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By Julia Moroney | The real AI conversation in AEC isn’t about tools or speed, it’s about preserving trust, judgment, and accountability.

By Kraig Kern | When the engine stalls, take the pause to reset, refocus, and get ready for what comes next.

By Mercedez Thompson | Win themes should tell a compelling story about why your firm should win a client’s work, but without the right strategy they can inadvertently lose you the deal.

By Javier Suarez | SOQs that are assembled without any direction just end up in the delete folder or the wastebasket. There’s a better way.

By Julia DeFrances | With the right tools and some best practices, anyone can create a persuasive and compelling proposal.

By Mark Zweig | There are 10 things practically every firm in this business should do but won’t. If you try these things, your firm will be more successful.

By Christina Zweig Niehues | Press releases haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs yet. Keep them short and simple to get the most out of this powerful marketing and exposure tool.

Most of these ideas take very little money – just your time. Invest in yourself and your business and you’ll be stronger and better for it on the other side of this.

Sadly, fewer and fewer of us are interested in developing writing, speaking, or other communication skills as a significant professional goal.

In this era of recycle/reuse/renew, instead of discarding boilerplate information, we should embrace it.

Marketing text has to be what the project owner needs to see. If you can standardize to accommodate an array of proposal types, great. If not, develop new recipes. Standardizing marketing text seems like a...

By Scott Johnston | Time is a luxury AEC teams do not have. And time spent on a losing effort drains resources, morale, and bandwidth on existing projects.

It can be harder than writing more, but oftentimes it’s necessary, so learn how to cut without gutting your message. When I started writing this column in 2004, the size limit was 800-850 words. Sometimes,...

At nearly 59, I don’t sleep so well. My mind doesn’t shut off. So much to think about. Here’s some of what is keeping me awake right now: You have to get the right people...

AEC firms have a big problem. We wait for clients to tell us what THEY want or need and then we give them a proposal. That may seem perfectly normal to you. What’s wrong with...

At nearly 59, I don’t sleep so well. My mind doesn’t shut off. So much to think about. Here’s some of what is keeping me awake right now: You have to get the right people...

Much like a “perfect” farmer, marketing professionals must take charge of each step of the growing (submittal) process, or else risk disaster. Dedication, hard work, persistence, and pride are some of the most commonly used...

Don’t let the current market surge allow you to become too busy or lazy to effect needed changes, and don’t underestimate the time and resources this will require. ​Have you ever been at the controls...

This over-used word can be working against you. In one of our seminars, we ask the attendees to spend 5 minutes developing a short pitch to convince a potential client why they should hire the...

I was talking with an old acquaintance recently— a principal in a very successful international planning and design firm— about how things were going for him and his firm. In spite of some rocky times...

We’ve all either experienced it in our own firm or heard about one of our competitors going through it— what I’m referring to is a complete turnaround. Consider the case of one of our clients....