Stop Fishing Everywhere: Nail Your Ideal Client Profiles for AEC Success

Disruptions are constant. Inflation, interest rates, politics, tariffs, funding cycles, and demographic changes – these are all areas that can cause uncertainty in the built environment, as owners consider holding back on design and construction projects.

This disruption is happening everywhere right now. Uncertainty over tariffs has resulted in projects going on hold. Cuts to governmental funding are being experienced throughout the country. Economists are now projecting a 50/50 chance of economic retraction, and first-quarter 2025 results demonstrate the challenges in the current state of the economy.

When facing uncertainty, AEC firms in the past have embraced a reactionary approach to the potential challenges, often rushing to cut overhead, including marketing and business development (BD) staff, and proactive efforts. But this is the opposite approach of what firms should be doing.

While it is important to ensure you have the right people in the right roles, focus is critical when facing economic uncertainty or the potential of a downturn.

During busy times, inefficiencies may remain largely unexposed, whether in firm management, project delivery and operations, human resources, or BD and marketing. To build and sustain a resilient business, we must identify inefficiencies and become more focused with our strategies and tactics.

Where do you start in business development and marketing? With the low-hanging fruit. Understanding your existing clients and focusing on the highest-value, highest-opportunity existing clients will help you to weather any downturn. But what about landing new clients? By focusing more on three specific areas, you will improve your efforts and the probability of success. These include developing Ideal Client Profiles (ICP), refining your target markets, and making sound go/no-go decisions.

Understanding Your Ideal Clients

Every AEC firm understands that some clients are better than others. Ideal clients tend to value your services, pay on time, utilize multiple services, and come back to you repeatedly.

In the realm of marketing, the term “Customer Persona” is thrown around a lot, and it allows marketers to focus on targeting individuals based on specific demographic/geographic characteristics. For the AEC industry, it is hard to pigeonhole a specific “persona.”

For instance, a DPW director at one municipal client may be a male Baby Boomer who did not go to college but worked his way up, beginning with the maintenance department. He may retire in just a few years. But the DPW director at the adjacent municipality may be a young Millennial female with a degree in engineering, new to the role, and with a long career ahead.

So, how do you create a buyer persona with these diverse characteristics? Well, it’s at this point where the Ideal Client Profiles come in. Identify the ideal companies, agencies, or institutions based upon certain variables, then target those prospective clients and individuals with specific roles/titles identified through the ICP process.

It is critical to look at your existing and former clients to help provide context for the ideal clients, so the ICP definition process cannot be done in a vacuum. Every company has its own definition of ideal clients, but some of the common variables analyzed include:

• Market Sector
• Sub-Category, if applicable
• Size (revenues, employee county, population size, etc.)
• AEC Selection Process
• Financial Position
• Business Objectives
• Needs We Can Address
• Project Delivery Preferences
• Primary Contact Profile

Once defined, making ICPs central to your BD and marketing strategy is essential. Use them to score leads, define targets, guide content creation, and prioritize pursuits.

Knowing Your (Market) Strengths

Ideal Client Profiles must align with target markets. Too often, firms facing uncertainty chase any and every opportunity, hoping that if they throw enough at the wall, something will stick. At the beginning of my career, I experienced a recession. The architecture/engineering firm I worked for was very worried about workload and went after everything.

This reaction included taking a one-size-fits-all approach to pursuing every publicly advertised opportunity. I vividly remember the thrill of the pursuit in the early days of my job, followed by the consistent agony of defeat. After a year of pursuing every Federal opportunity in our general region, with no focus or proactive business development, doing the math and learning that we were 0-for-100 took the wind out of my sales.

You may have heard the saying, “Don’t Fish Everywhere.” Perhaps a better saying should be, “Don’t Fish Everywhere, and Bring the Correct Bait.” In the prior example, we fished where the fish were biting, but our bait was woefully inadequate. When targeting the right markets for your services, internal subject matter expertise and prior experience are absolutely essential to succeed in an uncertain market. There are many different ways to define a target market, but it is really about the intersection of several different components, including:

Historic Performance – past revenues, profitability, current backlog, portfolio of project experience
Future Opportunity – growth projections, funding sources, legislation that could impact the market (positively or negatively)
Existing Relationships – knowing the decision-makers, having a broad network in the market sector, and geographic region
Company Brand – recognition as a legitimate provider of specific services to the specific market in the specific region
Strategic Alignment – conformance with strategic plan and company mission, vision, values
Licensing Considerations – business license, staff license and certifications, contractor license, etc. – whether in a specific state, geographic region, or having specialized certifications necessary to work in the target market

AEC firms often spread themselves too thin when it comes to target markets. Just because you technically “could” do the work doesn’t mean you will be hired without a robust offering to the target market, as outlined above. In other words, ensure you have the right bait before fishing.

Getting Real with Go/No-Go Decisions

A tale as old as time – or at least as old as your company – is the propensity for making “go” decisions for pursuits that are quite obviously “no-go” opportunities. In most firms I work with, there is a “go” process instead of “go/no-go.” An executive, principal, partner, or project manager wants to pursue an opportunity, so it automatically becomes a “go” – regardless of the firm’s past experience, existing relationships with the prospect, capacity of the marketing department, etc.

The opportunity cost of poor “go” decisions is significant. Critical – and often limited – resources are diverted to pursuits with low-to-no probability of success. Sometimes, this comes at the cost of pursuing higher probability opportunities. Or avoiding the critical marketing tasks necessary to build your brand, establish name recognition, and generate inbound leads. So it has the double-whammy of essentially doing nothing (pursuing a project you can’t win) and preventing the firm from conducting proactive marketing, which is absolutely essential during times of uncertainty.

There are many different types of “go/no-go” forms and processes, but they typically entail responding to several questions and scoring them. However, when they are too subjective, everyone knows how to “cook” the workshop to score it as a go, so being objective here is very critical.

Typical categories or questions for scoring include:

• Existing relationship with the client
• Pre-positioning before the opportunity or RFP hits the streets
• Alignment with Ideal Client Profiles
• Alignment with Target Market (s)
• Alignment with primary services
• Probability of being shortlisted (or winning)
• Capacity of marketing and other pursuit team members
• Knowledge of client challenges and pain points
• Portfolio of relevant project experience
• Strength of the project team resumes
• Ability to be competitive with your fee/bid
• Ability to make a profit
• Level of competition – including incumbent(s)
• Desire to be associated with a project
• Potential risks

Next Steps

There is of course much more to business development and marketing when developing strategies to generate work in uncertain times, but by focusing first on existing clients and segmenting them, then ensuring that your ICPs are current, target markets are defined, and go/no-go processes are realistic, you’ll be able to focus your marketing and business development efforts and improve your probability of success.

Ready to learn more about these and other strategies to help drive your business development pipeline? Be sure to register for our forthcoming webinar, Generating Business for Your AEC Firm in Uncertain Times, or reach out to me to discuss how Stambaugh Ness can help you be more intentional and strategic when it comes to BD and marketing.