [00:15:00]:
Calling all AEC marketers, it is our time to rally. The next generation of leaders in AEC are not going to look like our predecessors. The next AEC marketers are not just going to respond to RFPs. They will shape demand before pursuits ever exist. They'll understand brand, they'll understand visibility and market strategy. And they're going to understand it not from just a standpoint of marketing buzzwords, but truly how it drives revenue for their specific firm. That is the shift that my partner in strategy, Judy Sparks, has laid out in her latest edition of the Modern AEC Marketer. Her new book is a guide for marketers Seller doers and principals alike, all who know that the industry is changing and they want to be part of that change.

Katie [00:15:48]:
Maybe some of them even want to lead the change. And if you're ready to stop playing it small and start influencing how your firm grows with intention, this book is for you. Go on over to Amazon, you can search for the modern AEC marketer and you can get a copy of Judy's new book today. It's available in paperback as well as on Kindle. Yeah, and I think the doer seller, the seller doer at SmartWin, I heard another one, the solver doer, who's just trying to answer, you know, questions. Because if you think about a lot of the touch points, kind of that hand to hand combat you described, Noel, as happening actively on a project that you're currently serving a client where maybe there's some additional scope you could add. I'm not advocating for continuous change orders. Nobody likes to say that.

Katie [00:16:39]:
But there might be other ways you could help that client. And so just finding ways to leverage those touch points and maybe get out of the weeds of that one thing and talking a little bit more about something else and then remembering to bring that internally and tuck it away for another day on how you might use it. But certainly what I've observed is the, the old school systems that a lot of firms adopted, say in the 90s, early 2000s, they adopted out of necessity and it was usually accounting driven. And that data is very different. I appreciate the people that math and that handle accounting and make sure I get paid and everything, but that's not how I communicate. And as a marketer, that's not the type of information that I would routinely seek out. And so I love having partnerships with, you know, technology and industry partners that really understand how AEC works and, you know, how you might need data and things to talk together a little bit differently. I even think about my engineering clients who sell to architects.

Katie [00:17:44]:
You know, there might be one project, it's a new middle school, and they're chasing opportunity with six or 12 different architectural firms. And they don't want to have to go in 12 different records and add the same thing. They want everything to kind of play together so that they can fact check and, you know, pressure test what they're hearing from each other to determine, you know, who they might really want a team with that they think is going to have the best opportunity at getting selected. So, you know, the systems aren't always made for that out of the box. We really did need something that could paint the picture of, you know, the food chain and AEC and how all these different pieces come together and how data lives through the life cycle of a project. So maybe let's talk a little bit about that proof point. Noel, how can you seller doers use information in their system in a way that's kind of like celebrates a win to kind of reinforce the behavior? What's, what's a good carrot to point to?

Noel Brady [00:18:42]:
Are we talking like analytical proof points or we were talking getting that data in our.

Katie [00:18:47]:
Yeah, like when, when a firm starts using a tool like what helps them have that aha moment that it's worth investing in clean data management and having some of that ongoing operationalized expertise and expectations for it.

Noel Brady [00:19:04]:
Yeah, yeah, of course. I think again it comes with this cultural behavioral change. So when you are actively using a growth system, a CRM or whatever we want to call it, and we're getting our data right and we're getting our data into the system and it's getting much easier now. Once we have the ability to aggregate all of that data, those inputs lead to successful outcomes. As we say, when that happens, when we identify a new lead, when we identify a relationship that's going cold and we're able to bring it back because of the shared data among the team, when we identify maybe where we don't want to go because our capacity is not there, our expertise is not there and that change is a strategic decision for our business that leads to a better outcome. We have to celebrate that and we do that internally. It's celebrating the small wins ultimately does lead to adoption. And I think having a clear dashboard of where the goal and objective is, how we're tracking towards that week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter and celebrating that internally with your core group, your champion group, with your sub task group, and then across the entire business.

Noel Brady [00:20:11]:
Because I do believe that fundamentally there's three pieces of technology or tech stack that every AEC firm should have. There's project management, of course, there's accounting and there is CRM or growth piece of technology. And that's a layer of business wide intelligence is the one that captures more data over everything else. Ultimately I believe that starts at the leadership group, goes down into the champions and door sellers, BD people, if we have them, marketers. But then I think it'll also go to operational people because we have to record all of those touch points across the board. The more data that we can get into a system in a structured way, the more successful outputs that we can get. Out of it. And I think once you start to see that and you see the dots getting connected, that is really, really encouraging and invigorating for the rest of the team.

Noel Brady [00:20:56]:
And think if you shift slightly from maybe doing things on spreadsheets to leading with what you have in your CRM, your pipeline, where you want to go, you got to celebrate those continuous quick wins every week. And it becomes a lot more sticky.

Katie [00:21:11]:
Yeah, I really like that and I like having one centralized system, because I think you might have just highlighted a pain point that maybe some of our listeners experience. And it's that they're seller doers, doer sellers, even business development professionals kind of all have their own way. And some might carry around a tablet and they take notes on it, or, you know, maybe it's a piece of grid paper. Some people might have an Excel file, some people just have their mind. And if you could have a tool that kind of has everything all in one place, you do have a broader view at it. I was just at a meeting with a multidisciplinary firm the other week, and it always surprises me what some people ask, you know, so there was this, this person who, who leads a discipline and leads an office, and this is a pretty sophisticated. And he was like, from a sales perspective, you know, how often should I be talking to these people? And I was like, well, you know, rule of thumb, generally every 30 days or so. You know, that can be a touch point that happens during ongoing project conversations that can include seeing them at industry and events.

Katie [00:22:17]:
But also, yeah, you should have a zoom to zoom, you know, screen to screen conversation with them, an email, you know, social media touch point. You need to make sure that they know that you care about them and you're in their world so that you're top of mind. And in his mind, seeing them once a year at the industry conference was enough. And I was like, dude, no, they've forgotten you. And ps, you got a whole line of your competitors, you know, wanting to come court them at the same time. Like, you get lost in the masses there. And in that very same conversation, you know, we switched gears and now it's the leadership wanting to know what backlog and pipeline look like. And there's one of their seller doers that is so good and has all of their opportunities and can talk about who's on the committee and it's got everything to point to and guess what's happening.

Katie [00:23:06]:
The marketing team is matching what she's chasing bottom of the funnel with what they're talking about. Top of funnel. They're helping with pre positioning ahead of that rfp. They're pulling in resources to get drone footage of projects that they know they want to highlight. They're, I mean they're really thinking strategically and she's going to close those jobs. It's, she's awesome. She's got it together. Her counterparts that are just kind of don't want to be mechanics of the system and really don't want to do it or they don't want to over promise and make it look like, you know, I don't know what they're waiting for but there is a little bit of fear of their own shadow of putting the information in there that once it's there they're going to have to court it.

Katie [00:23:45]:
But it's a marked difference when you see how the teams can all play together when they kind of have this sheet music in the system and know how it works together. And then she's even getting like younger staff members involved doing back end research and so that they can be part of it. And you know, ultimately when the RFP drops, everybody's in that organization is going to know about that job. They're going to be so pointed with their project, you know, approach that it's going to sing to that, that project need and those committee members and they're going to come across very competent and

Noel Brady [00:24:21]:
very convincing in an interview and coordinated and cohesive. I mean from my perspective, I've been an owner, I've been a gc, so I've sat both sides of the table. I've been the one interviewing and being interviewed and when a team is not on the same hymn sheet, it's so blatant. I mean if you can tell that they've been pulled together last minute, maybe they don't do it a lot as one cohesive unit and coordination cohesive. It builds trust. And if people are able to, you know, have a good flow in that interview stage while having the trust built up in the months and years prior to that interview, it's, it's so much better. And you can see those who focus on it, who spend time and become intentional about it all. It pays dividends when you get to the interview stage.

Katie [00:25:10]:
Well, and it's not just all sales and marketing. You know, I'm not blind to know that when the, that particular, you know, business unit leader, office leader is tracking all these jobs, she's also tracking some workload forecasting and you know, there's certain ways where she knows she needs to trigger some HR Support to, you know, ramp up for a big contract that they have or have some internal working sessions with her peers to see if they can workload share across offices. And this is AEC marketing for principals. But you're selling one thing to the market, you gotta be able to deliver on it too, right? So they, they kind of go hand in hand. And sometimes those tools, when everybody's looking at it, you can forecast a lot of different. Not just, you know, your proposal hit rate, which you should track, by the way.

Noel Brady [00:25:56]:
100%. Yeah, absolutely.

Katie [00:25:58]:
I'm a big advocate for also tracking cost of client acquisition. You know, so how much did you spend on taking Noel to dinner and fishing and how much did it cost for us to put that proposal together? And are we going to earn that in our fear? Did we already go in the hole? Right.

Noel Brady [00:26:16]:
A hundred percent? One hundred percent.

Katie [00:26:19]:
Noel, from where you sit and maybe from your personal experience, where do you feel like leaders or even seller doers or maybe even marketers might rely too much on their internal instincts and maybe habits of this is how we've always done it versus true insight. When the data is talking to them in black and white.

Noel Brady [00:26:38]:
It's probably in that go, no go phase. I would say when you're evaluating what opportunities to pursue it is, I mean instinct absolutely plays a part in this. But if we're still relying on, on that, we're going to end up chasing the, the wrong jobs. And I think if we're, if we're still doing that, you know, on paper pursuit might look attractive because it's a large fee or whatever that might be, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the, is the right project for you. Maybe you don't have the capacity to deliver it. Whether it's your internal workforce or if you're a contractor, maybe it's a bonding capacity issue. And I think you have to have that visibility of it all. Maybe it's typically outside of your core expertise, maybe it's with a client in a sector that you've not been profitable in the past.

Noel Brady [00:27:30]:
And I think, yeah, you need that visibility into your pipeline, your backlog, your expertise, your relationships. And without that, the leadership are forced to make those decisions blindly. And often for us, I'd say, where we talk about that money bottle concept for aec. So instead of chasing those big numbers, those big jobs on the board, as I would say, the large numbers on the board, you should be pursuing the projects that are the right fit for your business at the right time and seeing how you can Best align that opportunity with your capacity and with, with your expertise. So yeah, I think I always default back to the same thing. It's like consolidate the data, get visibility of everything. And it's not just your pipeline, but it's not just your relationships in your pipeline. It's like your goals and objectives of the business.

Noel Brady [00:28:20]:
Because that has to inform where we go in this go no go decision. As an example, strategically, what markets do we want to target? If we know that there's a large uptick, as there is right now in different forms of delivery like IPD or design build, do we want to double down on something like that? All of this forms into our macro strategic decisions as a business. And I think our ability to remove those gush go no go decisions can only happen. We have access to clean data that considers everything.

Katie [00:28:54]:
Yeah, I think those go no gos. You know, firms fight for them, they want them so that they don't wind up chasing everything. But they are their own worst critic. They are so subjective and you can make it look whatever way you want to. And I feel like my engineers, I'm going to pick on my engineers, but I feel like my engineers are like part time lobbyists and lawyers. You know, they can make you believe whatever you want on those spreadsheets. But you're right, there's lots of ways to get to growth objectives, right? You, you could grow by increasing the size of projects you do, but that might put stress internally on your team that's not ready or maybe you don't have the infrastructure to support it. Maybe you don't have bonding capacity for that.

Katie [00:29:35]:
You could also do a lot of little jobs. Well, that's taxing and challenging, you know, the same thing. So there's different ways to think about it, but I think having a tool and having something to look at data is just going to give you more information to consider. And you know, sometimes even if you add another layer of technology, you know, with AI and I feel like every conversation brings in AI, but I have a love hate relationship with my AI tool. But I will give it some credit that it always comes at things from a different perspective than I do. And I can appreciate that. And when I'm trying to evaluate different things and certainly if I'm trying to predict different Personas that I'm trying to communicate with, I find that super helpful. And it's only helpful when I have something to feed it.

Katie [00:30:19]:
So yeah. Okay, let's get to some quick questions. You are the data guy. What are some metrics or maybe the number one metric that you think all AEC firms should be tracking and how often do you think that they should look at that metric?

Noel Brady [00:30:37]:
Yeah, I love this One big one I love is pipeline conversion ratio. So essentially how much opportunity you have compared to your revenue target. So at a very simple level, it's your pipeline multiplied by your win rate equals your revenue target. And I think something we, we should do in AEC is slice that. I think we need to understand our hit rate as we kind of touched on what percentage of jobs that we chase, do we win. Okay, great. What's our target? Let's just say we have $100 million target. Our hit rate is 10%.

Noel Brady [00:31:13]:
So we probably need to have something around a billion dollar pipeline to do this. But I think that's the big picture. But then let's look at it in the markets or the sectors that we serve. Healthcare, commercial, everything else, all the sectors that we have or whoever we want to look at it. I think once we do that again we become more intentional about what do we pursue, why do we pursue it? What risks do we need to evaluate before making these decisions? So pipeline conversion ratio very clear. You can see what you need to do at the various earliest stages of relationships with BD to build up that pipeline. And a strategic pipeline, having all that data informs you as to, okay, there might be a billion dollar opportunity out there that we can add to our pipeline, but it's not a good strategic fit for our because we don't have the capacity or the expertise to deliver it. Having all of that together, you chase the right things.

Katie [00:32:02]:
What advice would you give a firm that's trying to build a growth strategy? Maybe they've just been, we've grown organically, we do good work, we answered the phone. But now they're trying to be a little maybe aggressive or proactive about it. What advice would you give them to start that strategy?

Noel Brady [00:32:20]:
Simple strategic client account management. I think I touched on it already. It's deliberate re pursuit of existing clients and then identifying new opportunities. Whether it's account based marketing, as I mentioned, or maybe it's new markets and putting in that investment into the earliest stages of building relationships. Because I firmly believe the more you talk to people, the better output you'll get.

Katie [00:32:46]:
That really pairs well with the core belief we have at Smartegies. And that's, you know, in aec sometimes we forget how helpful it is. You know, we like to talk about, oh, we have 85%, you know, repeat clients. But when you are really thoughtful about pursuing what we call wallet expansion through, you know, account based marketing where you talk about every client's not worth the same. You know, there's some that are more, you know, strategic with our firm. Maybe they believe what we believe and we have a strong philosophical partnership. They're easy to work with, some might keep the lights on, they pay well and you know, it's fine. He calls me at six o' clock on Friday, I'll answer because he pays a premium, whatever that might look like.

Katie [00:33:30]:
But certainly that strategic account management coupled with some account based marketing so that you're aligned. But it's just being really thoughtful about not trying to be everything to everyone and really knowing who you're ripe for.

Noel Brady [00:33:43]:
I would support that 100%, I think. It's like we always ask ourselves in our businesses, how can we provide more value? You, yeah, it's just a simple question, like you just sit down, whether it's in a seat and you're like, how can we help this client out? Like building that trust, just being good people, good culture internally in your business. Apply that to your work and I think that will again pay dividends. Funny story on that about clients calling you at 6pm on a Friday. I had a client used to call me at 3am and he like, he could pick up the phone like, hey Noel, you sleeping? And I was like, kind of. And like he would ask me the questions like, do you remember that guy that we spoke to, however long ago, six months ago, he came onto the job site, asked this question and I'm like, sorry, what? It was just, it was oil. He was a funny guy.

Katie [00:34:35]:
And sometimes you forge a friendship with people that you worked with for a long time and those lines blur. Right. So yeah, they call you on the weekend, they call you on the holiday, they call after they got your out of office notice and it's up to you to, to say yes to it. Okay, final question for you today. This has been great. What is one thing that you hope the listeners will take away from today's conversation?

Noel Brady [00:35:03]:
Yeah, just, just take away that growth is a system. It's not just a talent and invest in the system and that is the people and the technology. Create an environment where you're leading the charge for your business no matter what role you play within that business. And if you build the right infrastructure and build the right habits, growth becomes more predictable. And that's why what we're trying to help firms achieve.

Katie [00:35:28]:
Yeah. And I don't think a tool's not going to solve the habit problem. Right? So you still need the people part of the equation. Noel, thank you so much for coming on the show. I also want to give you a special shout out for you and your team at ProjectMark supporting Smartegies in our annual conference SmartWin. We really enjoyed having you there, being part of the discussion, being part of all the fun that we had down at Georgia Tech and you know anybody listening today. If you're looking for a tool, I will send you over to Project Mark. Give them a call, check them out.

Katie [00:36:00]:
We will be sure to include some links in the show notes to make it super easy for you. But Noel, thanks again. Thanks to everyone for listening. We'll see you here next time on AEC Marketing for Principals AEC Marketing for Principals is presented by Smartegies, the AEC growth consulting firm that has been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 2008. The show is hosted by me, Katie Cash, Senior VP at Smartegies. I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, a guest request, or a topic request for a future episode, send an email or a voice memo to podcastmartigees.com and if you're looking for past episodes, be sure to visit our podcast page at Smartegies.com/podcast. We hope you'll tell your friends and colleagues about our show and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.

Katie [00:36:55]:
Thanks for listening.