What if I were to tell you that this is not the time to hold back? The AEC space has been a little bit strange inside of this year. It’s like the world’s holding its breath, not sure when to release it and to open up the path for more projects. Projects to interview for are fewer and farther between, and it’s hitting everyone hard.
We’ve talked to a lot of firms that are laying people off; they’re tightening their belts, they’re trying to keep things together. And the assumption is, at a point the breath out will happen, projects will start flowing again.
The reason I’m bringing this up is, there’s a dangerous idea here, which is not to invest in your success. If projects are fewer and farther between, it also means there’s more people competing more fiercely for those projects. This is the time to invest in winning those projects, to bring more to the plate, because everyone wants and needs those projects even more than they did before.
Now, it may not be every interview that you have to throw everything at, but be strategic. Look at your strategic pursuits and ask yourselves, “Which are the ones we really need to put that extra energy in?” And that’s when you need presentation support, interview assistance, to help you get your strategy right, your messages designed, your delivery right, so that you can stand out in this fiercer competitive market, because winning more of those projects solves your problem.
The more you can do while we’re waiting for the world to say, “Okay, we’re past the political and whatever else is creating this bottleneck,” that will pass, but right now you can do something really important to help solve that problem. While your instinct may be to hold back, you know, “Let’s wait and see, let’s just do this one on our own,” this is not the time to hold back. This is the time to invest in the successes that you can create now to solve as much of that problem yourselves.
That will help you get to the point where, when the projects start to flow and things become a little bit more normal again, you’re going to be in a greater standing for that time. If you resist the urge to just hold your breath along with everyone else, and instead invest in the success that you can get now.
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