If business development for general contractors looks night and day than it did a decade ago, just wait till you see how indistinguishable it will be in the coming decade. You've likely heard the projection that 41% of the construction industry—primarily in managerial roles—is due to retire. This is part of the reason why a search for "business development construction" on LinkedIn's job page will provide you with 40 pages of general contractors eagerly looking to bolster their futures.

With so many business relationships relying on longstanding repeat business (over 80% for most firms; 90%+ average for our partners) technological advancement in the last 20 years sidestepped customer-relations and took off in the realm of the (literal) nuts-and-bolts of project management. This paved the way for the flying successes of the Autodesks and Procores of the world (you may have heard of them).

It wasn’t until a global pandemic that we all collectively realized how vulnerable we were and how we had to become experts on subjects like supply chain disruption, the importance of diversified project portfolios, and the subtly disarming nature of a dog in one’s Zoom background.

We also learned that relationships didn’t need to be in-person to still be interpersonal. The general contractors that found the most success in 2020, and will continue to do so moving forward, are the ones that

• are the most agile and adaptable;
• forecasted pipeline to cover themselves and keep their crews intact;
• the ones that adopted tech to fill in the gaps emphasized by the pandemic.

For reasons of discovered convenience for both sides, it’ll be a hybrid approach from here on out. Of course, Covid-19 didn’t cause the change so much as it accelerated what was already on its way.

Step 1: Focus on systems, not goals.

For some GCs, hiring for a previously non-existing position requires a bit of faith that the team or individual will “figure it out.” It means potentially under-paying the under-experienced. It’s the fruit of the labor of those under-experienced that will be the propelling force in both the future of the company and their personal career advancement. If it doesn’t work out, it was an expensive diversion and trying again will have less oomph behind it: “Maybe we just go back to the not-focusing-on-sales thing.”

The key is to do everything possible to empower your business development team. It’s deciding on a timeboxed goal (quarterly, annually, 5 years—it's your call), strategizing a system to achieve that goal, then not fretting about the goal again. Business development, and symbiotically marketing, is a long-game strategy akin to a marathon. It takes accumulating data, and then making careful projections based on that data, before dramatic actions are appropriate. Setting both short and longterm key performance indicators (KPI) are necessary to stay on track, and performance on the short will influence whether the longer ones need to change. Bricked quarterly KPI's foreshadow longer term KPI's needing a readjustment.

James Clear’s Atomic Habits posits that we set goals incorrectly. For example, both teams in the Super Bowl this year will have the goal of winning, yet only one will. So what good are goals? It’s the systems in place to reach those goals that actually matter and the team that will win the Super Bowl will be the one that figured out the best system (even if you’re reading this in 2026, it’s whatever team has Tom Brady).

The following data is from a Stambaugh Ness survey of 2021 business development empowerment priorities voted on by members of AEC firms, in order of most to least voted on. They’re a good compass for your own firm when it comes to where to empower BD team members with systems:

28% Establishing direction

25% Creating/budgeting time

22% Providing training

20% Implementing accountability

5% Developing incentive program

It’s worth noting that the role in question is the seller-doer, hence the 2nd place emphasis on figuring out the way the BD team member(s) manage their time. Singular hat-wearing BD team members won’t have to worry about time management to the degree of their multitasking counterparts.

Empowerment techniques won’t look the same across the board and the annual construction volume and growth goals of individual general contractors will differ dramatically.

Step 2: Seeds need nurturing.

To some construction vets, “sales” is a dirty word. This line of thinking has inevitably led to stunted company growth for one obvious reason: how could a business in a capitalist economic system reach its full potential if increasing sales isn’t an explicit goal?

At its core, demonizing sales is wholesomely-intentioned. The modern construction industry was built on handshakes that evolved into full-blown friendships; business had always been about remembering clients’ kids’ names (best of luck if Elon Musk is your client) and playing rounds of golf before the holidays without so much as a mentioning of work.

It’s been said that the best salesmen are the ones you can’t tell are even selling anything. Perhaps there was a time where general contractors didn’t realize they were "selling" anything (or perhaps we’re being the wholesome ones now). Either way, sales is here to stay, and the contractors that prioritize empowering their sales teams are the ones whose growth will squeeze out their competitors who do not.

Pro tip: As a euphemism, call sales “business development.” (it makes some people feel more comfortable)

For an industry that tends to shy away from automation while valuing tried-and-true manual processes (including the interpersonal nature of construction), one can take solace in the fact that business development can never be automated. The tools for business development, of course, can be (but that's skipping ahead to Part 2).

It's the living, breathing relationships that make projects a reality. In that sense, giving business development a name and priority, no longer relegating it to a lower-tiered non-department on autopilot, is more in line with the longstanding framework of the construction industry. Respecting the craft is formally deciding that business relationships take dedicated time to nurture, and aren't just one-and-done seeds that are planted and forgotten about.

Step 3: Adopt tools that simplify and accelerate business development

Never before in history have general contractors been more incentivized to grow their project pipeline and improve existing client relationships—the dual core of construction business development. This incentive is true for three reasons:

1) Bond, Client Bond. The pandemic caused a tightening of construction volume that is projected to loosen its belt a bit over the next two years. This pull and eventual push will reveal which GCs were the best at managing their current clients—keeping rapport high even during a dry season—and poaching new clients away from their competitors with more lax client management.

2) Desperate times call for... a bidding mania. With a then-unpredictable drought featuring cancelled-or-stalled-projects galore and thus less opportunities overall, many GCs bid on projects outside of their normal scope of work to fill gaps in their pipeline. This momentary desperation resulting in increased competition implies many GCs gained new clients and expanded their project repertoire—great for them, terrible for their competitors that had a slice of their bread and butter taken right out from under their noses. We'll just have to keep an eye on the lagging results of the resulting portfolio expansion of 2020.

3) A cloudy future and the reign of forecasters. "Reign" and "rain" seemed like an apt homonym to play here, but we digress. If there's one thing the pandemic taught it's that tomorrow isn't promised. How solidified is your project pipeline if a new Covid strain rears its head next year? Forecasting is a technical skill that is integral to the success of a general contractor (we'll go more into depth on forecasting next time).

The carefully and intentionally built business development tech stack.

With GCs newly incentivized to pour energy into solidifying business development, the obvious answer is streamlining processes through technology. McKinsey and Co. posits that the pandemic accelerated tech adoption across all industries by as much as 6 years, and construction's notoriously lagging adoption rate implies this rate is likely much more pronounced.

Opportunity tracking, revenue forecasting, client management, and workforce management (sometimes referred to as resource allocation) are business development responsibilities that can be aided by increasingly popular apps that general contractors have plenty of solid options for. Building a functional tech stack can be like playing Jenga, depending on company growth goals and priorities (we'll touch on optimizing this game of Jenga in a future blog).

Adoption rates for CRM and resource allocation apps have especially ballooned in the last decade based on JBKnowledge's yearly tech adoption reports. The suddenly vast sea of options for CRM in the construction space also point toward an answer to the construction industry's call (though the CRM options with Procore integrations, for the moment, is on the modest side).

With construction volume shrinking, a smaller pool of current new business means that general contractors ought to take any competitive advantage they can. With repeat business so invaluable, the client bond is the most precious asset general contractors have, which directly correlates to why CRM adoption in construction has exponentially grown.

Rest assured that today isn’t too late to jump on the tech train.

Business development and sales roles are the most rapidly snowballing job title at general contractors on LinkedIn in the last 3-4 years. As of the publishing of this article, GCs have over 7,000 open hires for business development positions. This points toward a clear shift from the traditional seller-doer model of business development in the construction world, at least for the GCs that can financially and organizationally swing it.

Seller-doers are VPs and executives that solely maintain the spinning plates of building both buildings and client relationships. The shifting word here, of course, will be “solely,” as the folks closest to projects will still inevitably contribute to BD due to sheer proximity to (and time spent with) clients; the implied sea change of all the new BD hires in construction is that general contractors won’t have to rely solely on those multitasking executive elite.

If your company is still part of the old organizational regime (we don't age shame here), there's a silver lining. Some general contractors are rapidly advancing the way they think about business development, but it’s still far from the norm. Depending on what market you’re in, odds are pretty decent that the majority of your competition is still lagging behind too. Complications from Covid-19, even now, have diverted many companies’ priorities from the future to right this second. It’s a big ask to think about plans for dinner tonight when your head is currently underwater.

Smaller GCs have a bit of a competitive advantage in that they’re more technically agile while bigger GCs tend to be stuck in their ways, a symptom of “what’s always worked” and a traditional executive team whose bread and butter are the relationships they’ve maintained for 20-30 years. One multi-billion dollar GC we spoke with compared their organizational machinations to a massive, slow-moving destroyer built in 1885 (Destroyers were originally developed by the Spanish Navy in 1885 if you ever happen to be on Jeopardy). For the big dogs, shifting priorities and/or adopting new tech is a much more complicated venture.

Step 4: Take pages from other playbooks

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is a common internal evaluation for continuing to do what’s working. For external purposes, ie., identifying what’s working for others, let’s amend the colloquialism to “If it ain’t broke, let’s steal it.”

An aside: Of course, “steal” is a morally-loaded term, but consider Steve Jobs (likely) misquoting Pablo Picasso: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Led Zeppelin openly stole. Every head coach in the NFL steals strategies from Bill Belichick. If “stealing” is too jagged an edge, “paying homage” is a euphemism we can all get behind.

In all seriousness, it would behoove general contractors interested in leveling up their business development to study the best practices of two separate sources:

a) Their direct competition, and

b) Successful companies in other industries.

The direct competition piece will lean more circumstantial. How have other, more successful general contractors made a dent in your target market? The answers will vary, though a familiar one we won’t be able to change is that they’ve been around longer than you. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll be primarily identifying successful strategies and mindsets from industries separate from construction. Construction could learn a thing or two (or in this blog’s case, six things) from the successful business development of other industries.

Business development is a marathon, not a sprint.

The construction business development professional should prioritize daily habit-building to lay the foundation for continued success. This part is much more psychological than business-savvy, but one should strive to make new habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying or they simply won’t stick.

Large scale business development initiatives aren’t carried out in one fell swoop; they’re the result of completion of daily, occasionally monotonous tasks, and agilely circumventing—or quickly climbing out of—miscalculations. Keeping in mind that business development is a long game helps instill a microscopic momentum forward. It’s impossible to see tangible results from a single gym session, but year-over-year consistency? Now we’re talking.

Business development is internal as it is external.

As a general contractor grows, it will inevitably increase employee volume. On a long enough timeline, entirely new business units will also spring up out of necessity. This makes a universal business development ethos for the organization much more complicated, especially if acquiring internal buy-in isn’t made a priority.

One of our partners ANDRES Construction follows an internal empowerment strategy that is frequently seen in other industries but rarely in construction. Jonathan Haywood runs point on business development at ANDRES, and he also considers himself an ambassador and a steward to engage and instruct his team. He’s helping design a class for team members: Business Etiquette and Communication Training.

“We’re just shy of 200 employees," said Haywood, "so we hit on how we interact in a business setting, how we interact on Zoom, what etiquette is, how we portray ourselves in public. Some things will be rudimentary, but post-COVID it’s more apparent we’ll be doing this moving forward.”

Business development is a team sport.

Piggybacking off of the community-acknowledgement of the previous step, it’s important to treat business development like the collaborative effort it is. A well-oiled machine of an organization is when every member dons the sales hat, job title be damned.

Too often, business development efforts become siloed for various reasons: ego, a lack of a team buying into the mission, a failure on management’s part to encourage and empower. Siloed business development handicaps the ceiling of a company’s success. More times than not, more than one team member is going to have touches on a single business relationship. We specifically made our CRM feature unlimited seats for general contractors looking to destroy silos. Because what’s the logic in only one person at a general contractor using their CRM? What happens when that person leaves?

What isn’t measured can’t be improved.

In every industry, analytics is king and this trend will only continue to be the norm in construction. Which types of jobs do you usually lose on? What percentage of repeat business could fall away and you could still hit your growth goals? With general contractor profit pools tighter than ever—and more general contractors springing up everyday influenced by analytics-focused minds of other industries—every GC should be making it an imperative to not only gather data but dissect and grow from it.

Prioritize your digital self.

When’s the last time you looked in the digital mirror? The quality and scope of a general contractor’s completed jobs and word-of-mouth reputation matter, yes. But as we learned from Covid, in-person relationships are only a fraction of business development moving forward.

Is your company’s personal website sleek, easy-to-navigate, and aesthetically modern, or does it look like a library’s home dashboard from 1997? Is your personal LinkedIn an advertisement for you and your brand or is it the Sparknotes of a half-abandoned resume with a few tumbleweeds rolling by? Is your company’s social media and external marketing efforts operating on a singular cohesive mission with daily effort?

Our partner DeAngelis Diamond is one GC that makes it a priority to grow their digital footprint, with a dedicated marketing team that constantly promotes their brand. Just a quick perusal of their website and team member LinkedIns gives you a good feeling. What prospective client wouldn’t want them to build for them?

Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate.

One side of the coin is the past, the other is the future. Business development in every industry keeps its present informed by the future for an obvious reason: we have to work today to get to the place we want to be tomorrow. Forecasting and astute awareness of construction cash flow are staples of sound business development, which is why we made it such an integral aspect of Buildr CRM. Will you have gaps next quarter? Do you need to start the hiring process because of all the projects you signed onto next year?

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