AEC firms thrive when marketing, HR, finance, and IT stop acting as support functions and start driving strategic growth.
When I was the head of marketing and human resources management for two different design firms earlier in my career, I never cared for what we did being considered “support” functions. That implied second class citizen status as far as I was concerned. Not to say I didn’t recognize the importance of the design and technical functions of our firm, and the fact that THAT is what our businesses did and got paid for.
That said, just because we are in the business of engineering, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, environmental consulting, and land surveying, it does NOT have to mean that marketing, finance, human resources, and IT are LESS important, or have less potential to significantly impact the success of the firm. For that to be true, however, it can’t be “business as usual” for these functions in terms of how they are typically managed. They each require a redefinition of their mission and new expectations from management IF their roles are to be elevated to a higher than “support staff” function.
For example, I have often been critical of how human resources functions in the typical AEC firm. While HR managers and staff have potential to be game-changers for the firms they work for, they are far too often relegated to a role of paper-pushing and telling management what they cannot do for liability reasons.
One reason why this is the case is the people who head up those areas went into that field in the first place because “they like people.” That is not what is going to propel the firm forward with a strategic advantage. I would rather have someone in that role who “likes BUSINESS,” and sees their role as building the best, highest-performing team (the firm’s employees) they can get at the lowest possible price. That MISSION for HR is what is going to make you money. And that is going to take aggressive recruiting and shortening up the time to fill any role management deems needs filling as quickly as possible.
And HR people have to stop embracing nonsense like once a year performance reviews (something management and employees alike hate, and that mean nothing), and instead train managers on how to tactfully deliver immediate feedback, good and bad, to the people who work for them. I can say the same thing about bureaucratic policies and practices around pay increases. If someone needs a raise, do it now. If they need four raises this year, do that, also. Bonus programs need an entire rethinking as well. Where did the idea come from that management’s job ends at deciding who gets the money and who doesn’t? Their real job is to get everyone performing at a high level, not just reward people differently. And why isn’t HR advocating for open-book management? Everyone who has ever done it knows it both builds trust for management and trains everyone in how the company makes or doesn’t make money, yet HR people barely make a whisper about it, ever.
Or how about marketing? Is marketing’s job in an AEC firm just to support the architects and engineers and others who SELL work? I don’t think so. Marketing’s MISSION should be to create the situation where no one from the business ever has to make a sales call, and instead where all new clients reach out to the AEC firm for help because marketing has done its job. If you don’t think that’s possible, I beg to differ with you. It’s not going to be possible if marketing is defined strictly as a support job, however!
Marketing needs to be constantly experimenting with new ways to educate the firm’s targeted client types so they will call when they have a need – LEADING the charge instead of following people (the engineers and architects) who may know how to sell but haven’t been trained in marketing at all. It’s all backward in the typical AEC firm!
Then there is finance and accounting. Are they there just to report past numbers and offer no plan for how to make things better? I don’t think so. And are they relegated to managing the existing (flawed) ownership transition plan that probably won’t work, and negotiating with the firm’s bank over a quarter point interest rate adjustment that won’t make any material difference in the success of the firm? They shouldn’t be. They should instead be focused on how to facilitate the growth and profitability of the business. Their MISSION needs to be maintaining the capitalization of the firm and maximizing shareholder value, not just being robotic historians that give you all the numbers and get your tax returns filed.
And IT – are they there just to be sure your hardware and software all works like it should and to guide you through conversions from Microsoft to Google or vice versa? That’s the way it works in most companies in this business. Instead, their MISSION should be driving efficiency throughout the entire operation and figuring out how to capture and store information that gives the company a strategic information advantage in the markets it serves. That should be a critical part of the company’s strategy to support growth and increase its value. And what about creating software products that could actually be revenue generators for the company? It’s been done before. How about turning your IT from a cost to a revenue generator?
I could go on but I hope you get the idea. If you want these other functional areas in your business to be all that they can be, you need to stop thinking of them as “support roles.” Maybe if you can do that, you will be able to figure out what kind of people you really need to be leading these areas versus just following the playbook for non-differentiating mediocrity that could be holding back the success of your enterprise. Think about it.
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Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com. |