Most firms treat BD like a department. There’s one person, maybe a small team, with the title, the CRM login, and the pipeline report. Everyone else “does the work.” The unspoken deal is that BD brings the work in the door and the team delivers it.
Here’s what nobody tells you about that structure: it leaves the firm’s best relationships sitting on the bench.
Think about who actually talks to your clients, and remember that in AEC, “client” means different things depending on where you sit. For an architect, it’s the owner. For an engineer, it’s often the architect. For a subcontractor, it’s the GC. For an owner’s rep or consultant, it’s the owner, and every design and construction partner at the table.
Now think about who holds those relationships day to day. The project architect running the weekly OAC meeting. The structural or MEP engineer who answers the RFI in two hours instead of two days, and gets remembered for it. The GC’s project manager and superintendent the owner trusts with the hard news. The subcontractor’s foreman the GC asks for by name on the next bid. The owner’s rep who has walked a client through three projects already. None of these people would call themselves business developers. Plenty of them would tell you they “don’t do sales,” and they’d say it like it’s a relief.
But when that client starts planning the next project, who do you think hears about it first? It’s not your BD director. It’s the person they already trust.
And by the time that next project gets to a shortlist, the client already has a feeling about your team, built over months of meetings, calls, and site visits your BD person was never in. Nobody hires a BD department. They hire people they already know and have worked with.
What I often see is that BD gets one seat, and the principals or leads who are seller-doers have the other seats at the table. Everyone else who has relationships sits in the bleachers, just watching.
Not only do firms risk missing out on those relationships, but when that person leaves, the relationships go with them. A project architect or PM takes a job across town, and the client who loved working with them follows the person, not the logo. A principal retires, and a decade of relationships walks out the door with them. The firms that hold on to their clients through turnover are the ones where every important client knows three or four people at the firm, not just one. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the whole team is playing.
Look around your market. Which firms are struggling right now, and which ones are growing? My guess is the ones struggling have a handful of people who win all the work, and everyone else’s role is muddied.
When I was consulting, I talked with a lot of firms. One of them, a firm I ended up not working with, came to me with a problem. The owner was semi-retired and had transitioned their clients to designated successors. On paper, the handoff was done. But repeat work had become inconsistent, and they couldn’t figure out why.
Two things were happening. First, the successors weren’t bought in. They were running the same plays over and over “just like they’ve been doing it for years”, and those clients are taken for granted. The owner had built those relationships over years, and nobody was nurturing them. They were waiting for work to walk in the door, because in the past it always had.
Second, nobody was building new relationships. The firm had never built a BD culture. Even after the transition, they still expected one person to bring in the clients. That person just wasn’t in the game anymore.
Just in case you’ve been wondering, I have been watching a lot of sports lately. Now onto the meat of this article.
Five plays for building a winning BD team
1. Redefine who’s on the roster. Your roster is bigger than your BD team. Step one is just naming it out loud: everyone who touches a client or a partner is part of BD. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be the one who scores. It means everyone understands that how they show up in the Tuesday OAC meeting, the design review, or the site walk is part of how the firm wins its next job. When a project engineer hears “the way you handled that late design change is why they want us on the next one,” you are onto something. They start to see the relationship as something they built, not just a project they finished. That firm I was talking about? Their roster was one person deep. When the owner stepped back, nobody else saw those clients as theirs to grow.
2. Scout the relationships you already have. Most firms have no idea who knows whom. Your mechanical engineer went to school with the facilities director at a hospital system you’ve been chasing for three years. Your newest project manager used to work for the owner’s rep on your top prospect. Your senior designer has teamed with an architecture firm you’ve never pursued. All of that stuff almost never makes it into a CRM. It lives in people’s heads, and it stays there until someone asks. So ask. If that firm had mapped who actually knew each client before the transition, they would have seen how thin those relationships really were. (There’s a simple way to do this below.)
3. Give people positions, not quotas. Not everyone on a team plays the same position, and that’s the point. The people who try to turn their whole firm into people who bring in work usually end up with a lot of uncomfortable architects and engineers and nothing to show for it. What works better is helping each person see which position they already play:
The Front Line: project architects, PMs, superintendents, foremen, project engineers. The people the client deals with week to week. They hear about the next project first.
The Technical Voice: designers, engineers, estimators, planners, specialists. The problem-solvers clients call when something’s hard. Their expertise is the proof behind the promise.
The Connector: the person on your team who knows everyone at every AIA, ACEC, AGC, or SMPS event and actually likes going. Every firm has at least one. Let them do what they’re good at, on purpose.
The Executive Presence: principals and leaders who carry the weight when it’s time for the real conversation or the ask.
Special teams: marketing and proposal teams. They come in at the moments that decide the game: the proposal, the shortlist, the interview. They don’t always get the credit, but nobody wins work without them.
Coach/Strategist: that’s the BD role. Not the only player, but the one who reads the market, decides which pursuits are worth chasing, sees the whole field, calls the plays, and makes sure the ball gets passed.
What do muddied roles look like in practice? The successors at that firm inherited the owner’s clients, but nobody gave them a position to play.
4. Start with small asks, then celebrate the wins. You don’t need your project architect or your foreman at every networking lunch. You need them to tell you when a client or partner mentions the next project. That’s it. Small, specific asks work: “If a client mentions anything coming up next year, send me a two-line text.” “Pick one industry event this quarter and I’ll go with you.” And when one of those small moments turns into a real opportunity, say so loudly in the all-hands, in the team huddle, with names attached. People repeat what gets recognized. When someone on the project team sees their tip become a shortlist, they’ll start listening for the next one. Those successors didn’t need to become the owner overnight. A few small, specific habits, like a check-in call after every project closeout, would have kept those clients from being taken for granted.
5. Divide and connect. Think of it as zone coverage for industry events, and it’s the one I’ll go deeper on Thursday. When a firm sends four people to an industry event, those four people usually spend the evening standing together near the bar, talking to each other. That’s not BD. That’s a team outing with a name badge. Divide and connect is different. Everyone knows who they’re there to see, who they’re introducing to whom, and who’s following up afterward. It’s also how a firm like that one starts building new relationships, instead of waiting for work to walk in the door.
Leaders, this starts with you.
If you’re a principal or firm leader, none of these plays work unless your team sees you running them. Your people are watching what you reward. If the only BD wins you celebrate are the ones with your name on them, everyone else will stay in the bleachers. Give people time for this, talk about it in reviews, and make building relationships part of how people get promoted. And think about what it means for the business: every client relationship that lives with one person is a risk to your backlog, and that risk gets bigger the day that person retires or the firm changes hands. The firm in my story learned that the hard way.
Emerging leaders, this is your opening.
If you’re a PM, project architect, engineer, or superintendent reading this, you’re already on the roster, whether anyone has told you or not. The relationships you’re building now, one OAC meeting and one returned call at a time, are your reputation. They’re also how people move from doing the work to leading it. The successors in that story inherited relationships they never built themselves. Don’t wait to inherit yours. Start building them now.
How to actually do this, this week
Call a thirty-minute team huddle to map your relationships. Not a big strategy offsite. One meeting, one shared spreadsheet, this week.
Send something like this to five to ten people who touch clients or partners (mix project, technical, and leadership):
Quick ask – “I’m putting together a map of who we know across the firm, because I’m pretty sure our best relationships aren’t all in the CRM. Can you grab thirty minutes Thursday? Come with the names of five people outside the firm you have a real relationship with: owners, owner’s reps, architects, engineers, contractors, trade partners, consultants, anyone. No prep beyond that.”
In the meeting, build one sheet with five columns:
1. Contact name
2. Company
3. Who on our team knows them
4. How strong the relationship (1 = met them, 2 = we talk regularly, 3 = they’d pick up my call tonight)
5. Next natural touchpoint (a project milestone, an event, a question we could ask)
Then ask three questions out loud:
a. Where does more than one of us know the same person?
b. Which “3s” are at firms or organizations we’re actively pursuing, or want to team with?
c. Who knows someone and never mentioned it because they didn’t think it counted?
Before everyone leaves, pick three relationships to activate before the end of October. Give each one a named owner and a specific next step. Not “reach out.” Something like “Invite them to the November chapter event,” or “Ask how the phase one move-in went.”
That’s it. Thirty minutes, and you’ll probably find out your firm is better connected than you thought.
Want the template? I built a Relationship Map you can use for this huddle: the columns above, the strength scale, and a priority column that flags which relationships to activate first. Reply to this email with MAP and I’ll send it to you.
Final Notes
When a client picks your firm, they aren’t picking a proposal. They’re picking people, and most of those people spent months building the relationship before anyone called it BD.
The best firm leaders I know aren’t the ones who hold every relationship themselves. Like good coaches, they can see the whole field, every relationship the firm holds, and they know how to get the whole team moving toward the same goal.
One person can open the door. It takes the whole team to make a client want to stay.
And if you’re heading into holiday event season with a team in tow, Thursday’s paid piece is the playbook for exactly that: how to divide and connect at every Q4 event, from the heads-up message ten days out to the debrief that decides who follows up with whom.
As always, thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
Your BD BFF,
Ivi
