I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing AEC firm leaders lately.
Some are running relatively small boutique firms. Others are leading organizations with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue. Their markets, structures, and growth strategies differ significantly, but when I ask what they want from marketing, I keep hearing the same things.
They want marketing to help them grow. They want better intelligence about clients and markets. They want help entering places where the firm is not already known. They want stronger positioning, better support for business development, and a clearer sense of where marketing dollars are producing value.
They want marketing to play a bigger role in the business.
Then I ask a different question.
How well does your marketing team understand your business?
That is usually where the conversation changes.
The confidence that was there when we were talking about what marketing could do starts to soften when we talk about whether the marketers themselves really understand how the business works.
Do they know how the firm makes money? Do they understand which markets are profitable and which ones simply produce a lot of revenue? Do they know what drives backlog, why utilization matters, where the firm is trying to grow, and what operational issues might make that growth difficult?
More importantly, do they understand the clients well enough to advise the people who have spent their careers serving them? Too often, the answer is some version of, “Not enough.”
I wrote about this in The Modern AEC Marketer because I think we have misunderstood the trust problem in our industry for years.
AEC leaders do not automatically resist marketing ideas. They resist marketers they do not trust.
And it is very difficult to trust someone as a business advisor when you are not convinced they understand the business they are advising.
Think about your own behavior.
You probably would not take investment advice from a financial advisor who could not explain current financial markets. You would not hire an attorney who did not understand the area of law you need help with. You certainly would not hire an architect, engineer, or contractor who did not understand the work you were asking them to perform.
Yet marketers are increasingly walking into leadership meetings and making recommendations about where the firm should invest, which audiences it should pursue, which markets deserve attention and how the firm should grow.
Those are business decisions. If we want to influence them, we must know more than marketing.
That means understanding the firm’s finances well enough to follow the conversation and contribute to it. If leadership says they want to grow a market by 20 percent, a marketer should understand what that means beyond developing a campaign.
Where is that growth supposed to come from? Existing clients or new ones? Which services? What is the average project size? How much pipeline is required to produce that revenue? How profitable is the work once the firm wins it? What does the firm have the capacity to deliver?
Those questions matter because there is a big difference between producing more work and producing better business. This is where I think some marketers get frustrated. They believe they are being excluded from strategy conversations, and sometimes they are. But before assuming leadership simply does not value marketing, we should ask ourselves whether we have done enough to earn credibility in the conversation they are having.
Financial literacy is part of that, but business fluency goes well beyond the numbers.
Marketers need to understand how work gets sold and delivered, what happens on a job site, what happens in a client meeting, and what happens when a project starts to go sideways. You need to understand what your market leaders are hearing from clients and why some opportunities are worth pursuing while others are not.
That requires getting out from behind the desk. Go on the sales call. Sit in the client meeting. Visit the project. Listen to an operations meeting. Ask your CFO to walk you through the P&L. Learn what utilization, multiplier, backlog, and operating profit tell you about the health of the business.
And yes, the industry has some responsibility here too.
For decades, AEC firms kept marketers buried in proposals, presentations, and production work, then wondered why those marketers did not understand the business. You cannot expect someone to develop commercial judgment if you never expose them to the firm’s commercial side.
We have to ask for access and be curious enough to learn the parts of the business we were never taught. That means understanding the firm well enough to know when a marketing request makes sense, when it does not, and when there may be a better way to solve the underlying business problem.
That is how trust gets built.
Not through a title. Not by waiting for someone to invite us into the room. It happens when the people running the business realize that we understand what is at stake, what they are trying to accomplish, and that we can bring ideas that actually help them get there.
That is the kind of marketer I want to see more of in this industry.
And it is exactly why our next SmartSKILLS session is Financial Literacy for Modern Marketers.
If terms like utilization, multiplier, overhead rate, backlog and operating profit still feel like someone else’s job, this session is for you. We are going to help marketers understand the numbers behind the business so they can participate more confidently in conversations about growth, investment and performance.
You do not need to become your firm’s CFO. But if you want the CFO, CEO, and market leaders to trust your recommendations, you need to understand the business they are trying to run.