For Engineering Firms, It Takes More Than Talent to Win is a guest post by Christian Haring
You’ve got plenty of talent and depth on your bench, and your sales team is doing a great job putting together compelling proposals. Yet too often, your team is cut in the final round, or turned away before you’ve even had a chance to show what you’re capable of. If you’ve been in this business for any length of time, you know every play can’t be a touchdown. Yet if you find yourself going up against the same competitors over and over again, or pursuing projects that aren’t an ideal fit, there’s one way to refresh that pipeline and win more business that few engineering firms appreciate or exploit. In fact, it’s probably the last aspect of your business that you would associate with winning anything, let alone new business: regulatory compliance.
Whether you see it as a growth driver or not, licensing and entity management are basically the playing field you provide for your business development teams. And at key moments throughout your firm’s corporate lifecycle, licensing influences your playbook as well, affecting agility, profitability, and performance long after the contracts are signed. By creating a favorable regulatory playing field, equipping your team, and embracing the power of compliance to enhance your brand, you can position your firm to win more of the projects you really want.
In episode 98 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I speak with Ben Walpole, a writer and editor for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) strategic communications team. We will talk about a few very important management skills that civil engineers should build in order to increase their effectiveness as civil engineering managers.
