Ten Bold Strategies for the Millennium
By Ellen Flynn-Heapes, FMP
Reprinted from the SMPS Marketer

What are the hot new competitive strategies for the next millennium? As the economy slows a bit in the next few years, we’re counseling our clients to be bold. Invest now in building world class expertise in whatever you do best. This demands a sharp eye on the future, and a relentless focus the firm’s vision.

In any competitive economy - not to mention a global economy - your currency is your identity. We’ve all experimented with opportunism and diversified beyond recognition, often to the point where clients can’t tell us apart. We’ve grown and lost sight of why. One key concept is emerging: identity is the main act of competitive strategy. Only your edge will help you win.

Answer this question: What special value do you bring to what kind of clients? As you answer, try to define your company in terms of a driving force: are we great project managers? Health care gurus? Prototype/site adapters? Do we “own the town?” Almost any answer works, as long as you stick to it and build strength. In fact, I’m convinced that if you bring skills and conviction, there will be profitable (and respectful) buyers. Keep your eye on attaining distinction - the position of marketplace leadership as the best project managers, the best health care experts, the best in town…Therein lies the bargaining position and the rewards - the top clients, staff, and fees.

Our ten favorite strategies for the millennium help you create, deepen, and broadcast your clearest identity. After all, getting to that magical place where clients actively WANT YOU is what marketing’s all about, right?

#1: Eliminate elaborate plans. Most people find these plans to be drudgery. Even if they’re written, they’re hardly ever used. Instead, make sure your firm has a focused competitive strategy rather than a dilute committee-generated mission statement containing words like excellence, service, quality, etc. Then, with your focus outlined, everyone knows what to do, how to behave, and how to push the envelope. The best guiding statements are clear, compelling, and step boldly into identity. BSW’s is great: “Setting new world standards for the delivery of building program services.” Although brief, everyone in the firm knows that they excel in delivering prototype rollouts for volume developers. Walter P. Moore’s is great: “Be a world leader in the structural design of sports facilities, and the number one choice by our top five clients in public assembly facilities domestically.”

Of course, plans are quite useful to document decisions and agreements, and to facilitate communication among people and groups. But don’t let yourself get bogged down in detail. Keep your eye on the strategy.

#2: Branding. Branding gives the buyer a shortcut in decision-making. And of course, the more focused it is, the more potent it is. The point is to own a powerful concept in the world of competitors - like Xerox or Kleenex - because clients know that trading with a brand name rather than a generic reduces their risk of mistakes.

Most firms entertaining this technique now are focusing only on the company name, but there’s lots more potential in branding. We see at least three levels of branding operating now in our industry. In “Wide Band” branding, the company name is the brand, and it stands for something specific. For example, Parsons Brinckerhoff stands for transportation, Fluor Daniel stands for design/construct. In “Medium Band” format, the brand is a specialty of the larger company, such as HOK Sport or Karlsberger/Garikes for labs. In “Narrow Band” branding, the company has a proprietary process or specialty, e.g. “Problem Seeking” (CRS-style programming), the Step-Wise Approach (CH2M-Hill), or BBG’s “Flash-Track System.”

Name design is a mini-strategic planning event. Be creative with your branding

#3: Formulate benefit statistics. Nothing makes clients feel so secure as statistics about your design effectiveness. Try to create such numbers as 20% greater user satisfaction, 50% faster, 40% lower cost, and 15% higher leasing rates. Or try “voted number one by college libraries in Montana.” See if you can get your clients to do an internal study on productivity or cost savings. (Sometimes they’ll just ballpark it, but then you’ve got a statistic.) You can’t rely on published sources for this - you have to generate the numbers. Take 20% of your marketing budget and spend it learning about your client’s operating statistics and measures of success. Then run a small study to connect what you do to what they need, even if it’s an opinion poll, to get to the numbers. Your lawyers won’t like it, but your clients will.

#4: Make the “Ten Principles” list. You will be perceived as a guru if you can articulate ten principles of success in your area of expertise, whether it’s corporate interiors, water treatment plants, program management, or design/build electrical . Think of Tom Peters’ principles in In Search of Excellence. Think of Steven Covey’s world renowned list.

Generating a set of timeless principles indicates your depth and commitment to the area, and sets you apart from everyone droning on about service. (Not that service is bad, it’s just become a clichÈ these days.) Include your list in all your materials, and add to them as you read articles and observe more. Start small and build up the list over time. PS: consider the value here for staff training too.

#5: Implement partnered learning. One of the most powerful ways to build a reputation and forge strong client relationships is to do partnered learning. This can range from the informal - as in going on “field trips” together to study precedents, pick art, or select materials - to more formal joint proprietary research and consensual databases. Partnered learning ultimately results in a shared information database which virtually cements your relationship.

Draper-Aden’s studies with the Virginia Association of Counties and the Virginia Municipal League for their Water and Sewer Rate Reports are exemplary. With this information, along with some good marketing, the firm bootstrapped their water-related engineering practice to considerable prominence in the area.

Go to your five best clients, collect operating statistics, and create a consensual data base that is not specific to the individual clients. You can then, with their permission, share that data among the group or broader industry - with your firm positioned as the expert. Your client base will have new benchmark information, and you will have created a partnership that benefits everyone. (Note: when we’ve conducted focus groups, I’m constantly amazed people in the same industry haven’t met each other. They may think they’re competitors, but they walk out friends.)

#6: Create “the institute for the study of....” Cooper Carry’s Main Street Studio created the Boca Raton Institute for the Study of Main Streets. A firm in North Carolina created an institute for the study of school learning to complement their school architecture practice. Think of the commitment to excellence this conveys to the client as compared to reading about a “commitment to excellence” in a firm’s mission statement.

These institutes are not just promotional, they provide a real infrastructure for innovation, research, and publishing that furthers an important contribution to the community. Did you know that SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) was funded by Bechtel?

#7: Write a book. Writing for client groups is very powerful. Although a major commitment, our experience is that writing a book is the ultimate tool for both launching and sustaining a top marketplace leadership position. One piece of advice is to conduct some original research. This yields news and sets the stage for the book to be reviewed in the client press (and purchased.)

If you’re not currently being chased by the New York publishers, and if the usual group in our industry aren’t your cup of tea, you can very respectably self-publish. Lots of good options exist for co-publishing too, in which you create and market the book while the publisher manages inventory and fulfillment. School experts Fanning Howey, for example, are working on their third self-published book in a series. They love to use their books in interviews, particularly during Q&A time when asked a question. Nothing like sending the message, “we wrote the book.”

#8: Create your 3-D net. Alvin Toffler in the Third Wave envisioned the 21st century as an “ever-changing mosaic” of firms linking and de-linking in the marketplace in order to deliver highly tuned expertise. Teaming, which is driven by client demand for a more exact matching of project requirements and available expertise, will last well into the future. Smart experts such as Ellerbe Becket have for years had formal agreements with firms in many US cities for health care teaming, for example. A firm in Houston in brokering teams. And the Global Design Alliance (formerly the STAR Alliance) seems to be hitting its stride.

We’re beginning to see more three dimensional networks that work not only horizontally with allied design firms, but vertically with contractors, financial people, lawyers, management consultants, etc. 3D nets will center around a specific set of prime “patron” clients, typically in non-competing geographies or markets. If you truly focus and work this net, it gets easier to write those personal notes and send those interesting articles. You can develop the deep working partnerships that make competition a non-issue.

#9: Create shared technologies. Technology continues to make us more productive, but it can also bring us closer together. For example, many firms are taking full advantage of the Internet by going beyond the homepage to secure web sites for all project members. With firewalls and passwords to limit access, you can share CADD files, transmittals, presentation graphics, and funny stories. The beauty is in the instant communication (if you have reasonable band width) and ease in manipulating and refining data. Videoconferencing and video workshops as well as chat rooms for public process input are today’s reality. The next generation of tools is focused on collaborative technologies, as biggies such as the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (the people that brought us the Macintosh) and MIT study technology-assisted innovation. In the near future, interpersonal computing will be much more pervasive than personal computing.

#10: Get great at relationships. Peter Drucker said that everything is about relationships - even the stock market reflects how people feel about each other. In general we do a very poor job in this increasingly complex area, but the payoffs for masters of communication are huge. Think for a moment of President Reagan.

If there is one topic your firm should focus on for training this year, it should be in the realm of relationships, psychology, and communications. Get a Myers-Briggs course into the firm, and use its vocabulary and principles on a regular basis. Stage a workshop on “lessons learned dealing with clients.” Devote real brainpower to the client maintenance program - and rename it something snazzy. The more your people understand themselves and others, the more you leverage all your investments.

Ellen Flynn-Heapes, FMP, is president of SPARKS: the Center for Strategic Planning, a company design lab for building great organizations.

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