In 2025, faster firms win – optimize key processes from proposal to payment to stay competitive in AEC.
"I started running an engineering firm, and my plan to win was that we’d respond to emails in less than a week.” This is some hyperbole from one of our customers, but the statement contains a nugget of truth. Speed matters in an AEC industry not known for its pace. This is especially true in 2025. Client demands, generational workforce shifts, macroeconomic trends, and technology are all changing at an accelerating rate. The firms moving quickly are the ones succeeding, while most firms are feeling squeezed.
As Larry Fabbrioni of Practice of Architecture put it, “If it feels like it’s become more challenging to maintain the same levels of prosperity, that’s because it has.” With lower fees for bigger scopes and faster turnarounds (among plenty of other challenges for architecture and engineering businesses), firms need to prioritize speed. Not only for project delivery, but across all aspects of the firm’s operations.
So how do AEC firms move faster? A good framework helps. Start by breaking down the “proposal to paid” process for firms:
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Win new clients and projects. How quickly are you responding to leads? A Harvard/InsideSales study suggests that conversion rates drop by eight times after only five minutes following submission of a lead. Further, responsiveness can set the tone for the client relationship. A firm that follows up on a lead quickly indicates to a prospective client that they will be responsive and engaged partners during the project. That’s why “speed to lead” can be such an important metric.
Time to submit proposals also matters. Firms are often held back when employee bio/project data isn’t well organized and accessible. Historical data on projects – to better understand how to price – can also help make fee-setting a more systematic rather than an ad hoc (and time-consuming) exercise. -
Set up and staff projects. By the time firms grow to the point where firm leadership can no longer look around the room and know what everyone is working on, staffing becomes a challenge. And because people are the most valuable resource for AEC firms, there’s high leverage to being able to flex resources quickly.
Even more important is moving fast enough to forecast work in the future. If firms don’t have visibility into their project pipeline and their staffing, they run into situations where they’re under-delivering for clients (understaffed) or giving away work (overstaffed) to drive up utilization. -
Deliver great projects. For an industry where time and materials is unfortunately still the most common billing method, project delivery speed hasn’t always been a priority. However, speed matters. Faster delivery matters to clients and increases the value of the services you provide. Driving internal efficiencies will almost certainly pay off in the long run.
Firms can track metrics like hours or days per phase (or appropriate unit). Tracking speed-plus-accuracy measures like percentage of on-time deliverables can help encourage firms to move faster as well. -
Invoice and collect. Our 2025 Benchmarking Report suggests that firms take 57 days on average to get paid, but many firms take 50 percent to 100 percent longer than this. Time is money, and cutting your collection period has real cash flow and cost implications.
Firms ought to be looking at their time to invoice and invoice-to-payment timing. We tend to see the former move slowly when firms have ill-defined invoicing processes and struggle to collate disparate data sources (i.e., across multiple systems). For invoice-to-payment, firms benefit from structured data around outstanding invoices and a client reminder system (and of course, a way to minimize all the paper checks traveling through snail mail). Firms that send electronic invoices with the ability for clients to pay electronically see a 14 percent decrease in the time to collect. And the more clients pay electronically, the more significant the decrease. - Generate results and insights. Perhaps most important, firms need the right data at the right time to make decisions. How long does it take your firm to close the books each month? Do project status and staffing reports emerge at the click of a button, or after compiling spreadsheets for a few weeks (or never)? Are the reports and dashboards you use generated with live data, or are they relying on stale information?
For each of these steps, as with everything, improvement requires measurement – what speed-based metrics are most important? Where can firms cut time out of their processes?
Speed matters, and technology is critical to driving speed. I’m a big fan of simple prototyping for data collection or workflows before systematizing it. But by the time firms hit any real scale, most need technology to enable a consistent, fast process. For example, lead response and data management for proposals likely require a CRM system. Real-time data around projects or firm performance isn’t possible unless projects, time or progress tracking, and invoicing are all linked together seamlessly. And paper checks won’t go away without a means to invoice and collect payment electronically. Many firms have been reticent to invest in firm management tools in the same way they’ve invested in design tools, but the former is required for firms to move fast to meet the challenges of a quickly changing industry.
One closing caveat: Building process and measuring results is not free. Trying to optimize across all phases simultaneously will mean sub-optimal results and may mean other areas of the firm suffer. Especially if you’re a small or midsized firm, pick one or two processes to optimize, and a couple of metrics to start tracking. You’ll get a quicker win and build momentum to improve speed across the rest of your firm.
Matt Cooper is CEO of BQE Softwater, Inc. Connect with him on LinkedIn.