Mid-sized A/E firms can hold a powerful advantage by pairing greater resources with closer relationships and faster execution.
Somewhere along the way, many in our industry decided that the interesting and ultimately really successful firms all live at two ends of a spectrum – the boutique firms, who win their reputation on individuality, nimbleness, and a sharp practice-focus, and the giants, armed with economies of scale and seemingly limitless capacity to pursue people, projects, innovation, and other things small firms dream of. It’s become A/E dogma.
Further, everyone in between, say, the firms running somewhere between 50 and 500 people, get tagged as mired in the middle – the dreaded “no man’s land” of the A/E world – too big to be personal and adaptable, and too small to bankroll anything ambitious. It is a comfortable assumption, but I don’t buy it. I would argue that the firm in the middle can, in fact, hold the strongest strategic position. And, once you see it, you may start to see opportunities for it everywhere.
Technology is one place, intuitively, we can see it. Firms in the middle have enough capacity, done shrewdly, to fund future-forward equipment and software and to develop specialized staff to drive it, and with enough volume to spread that cost until the math works. It also stays close enough to the field, projects, and clients to identify where real opportunities are, and to know which of them are worth pursuing in the first place. At a small firm, that kind of fixed cost competes with basic needs. And, at a very large one, the investment might be easier, but the path from idea to job site to the client’s success runs through many hands, many layers. The firm in the middle feels less of either constraint and has the ability to standardize a workflow across every office so that a lesson learned in one location becomes a capability in all of them.
Scale that stays personal
Additionally, consider the challenge that keeps most of us up at night, which is people. The National Center for Construction Education and Research estimates that roughly 40% of the AEC workforce will retire by 2031, carrying decades of institutional knowledge out the door. Average tenure at architecture and engineering firms has slipped from about seven years a decade ago to less than five today. Holding on to good people, and growing the next generation of them, has become the defining test of whether a firm lasts.
A real investment in developing people, a structured learning environment built around the work, like hands-on mentorship, emerging-leader development, an internship that hands students meaningful projects and experiences. A firm in the middle has enough scale to build those programs and enough closeness to still make them personal. In fact, my firm has leaned hard into this, with a project management development program, a management training series for our people leaders, a development track for the ones ready to climb, and a structured internship that treats each student cohort like future colleagues. None of it would have been affordable at 50 people, and none of it would have stayed personal at 5,000. We can do both.
Scale cuts both ways
Here is the catch, and it applies to every one of those investments. The same scale that creates the advantage turns into a liability the moment a firm stops tending it. We have all seen the well-conceived procedure that gets ignored, the tool that goes unused, the software nobody opens, the training program that launches with fanfare and fades by fall. Scale left unattended stops compounding, starts to fragment, and eventually breeds cynicism.
I think about it this way. Done right, a firm our size (Sanbell is 300 people and 14 offices) should operate like one office that happens to have really long hallways. A place where an engineer in one state can walk down the corridor, so to speak, and borrow what a colleague three offices (or states) away already worked out. Done poorly, that same firm devolves into a loose federation of independent offices that share a logo and very little else. Nothing about size decides which of those you become. That outcome is a choice, and it has to be made on purpose – built into how we communicate, how we share what works (and what doesn’t), how we assign clear responsibilities, and how we set unified goals and honestly measure the results. And, it only holds together when everyone buys in.
Firms that started out thinking they were in “no man’s land” can win the future, if they recognize the middle for the advantage it is: a place with enough scale to matter and the proximity to stay human, but only if you do the deliberate work to wire it all together. At Sanbell, we are placing our bet on precisely that, and the connections I see forming across our offices tells me it’s paying off.
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Michael Sanderson is CEO at Sanbell. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |
