Katie [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the AEC Marketing for Principles podcast. This show is designed as a conversation between sales and marketing principles to address trends, challenges, and best practices that are driving growth for professional service firms. Through our collection of discussions with subject matter experts, industry legends, and leaders, we aim to share thoughts and practical tips with our listeners that you can use for growing your AEC brands. Hosted by me, Katie Cash, senior vice president at SmartEgies, the AEC growth consulting firm that’s been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 02/2008. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of AEC Marketing for Principles, where we bring you stories, strategies, and insights to help shape architecture, engineering, and construction. You all know me. This is Katie Cash and joining me today is great.
Katie [00:00:58]:
Scott Steiding, the chief growth officer with Bennett and plus, as you know, I know Scott and he and I go way back. So I’m very excited to share the show with you today. And for those of you that might not know Scott, Scott is really known for his ability to uncover opportunities and tell compelling stories through data. It’s quite fitting that I gave him a shirt one time that said I heart spreadsheets. And if you need a pivot table, Scott’s your guy. So Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Steiding [00:01:28]:
Thank you.
Katie [00:01:30]:
Let’s dive in. You’re in a new position, the chief truth officer at Ben and Plus, maybe take a few minutes, tell our listeners about your journey, how you landed there, and a little bit more about what Bennett plus does.
Scott Steiding [00:01:43]:
Sure. So may maybe I’ll start with Bennett plus. If not the largest, probably one of the largest single discipline structural engineering firms when the South. Over a hundred structural engineers, about a 50 40, hundred and 50 employees. And we’re focused in a wide variety of areas in no particular order. Sort of the emphasis though is manufacturing, data centers and other critical facilities, life sciences, both on the research side and on the manufacturing side, and then industrial, including cold storage. And then as any other diversified firm, we’re doing education and kind of all the other stuff. We have nine offices throughout the Southeast, employee owned firm.
Scott Steiding [00:02:25]:
And I like to say we’re doing some of the sexiest structural engineering projects in the biz. I joined late last spring. My my easiest way to say this is I’m working with some individuals that I worked with sort of fifteen, twenty years ago and at another firm. So it’s been fun to kinda get the group back together. We’ve got the band back together. I’m not sure if I’m Dan Henneproider or John Belushi in that scenario, but, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. And being geographically more focused and then serve a market sector more focused, it’s a lot of fun. Like, it’s really agile, fast return, and then the usual stuff.
Scott Steiding [00:02:59]:
It’s highly client focused. We’re talking about data here. So I’ll throw my first one out there. It is like, we literally track how quickly we respond to client inquiries, and then we post that every Monday morning on how we did last week. So that’s absolutely the expectation is that the client experience should be fantastic. And before I got here, the surveys that they did with clients is similar to something you said before. When they praised the company, they praised the company for being highly responsive. When the company got in trouble and we didn’t get the praise, it was they weren’t responsive enough, whether it was us or another structural engineering firm.
Scott Steiding [00:03:35]:
So you just sort of hung their hat on that. And when you go to the Internet site, when you do your time sheet, you’re going to get whatever you’re doing, that’s the number. And it shows whether it’s moving up or moving down. And so I think last week, it was just about, like, an hour and about fifteen minutes on average response, which is great. This is our first thing. You get what you measure. Uh-huh. And being highly responsive is what we’re trying to drive towards.
Scott Steiding [00:03:58]:
And based on the markets that identified fast moving, large volume sort of stuff, minutes and hours make a difference in terms of moving some of these projects forward. And so I think that’s a big differentiator. And so as a result, the people that we interview, the people that we hire, they kinda gotta be on board with that. When you talk about core guiding attitudes and that’s our stuff, that’s one of them. But we’re we are using a metric to provide our staff with feedback and sort of set that expectation. So it’s been a good fit.
Katie [00:04:24]:
Yeah. I kind of imagine myself now showing up at a Benin Plus office and, like, ringing the little bell and it’s saying, your wait time is one hour or something like
Scott Steiding [00:04:33]:
It is a little bit like that. Well, I’d say so a a quick aside, when I started so they run the clock between 8AM and 5PM. When I first joined, I was doing some work with a group out of South Korea, and I would wake up panicked. Do you know what I mean? At at my normal 05:30, five forty five in the morning.
Katie [00:04:49]:
Thinking you’re skewing the data?
Scott Steiding [00:04:51]:
Thinking that it was
Scott Steiding [00:04:51]:
absolutely you know what I mean? Hurting everybody else’s average because this thing
Scott Steiding [00:04:55]:
had been in my inbox for six hours sort of thing. So I did they let me scramble, I think, for a month or so. And then they and I got let in on the secret that it was it’s sort of they’re measuring it between eight and eight and five. But it’s good. It’s a great everybody’s aware of what the expectation is in that scenario and what our clients have communicated is important. So we’re trying to respond respond to that.
Katie [00:05:15]:
Well, and I think it’s really smart because as a branding firm, we do a lot of brand analysis and market surveys. We talk to all kinds of owners, public, private, big, little, highly institutionalized, whatnot about preferences of what makes them pick a certain firm over another firm. And today, competition is so fierce. Yep. You’re not gonna win it on your resume. Right? Like, you really can’t compete on the basis of technical preeminence. But those soft skills, your responsiveness, your proactiveness, your client bedside manner on how you handled challenging situations is becoming more and more attractive, I think, to buyers. And it’s a way that a lot of firms are really differentiating themselves in the marketplace and they’re building their brands around those more so than, Hey, I’m the smartest damn structural engineer you’ll ever see.
Katie [00:06:07]:
And your building’s never gonna fail if you use my team. No. It’s more along the lines of, hey, you’re trusting me with this. I’m taking it seriously. I’m a licensed engineer. You know, I’m gonna give you quality step, but you’re gonna enjoy the process and you’re gonna feel like a client along the way.
Scott Steiding [00:06:21]:
That’s interesting. And you and I both probably responded to thousands barbecues and art fees. Not one have I ever seen it say, how responsive are you? So I think that it’s a significant
Katie [00:06:33]:
Nobody’s gonna say I’m slow as molasses.
Scott Steiding [00:06:35]:
On a scorecard, I’ve never seen a clients are still grading us based on all these other things. And I think it’s really interesting what the firm’s done, which is we work really hard to get that first project and we just absolutely wow. Do you mean in terms of client experience? And we don’t there is a paragraph that we drop in on being focused on client experience and being focused on being responsive. I think that that it’s hard to imagine. I think if you’re on the client side seeing that as necessarily as a differentiator, I think they have to live it.
Katie [00:07:06]:
It’s hard to experience and or or it’s hard to understand it and value it until you’ve experienced the difference. You’ve gotta have something to compare it to. So, yeah, you’ve gotta get that first at bat. And I love I think we made it, what, maybe five minutes, Scott, before you start throwing in scorecards. So you can’t separate your mind goes straight to data and that’s always your stick. And that’s that
Scott Steiding [00:07:27]:
is, I
Katie [00:07:27]:
think that’s what, you and I have always geeked out on it and always kind of doubling down on this idea of data. And I think back to a lot of conversations we’ve had where you’ve dug in on something and you’ve been like, okay, Katie, if we can increase our hit rate by 5% this year, that’s gonna add 2,000,000. Or you’ve said, hey. If we can find a way to automate this piece where my technical staff is putting fee proposals together, that’s gonna give us back an extra six hundred working hours this year that we can build. Like you’ve dug in. Not every firm has someone like you. And to our listeners that might be thinking, well, that sounds great, but it’s really abstract. Where do you start? How do you identify these areas? Can you maybe break down your point of view on identifying maybe key leading indicators of where there might be need focus and, you know Sure.
Katie [00:08:18]:
Decide to turn over belief and see what’s going on?
Scott Steiding [00:08:21]:
So I always start these conversations with the exact same thing that you’ve heard me say a hundred times, which is none of us went to college or university and got the degrees that we got so we could do sales and marketing, like all of us anticipated that we were going to do. You mean something else. But we love the consulting work. We love the variability of the projects and that sort of stuff. So sales marketing is a little bit of a of a necessary evil. And so let’s just be as efficient as we can. I think that’s my goal given the choice anybody I’ve ever worked with. Would you rather do some more calculations? Would you rather brainstorm on some ideas, put a value engineer something, or would you rather write a proposal? Nobody would rather write the proposal.
Scott Steiding [00:08:58]:
So I think that’s number one. So I think that a little bit is how can you use some basic data to help us understand where we can put in the least amount of energy or time and get the best results. And then you were asking, like, if we’re gonna start with one, I think that your win rate and your value conversion rate is the first number that’s really important. And win rate being, if I go after a hundred proposals and I win 46 of them, then my win rate is 46%. But then the other one, the value conversion rate is if the total value of all the proposals I went after was a hundred dollars and we won $38 of that, then our value conversion rate is 38%. And it’s important to distinguish those two because most terms are better at winning small proposals than they are winning the larger proposals with the large proposals and large pursuit streams spend most of your time.
Katie [00:09:52]:
But I would challenge some of that. So I love tracking win rates, certainly support everybody tracking that. And there’s no excuse not to these days, but sometimes the procurement process. Is a little bit long winded. And so there’s a qualifications and you wanna track whether or not you make it a step two proposal and then maybe get a step two proposal and you wanna track on, well, do you get invited to provide a best and final offer? Do you go interview? You wanna track your ability to keep moving forward. And then, on your comment of chasing big work versus small work, I think if you had the systems and infrastructure in place, I think you would find that you’re still spending a lot of time and resources chasing small work.
Scott Steiding [00:10:34]:
I agree with everything you’re saying. I think where I’m going is that if I gotta pick one place to start, I’m gonna start at that final place where it really matters whether you win or lose. Yes. And whether that opportunity, that proposal that lead opportunity proposal turns into a project. And so I start there and move up the funnel. And then similarly, I start there and move down the funnel. Most professional services from approximately 80% of your work comes from somebody you worked with before. You need to be just as thoughtful about that 80% as you do for the 20%.
Scott Steiding [00:11:07]:
Do you know what I mean? That’s coming from net new clients and work your way up. So I agree completely. And I also very much agree with, I think you should track if I’m going all the way up, you should track leads. Where is that coming from? Where is that originating? I’m in a solid opportunity, and I’ll define that as sort of the RFQ stage, qualifications. And then for me, the difference between the lead and an opportunity is an opportunity is I know who the client is, their organization. I know where the project is. I know what the scope is. I may not know all the details.
Scott Steiding [00:11:38]:
And then at the proposal stage, then exact location, exact scope, schedule, what are the deliverable, who are the partners, all those sorts of things, and you’re in that sort of thing. And you learn more as you go through, but there’s been let’s say you wanna get into a new university in a particular system. Let’s say you’ve been doing a bunch of work at UGA and you wanna pivot or go to Georgia Tech. Well, some of that experience is going to transfer over. But the other one is you’re gonna have to just spend some time
Katie [00:12:05]:
Right.
Scott Steiding [00:12:06]:
Introducing your organization to the group at Georgia Tech regardless of how many Georgia Tech alum you have on your team so that they become acquainted with your firm. And so I think that from that same point, it’s worth tracking. But going in, you gotta know that your win rate, value conversion rate, Georgia Tech, if you’ve never submitted over there before, it’s gonna be different than it is at UGA. So you’ve gotta familiarize them, and that’s part of the process and all those sorts of things.
Katie [00:12:33]:
And you’re right. I think so many firms really tout their repeat client percentage. I mean, that’s something to be excited about, but also at the same time, having been an owner myself looking at stuff, I’m like, well, yeah. Well, one, you’re not gonna say if it’s bad. And two, why isn’t it a %? It sounds like you’re not retaining everybody. You’ve pissed somebody off. Right. There’s always that skeptic in the room.
Katie [00:12:57]:
And one thing that I think you’ve done really well in your positions certainly in the past, and I think you’re bringing it forward now is really empowering everybody on the payroll, whether they’ve got a PE after their name or a AI or whatever it is, they’ve also got this abs, right? Always be selling. Yeah. Everybody’s kind of empowered to be that seller doer, that doer seller and looking for opportunity, all in the spirit of client service, keeping your ears to the ground, listening for opportunities for potential added scope or new contracts, or, Hey, maybe you’re great. And you got an on call service or you got a, an MSA. How do you sell into that and continue to add value? And then I wanna ask you on those scenarios, like what’s important to track from a a data standpoint as you’re looking at increasing your share of wallet with existing clients, Scott? Like, what would you look at?
Scott Steiding [00:13:50]:
Great question. So I’m gonna maybe talk to the philosophy and then I’ll get into the to the number there, which is it’s fun. This is like my first full year at the new firm and my background’s project management. And I think that sales and marketing inside a professional services firm should adopt project management lingo and project delivery lingo because that’s what everybody does on a day to day basis.
Katie [00:14:11]:
Yes.
Scott Steiding [00:14:11]:
So we do marketing projects. Do you know what I mean? It’s sort of a sale or a pursuit or that sort of thing. Not necessarily saying campaign and some of those other sorts of things. I’m always trying to use the language that everybody else in the organization uses on a day to day basis. Right? Because everyone has their vernacular. And then so we’ve created project plans around some accounts and around some larger, like, market sectors that we’re looking because the team’s familiar with that. So without geeking out too much, what’s our goal by the end of the year? What’s the work we need to do sort of quarter by quarter? And so if there’s other project managers listening to this, they’re building up a work breakdown schedule or a schedule a work breakdown structure or a schedule in their head. And then what are the resources I need to accomplish each one of those work packets? And so back to your comment about engaging everybody is that if everybody understands where the goals of the project are just as you would if you’re designing a new building and everybody understands what their role is, what’s the scope, what are the roles, and what’s the schedule.
Scott Steiding [00:15:06]:
It’s not a individual all star approach where one person is sort of doing all of this. It’s a system where everybody sort of understands what their role is. And back to your comment is, okay, if I’m the project manager and I’m a junior project manager, and this is not the biggest project we’re doing with one of our best clients but a small one. Hey. They need to be aware of that and they need to know, hey. There are always eyes on the work that we’re doing for this particular client. They’re one of our best. We gotta deliver.
Scott Steiding [00:15:31]:
And just even little things like that can really help. And so we do try to in terms of, like like, what we benchmark, we do try to figure out how much I’ll just say in terms of architectural practice. How much is that architectural practice depending on structural engineering every year? And then what part of their business are we getting? If you want me to nerd out on that, the easy math is that most architectural practices, if I was to hang a number on it, say they do $200,000 in revenue per employee, and then structural engineering fees are 10% of the total fee. So go to LinkedIn. How many employees that firm have? Multiply that by 200,000, and then find a tenth of that. If you’re a structural engineering firm, if you’re a MEP firm, there’s other metrics. You guys can look online and find this for our stuff. But that gives us an idea on what that organization is spending on structural engineering.
Scott Steiding [00:16:18]:
And now that’s just a first pass. It’s higher and lower depending on your billing tech, what have you. But I think that can help you, I think, from a couple different standpoints is and then if you have an understanding on the type of work that they do, hey, maybe we’re doing a lot of educational higher educational work with a particular organization, but we’re not necessarily doing anything with them in mixed use or something like that. Or, hey. We’re doing a bunch of stuff with them on advanced manufacturing, but we haven’t broken in with them over on the research, the lab design. So we’re aware, I think, number one of what the opportunity is, and then we’re just trying to track. And some might think that that’s kind of a cold maybe calculated event, but we do really good work. Our clients come back to us.
Scott Steiding [00:16:58]:
So I think that if we’re gonna work with clients, let’s work with clients that we like working with, let’s work with clients that we’re most aligned with. And if those two things click, why wouldn’t we try to build a bigger relationship? It benefits us because we like working with them and we think our resume is superior to me so are others. And from their standpoint, there’s always the shuffle, the contracts that, hey, how do we get the resumes? How do we get all this sort of stuff? We’ve got some clients where our marketing team and their marketing team, like, the principal say go on an opportunity, and then the marketing teams are working so closely together. They know each other to get some of those things. So we track to stop what’s the opportunity, but we’ll track win rates, value conversion rates on RFQs, on proposals, and that sort of stuff coming in. I think the other one which we’re tracking, which I bet a bunch of other firms don’t is we are actively looking for and bringing opportunities to our architectural clients and to our design build clients. We’re not just the structural engineering firm that’s the baby bird and the nest saying feed me, feed me, which I think is being a sub consultant underneath one of those two, which is often the prime. I think it’s unusual, but we’re actively out networking and we’re hearing about things.
Scott Steiding [00:18:08]:
And when we do hear about an opportunity, why wouldn’t we bring it to the principals and the other and these other firms? And they’re gonna take the lead Right. On that. But why wouldn’t we bring it to them? They bring enough opportunities to us. Because, again, same thing. Whether you’re an architect or design build contractors, none of them went to college. So they could do sales of marketing. It’s like, so
Scott Steiding [00:18:26]:
we have a lay a lead or a
Scott Steiding [00:18:28]:
leg up or something. Hey. We know the owner. I think you’d be a good partner for this. And we do try to track those as well so that we’re bringing additional value to that relationship.
Katie [00:18:37]:
And that’s unique of y’all because you’re a business model. You also do a good portion of your work as direct for owners where you do have that opportunity where you can bring that in. I wanna go back to one thing that you said earlier about, Hey, if you’ve been working with a client and you’re aligned with them and you know the folks, why wouldn’t you wanna do more work with it? I also think about it from, typically the cost of client acquisition goes down there because you’ve already got those built in synergies. Your marketing teams are working together, so it’s less strain on the technical teams. But then you also know the creditworthiness of that organization. So there’s less financial risk there, and you know what that’s gonna look like. And maybe you’ve already gotten a a general contract, and so there’s less back and forth with contract. There’s just a lot of things that just kinda make that make sense.
Katie [00:19:23]:
But then at the same time, you also wanna be, I think, the responsible business leader and not have too many eggs in one basket. Right. And still remain diversified where say, you know, that particular organization gets acquired. M and a is still very popular in our industry. And how do you make sure you don’t get lost in the wash? So Scott, I think we can all agree that data is super, super helpful at allowing us to make informed educated decisions. A lot of people say, Hey, numbers never lie, but I think the savvy communications person can make sure that the numbers tell the story that they wanna see. So maybe what are some lessons learned from the field on making sure you’re correctly interpreting the data without having rose colored glasses on?
Scott Steiding [00:20:12]:
Great. When you were given an example there, I might know you sparked one in terms of kind of alignment and some of that sort of stuff. So I’ve been in a spot before where we had insight into it, what employee satisfaction looked like, and you could sort of slice and dice that. We could see what year over year revenue was and what profitability was and what win win loss rates. And in an instance, we were growing with an account that looked very attractive from the outside of the opportunities. But once we started digging into the client satisfaction stuff, we were never scoring high. We just we were never getting over the bar. And that was the first red flag.
Scott Steiding [00:20:47]:
We tried different project managers, didn’t matter. We just couldn’t get over the hump there. And from a profitability standpoint, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. And he’s called middle of the the table. And then we started looking at those employee satisfaction stuff. So now I’m talking all kinds of different data points. And and it was relatively low, the individuals and the various departments are sort of working at that. And then we mapped it against all of the accounts.
Scott Steiding [00:21:11]:
You I mean, if you have your dotted line in the middle, what’s your median? Is it highly profitable and high revenue? It’s sort of in your upper right, low revenue and biometrics. And this one was below the line. And get to the end there quickly is that some of the data points told of this great story that we should really be doubling down and continuing to invest and sort of doing all these other things because we’re able to continue to grow. We went the other way. We decided to start raising our prices, which was our nice way of exiting that that account. If you’re not prepared to have that tough conversation with them, just start raising your your prices and you will self select. You’ll self select out. Right?
Katie [00:21:48]:
I think we all have those clients where we’re like, oh, they came back again at a zero.
Scott Steiding [00:21:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ll fast forward. We really pivoted from business development standpoint. We had to replace a bunch of revenue. But a year later, we had replaced that. And so the organizational metrics revenue stayed the same or was that profitability was a monster. The one that was super interesting to us was that employee satisfaction went up.
Scott Steiding [00:22:13]:
And it starts to make sense is that there’s just clients either culturally or individually are never gonna give you a a nine or a 10 or a zero to 10.
Katie [00:22:22]:
They’re always gonna beat you up.
Scott Steiding [00:22:23]:
Yeah. And that was their thing. And we hired individuals who really cared about the work, and they were working their butts off, and they were doing their best. And to say objectively, they were doing a great job, but it was just either the client or the organization was never gonna give a thumbs up, which was really hard, you mean, on them. And I’m just kinda too short for that. Do you know what I mean? So freeing the staff from that situation, their satisfaction went up. So then that you really gotta win. So you’ve gotta win in terms of how your employees are feeling about the work that they’re doing, feeling about themselves, and the challenges professionally, and those sorts of things, and the organization’s doing well.
Scott Steiding [00:23:00]:
So I think there’s one where I would say is that depending on which data point you looked at, there was a different story. So bringing multiple data points together and then kinda having a discussion around it really gave us a different view on really what was happening. Rarely is it just one data point. I don’t think you wanna make a big decision based on one data point.
Katie [00:23:21]:
Well, and I like your surprising moment of this all happened, but employee satisfaction went up, and you wouldn’t necessarily look at those together. I know I get some marketing related newsletters, and it’s they’ll pair two data points together that shouldn’t match. And it’s like people eating chips and the amount of car crashes are. It’s just why are these the same? But I think kind of your idea of making sure you’re not making decisions based on one point of data and not really thinking through the domino effect of what that decision might impact. Across the organization is, is really, really helpful. Scott, for some of our listeners who may not have a formal data strategy in place today, what is one small step that you would advise that they start And what type of, I guess, onboarding or approach should they take with data as they build their strategy and they build their data lakes?
Scott Steiding [00:24:20]:
I take the first if they don’t have a strategy, the first is to recognize the sin that they they
Scott Steiding [00:24:27]:
They need to they need to recognize the error of their ways. And then, you know but seriously,
Scott Steiding [00:24:31]:
I think I’d start with what’s your top line revenue number for the year? And then you gotta figure out that. Remember, we we talked about that a little bit further. What’s your win rate? What’s your value conversion rate? I mean, if you’re just gonna start basic CRMs are so easy and so inexpensive now. You’re not unique. Don’t make changes to it. Just use the out of the box. I went over. So don’t make any of those changes.
Scott Steiding [00:24:55]:
Use the out of the box reports. Use the out of the box things. And I would just start there. And then I think I would try to get with operations to look down through as you’re building your strategy out, build down through here. We’re gonna do client satisfaction stuff. Are we just gonna track profitability? Are we gonna track this by geography, by scope of work, by market sector? There’s all kind of these other ways to look at. I’m big right now on quality revenue is the my new buzzword. You know, quality rep because revenue is not created equal.
Scott Steiding [00:25:24]:
And our industry has a significant shortage of professionals that are available to deliver the work. I know AI is coming, but we’ve got a lot of baby boomers that are retiring at the same time too. Do you mean we’re losing a lot of knowledge in our industry? Why wouldn’t you focus your time and energy on those areas where the work is interesting to your staff, it’s challenging, and it’s profitable. So you can’t do those things if you’re not tracking that piece. And then that’ll inform your sales funnel, your marketing funnel things. Hey, where are we gonna make investments in the website or in our campaigns or doing those sorts of things? What are the groups we need to get in front Marketing one to many activities. And then me, business development is one to one or one to few. Marketing’s one to several or one to many.
Scott Steiding [00:26:08]:
It is kind of how I define. Now I find those there’s gonna be other people that
Scott Steiding [00:26:11]:
are gonna cringe that are listening to
Scott Steiding [00:26:13]:
this at those definitions, but I find that the easiest. And then whether you start at the top, work your way back down to what your sales goal is or start at your sales goal and work your way up the funnel. Just starting to pick those metrics along the way, but there’s probably two to start with. You could get away with tracking eight and really have insight into where to optimize, where to put your time and and energy before. And then let your strategy sort of evolve around that. And I think that that strategy as much as culturally, what’s acceptable inside the organization, you know, how do people work more than, you know, we’ll do this. And my last one is, I think it’s better to error on the side of maybe tracking less than more. You don’t want people to feel like they’re just feeding a CRM system or an ERP system with all this data if it’s not being used.
Katie [00:27:02]:
Yeah. I’m a big believer of starting small and then determining how you wanna mature from there. So follow-up question. Okay. I’m new. I’ve got my system set up. Got some data going in it. How frequently should I be looking at it and how frequently should I be questioning what I’m seeing? Weekly, monthly, quarterly? All depends.
Scott Steiding [00:27:23]:
Yeah. So we’ve got dashboards that I’m instantaneously being updated.
Katie [00:27:28]:
Oh, that’s too much.
Scott Steiding [00:27:29]:
It’s amazing. Come on. Jump into the jump into the pool. Water’s nice over here. I think you you should be looking at things monthly. You know, realistically, it’s like we’ve got a new ERP system. Acumatica is a group we’re using. I don’t think that’s one that’s that’s often sort of heard of, but some of the dashboards and the plugins that are available there, we’re surfacing the stuff that shows up on the dashboard is updated, I say, instantaneously.
Scott Steiding [00:27:53]:
I think every five or ten minutes opens up. And what I’m trying to do a little bit at the new organization is, at the old organization, I could just glance at my charts and I knew how we were doing because I was so familiar with that language, the data language and what the numbers should look like. Whereas at the new firm, I’ve got this sticky note here that’s telling me where my numbers should be sort of on a monthly basis. And so I’m not waiting to the thirtieth or the thirty first to see, hey, how are we doing? And so then the other piece I think is the number is a measure of activity. And some of that activity you can control and some of it you can’t. And so it’s back to me saying that there’s this language that shows up. If we’re going after an RFQ and we’re on four teams, we’re tracking all four of those. We’re not tracking that.
Scott Steiding [00:28:39]:
That is one. It’s all four and whoever has the best relationship with those particular architectural design build firms or what have you. We’re playing to win and help all four teams win. Yeah. That’s the the case. Or if it’s one, Jimmy, then it’s then it’s, you know, so those sorts of things. So there’s ways to kinda massage that by where I’m going is is, like, there’s a story around the data. If you’re checking in monthly, it’s just gonna take you longer to learn what that story is.
Scott Steiding [00:29:08]:
And then in terms of having the team review together, we do it quarterly. Gotcha. So I nerd out on this stuff that I’m not pinging people daily, hourly, weekly. I could take some discipline on my standpoint, but I am trying to get the rhythm. At my old firm, Monday was all was when all the staff would often go into the CRM system. It wasn’t so much on a Friday. A little bit of that had to do with when time sheets are due and kind of, you know, all that here. It’s kinda Thursday and Friday.
Scott Steiding [00:29:36]:
There’s a lot of stuff that’s happening more frequently as we go because there’s not sort of that same line here. So I think things are happening a little bit more organically, but I don’t know that I would have anticipate those types of things. And then my last one you were talking about, sort of getting to mirror that, you gotta track it over time. So all the up systems show you instantaneously what you did this month, what you did next month, what the other. If you plot that on a graph, it’s like an EKG. It’s bouncing up and down. A trailing three month average and a trailing twelve month average gives you a sense of how is the business trending. And even if the business is trending up, don’t be alarmed if you see a little bit of dip because there’s a seasonality to when work comes out depending which market sectors you’re in and construction schedule and then geography can play into those sorts of things.
Scott Steiding [00:30:23]:
But it’s fun. I have been able to get a lot of my technical colleagues interested in this because we like the data.
Katie [00:30:31]:
Yeah.
Scott Steiding [00:30:31]:
You know, none of us is dying to do sales, but we can sort of look at it’s almost like baseball. You’re sitting there and you’re counting out all the at bats and you’re keeping score yourself and sort of doing all the other types of things. For me, I think it’s a little bit like that is is okay making this activity that we don’t enjoy as much as our technical work, making it more fun because there’s numbers involved.
Katie [00:30:51]:
Yeah. Number you engineers and y’all’s numbers. At the marketing agency, we have a math team that does numbers, and then the rest of us are
Scott Steiding [00:31:02]:
Fantastic. Of marketers. But I think that kudos no. But I’d say kudos to you folks in that you’ve recognized that that’s an important part of your business, whether that’s serving Smart AGs, business development, sales and marketing activities, and or whether that’s called on to help your clients. I think that’s smart. I like the math team.
Katie [00:31:25]:
So, Scott, I know you didn’t get to where you are overnight, but what resources did you use to kinda help educate yourself to know how to better use data when you’re driving growth strategies? What books, authors, podcasts, YouTube channels, organizations, where did you turn to kinda help broaden your understanding?
Scott Steiding [00:31:46]:
So I’m old. So, originally, I read it off of stone tablets that someone had created.
Katie [00:31:51]:
I’ll shall.
Scott Steiding [00:31:53]:
It track it track it’s win rate. No. I think that one of the first ones is a book called Professional Services Marketing by Schultz and Doerr, d o e r r, and it’s an older book. And it’s not as sort of tech, social media savvy, some of those sorts of thing. But there’s a lot of just basic principles in there, which are great. And it’s also targeting professional services, not just our industry, AEC, also accounting, legal, what have you. But there’s some good basic and there’s some examples in there that’ll get you thinking. SMPS has, like, a five or six book series.
Scott Steiding [00:32:28]:
It starts to takes you through the whole art from market research through to client management. Each one of those, like, individual books talks about polls less or stuff. There’s some good tidbits in there, so I’ll give them a plug. But if I were jumping in now, I would do it differently is I would just use AI. Yeah. Conversation with me right now doesn’t end without me mentioning at least once, but I wouldn’t put my data in a tool outside of a firewall. But I certainly you’re not the questions you’re asking aren’t anything. And if you’re not sure what questions to ask AI or the ScottBot, as I like to call it, you can just ask AI, hey, I’m trying to develop this.
Scott Steiding [00:33:08]:
What do I need to know? And you can have a conversation and it can explain the math to you and it can explain the the metrics. Maybe I’ll go back to a question that you asked earlier, which was about strategy is, I think I would probably lean on AI to help me develop the strategy and help me what are the best few metrics you mean that I need to track for this? And then they can help you develop a plan to move up the funnel and move down the funnel. I I’d be leaning heavy on artificial intelligence to give me some ideas. And AI may not necessarily be great at giving you the numerical answer. Like AI is not as great. Generative AI isn’t as great as doing the math, but it’s certainly really, really good at helping you identify the equations that you need to implement and understand the strategy and understand the metrics that you should be tracking.
Katie [00:33:51]:
I think it’s a really helpful tool to help you educate yourself. It’s not always gonna give you the answer, but it can at least help me understand some nebulous topics and enough to where I can have a conversation with the subject matter expert that’s gonna help me deliver on whatever we’re trying to do together. Yeah.
Scott Steiding [00:34:08]:
I think that’d be how I’d probably go about it now if I wasn’t if I was just starting out. I’d lean heavily on the Scott bot.
Katie [00:34:16]:
Okay. Well, Scott, this has been great. Your passion for the industry, for the position, for all things data as always shines through. For any of our listeners that might want to stay connected with you or learn more about your thoughts and ideas and what Ben plus is doing, what’s the best way for them to reach you and kind of follow along on this journey?
Scott Steiding [00:34:38]:
I think reach out to me through LinkedIn is probably the easiest one. And then I’d say the last few years, I probably speak once or twice a year, so I’d keep an eye out for that. And I normally post something. I’m not in the most prolific LinkedIn poster on this, but I bet I could do more around beta. But if I’ve got a speaking engagement come up or something like that, we’d love to see more people in the audience and talking about this and technology and all the ways to get the technology to do work while we’re doing things that we’d rather do. Thanks for the time.
Katie [00:35:05]:
Thanks again, and thank you to listeners for staying with us to the builder end. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure you subscribe. Give us some feedback. As we continue with the show, we always love to hear from our listeners, and we’ll see you next time. AEC Marketing for Principles is presented by SmartEgies, the AEC growth consulting firm that has been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 02/2008. The show is hosted by me, Katie Cash, senior VP at Smartergies. I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, a guest request, or a topic request for a future episode, send an email or a voice memo to [email protected].
Katie [00:35:49]:
And if you’re looking for past episodes, be sure to visit our podcast page at smartergies.com/podcast. We hope you’ll tell your friends and colleagues about our show and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes. Thanks for listening.
