AEC Strategic Planning Priorities: What Are Firms Focusing On?

Successful strategic planning requires a bit of time travel. Firm leaders must visit the future to understand where they want the business to be in three years, five years, or even further. The strategic plan is the roadmap to get there.

The past two years have been somewhat of a tale of two AEC industries. One is the horizontal construction side, which has generally experienced banner years recently, and the other is the vertical construction side, which has been more hit-or-miss, depending on market sectors and geographic regions.

Every firm has its own unique goals, yet we continue to observe general patterns across areas of strategic focus, regardless of firm size, type, market, or region.

What Are the Top Strategic Planning Priorities for AEC Firms?

While every firm’s strategic plan should reflect its unique goals and circumstances, several priorities consistently rise to the top. Growth, employee experience, business development, technology, and client experience are among the areas increasingly shaping strategic decisions across the AEC industry.

Growth

One of our primary strategic priorities is growth. However, this growth comes in different forms.

Some AEC firms are more focused on top-line revenue growth. This may include diversifying into new market sectors, expanding service offerings, or entering new geographic regions. Growth through acquisition is another strategy playing out, and the continued increases in M&A activity in the industry certainly prove this.

Other firms are more focused on bottom-line growth. They are looking to improve efficiencies and processes to elevate their profitability. We commonly see improvements in financial and project management, as well as a focus on more standardized processes and greater consistency across departments and offices.

Training is frequently an outcome, as firms have realized they are losing institutional knowledge due to the retirement of their Baby Boomer leaders.

Employee Experience

The current talent shortage facing the industry will be a long-term challenge due to declining birth rates and a plummeting number of high school graduates entering college or the workforce. Demographers project a 13% decline between now and 2041.

Recruitment is certainly an issue facing many firms, but so is employee retention. Average tenure at architecture and engineering firms has dropped from seven years a decade ago to 4.9 years in the most recent government data. Tenure at construction firms has been more stable, but hovers around four years.

AEC firms fear losing their talent, and industry data reinforces that fear. Zweig Group tracked a turnover rate of 12.2% in its 2025 Financial Survey. And Deltek reported a similar number of 13.8% in their 2026 Clarity Report – the highest level since 2018. Furthermore, the turnover rate is even higher for small and mid-sized firms (those with 250 or fewer employees in the Deltek data).

As a result of the shrinking talent pipeline and relatively high turnover rate, many firms are looking to enhance the employee experience as a recruitment and retention tool. The specific approach to this varies, but an increased emphasis on professional development and leadership training is a common response.

Companies are also continually reevaluating their employee benefits program, trying to balance spiraling healthcare costs with the need to offer an attractive package that minimizes departures. This may mean better-defined career paths, hybrid/remote work options, or accelerated advancement in addition to traditional benefits such as insurance and time off.

The “Missing Middle” trend, or lack of mid-career professionals, is real and continues to create a pinch point at companies of all sizes. When you don’t have enough mid-career talent, you must poach from the competition, accelerate the development of younger staff, and/or rely on your next generation of leaders to pick up the slack, potentially at the cost of not further developing them to become managers and firm leaders (and even owners), and possibly even burning them out.

Business Development

As Henry Ford famously stated, or at least is commonly attributed,

“Nothing happens until someone sells something.”

Business development is often a top priority when AEC firms develop their strategic plans, but that again depends upon their markets and geographies. Some companies can’t keep up with the workload, have a significant number of open positions, and are challenged to get the work out the door right now. And although they understand that business development today is about creating work tomorrow, it may still not rise to the top in a strategic plan.

That said, Stambaugh Ness’s research last year found that Business Development will be the top strategic initiative for AEC firms.

One of the main drivers of this is the turnover of senior staff. Firm leaders, rainmakers, and senior seller-doers are heading for the exits, and companies are very concerned about landing future work, even if they are currently busy.

Other companies are struggling right now; the most recent Deltek Clarity report found that 21% of firms have reduced staff over the past year, with architectural firms hit harder than engineering firms. These numbers were down from the prior year, when 42% of firms reported a reduction in force, but still represent a large swath of AEC firms downsizing.

Strategic approaches that firms are utilizing include focusing more on existing clients and identifying key accounts for growth, re-evaluating business development models due to retirements and changing buyer behaviors, and enhancing the skill set of seller-doers.

Stambaugh Ness / SMPS Foundation research found that the use of the seller-doer model has continued to grow, and 89% of AEC firms now utilize seller-doers to some extent, though often without proper training. Balancing business development needs with workload commitments is a clear and present issue facing AEC firms.

Technology

A coworker from early in my career had a favorite phrase: “jousting at windmills.” It comes from the 1605 novel Don Quixote and a specific narrative with the words “tilting at windmills” — or fighting an imaginary enemy. Today, the phrase is often used to represent futility or impracticality.

Any AEC firm not considering the massive technology disruptions is jousting at windmills. Although the jury is still out on how impactful the proliferation of automation and artificial intelligence tools will be on the industry, the reality is that most firms are struggling to keep up with technology.

Recent research from Anthropic, creators of the Claude large language model, or LLM, found that more than 80% of architectural and engineering job tasks could theoretically be performed by LLMs, yet the actual observed AI coverage was less than 10% in the industry. On the construction side, the theoretical coverage of job tasks was less than 20%.

Beyond AI, many software programs used by AEC firms have increasingly incorporated automation, yet firms still use them the way they always have.

In line with business development, companies are looking to improve their use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, digital asset management (DAM) tools, enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages, and more. Top of mind for many of our clients right now is capturing and centralizing institutional knowledge to improve efficiencies while also downloading legacy information from senior leaders before they retire.

Many firms are sitting on a data goldmine, but they have not effectively leveraged this data to not only improve internal efficiencies but also create external offerings that drive value and increase revenue.

Client Experience

One of the interesting findings in the 2025 Stambaugh Ness Strategic Planning Survey Report is that, while 46% of participants currently have Client Experience strategies in their strategic plans, it ranked only as the tenth most common strategic priority category. When asked about future strategic priorities, Client Experience jumped to fifth.

AEC firms are clearly getting the memo on the importance of not just being a consultant or vendor, but enhancing relationships to continually add value.

Just as improved cross-selling was referenced under Business Development, we’re seeing many firms develop strategies to better understand the journey a client makes with the firm to elevate the experience, gather regular “voice of the client” feedback, create consistency across the experience at every office and department, or develop comprehensive account plans for the most important clients.

Elevate Your Next Strategic Plan

The most effective AEC strategic planning priorities are not selected in isolation. They reflect where a firm is today, where its leaders want it to go, and the industry forces that could shape the journey ahead.

Interested in learning how Stambaugh Ness can elevate your next strategic plan? Our “lead with people” focus features an engaging process led by AEC industry veterans with extensive industry knowledge and experience. Reach out to discuss how we can support your next planning process.