AEC Marketing departments typically have too much to do and too few resources to do it. This leads to overworked staff, quality control issues, and unfulfilled department goals. So, what is the right size marketing team for your firm? Allison Tivnon talks about how to collect and leverage data to discover where your time and resources are currently going and decide where they should be going.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC Marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons.
In each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with Allison Tivnon.
Hey, Allison.
Hello, Wendy.
So, Allison, you have pretty extensive experience leading and hiring marketing teams in-house, and you suggested we talk about right-sized teams.
Tell me what you're thinking.
Well, I think that for folks that are outside of the marketing industry, but work in the AEC industry, they think of marketing and they think of proposals, and that's about all they think about.
And for a lot of marketers, it's really easy to have that be the only thing that you think about.
I like to think of it as kind of a wheel, and in the center of it are the proposals, but it's surrounded by these different functions.
You have marketing administration, you have communications and media, you have event planning and attendance, and you have teaming partner and client outreach.
Those are four buckets that, when they work in concert with each other, really support that internal proposal engine.
And marketing has to have a hand in every single one of those.
So when you think about a right size team, for the most part, even the marketing director at times are gonna find themselves sucked into doing proposals.
But you want to make enough room for the members of your team to understand each one of those functions and ideally own one of them as a sentinel of it.
Even in the daily course of getting all the proposals responded to and out the door, that each of those areas is getting the time and attention that it needs.
Right, and depending on the size of your firm, the right size piece is going to be different.
So we'll talk about how you decide, you know, based on some like industry best practices and what the demand is in each of those categories you talked about on the wheel.
But to know like how big is the piece of the pie, depending on your firm, so that you can right size your team.
Well, let's start with a real basic way of looking at a right size team.
If you only have one person in your marketing department, or I should say if you're lucky enough to have one person in your marketing department, what does their role typically involve, and how do you know when to add to that team resource?
Any time that you see a firm get large enough to support having marketing, I think it's a moment to celebrate for that firm.
It means that what you're doing works.
You've got the right technical staff in place to execute on the work.
You're getting quals, and now you need help, because once you start having those quals in place, there's more work to go after.
And what marketing is really all about is it's not just a function of fulfillment staff who are going to look at RFPs and put proposals together and track leads.
It's also about building up a database of marketing assets, a headquarters where everything used to promote awareness around your firm and procure new work is going to live.
There's an execution aspect to it.
There is an internal systems management aspect to it, but you are also hiring to get that skillset of, okay, this is where we are today.
Where can we be tomorrow?
So the strategy aspect of it has to come into play as well.
It's really typical that you see a marketing department of one either evolve from someone wearing multiple hats.
You may be starting in your firm with no dedicated marketing professional, but you have someone within the company, within the organization that just has a natural talent for storytelling or maybe has been asked to put together a lot of proposals and brochures for the team.
So they've adopted that marketing hat over the years.
And sometimes that's the right fit for that person, or it does make sense that it's a part-time role and they're doing multiple things.
But you'll want to assess if that is the best use of their skills and talent and what your firm needs and wants to achieve so that if they can have the opportunity to bring on someone full-time or totally dedicated to marketing or with really more seasoned experience that you're bringing in that person for the right reason and the right thing at the right time.
And there's a pretty big jump that happens, I think, when you start to build out a team from there.
Well, I have a great anecdote that hits right on this, if you don't mind me sharing that.
Go for it.
So I worked at a firm for about seven years of my career.
I absolutely loved this place.
And when I entered that firm, the way in which I got that job was pretty unique.
So I was ready to go from the firm I was at before that.
I was looking at the job boards, and I saw one for a proposal coordinator slash receptionist.
And right there, it's like, well, obviously that's not the job I want.
I was already seven years into my career at that point.
But also that's like an old school mentality of thinking about that kind of work.
It's basically a proposal jockey who's going to be doing nothing, but responding to proposals while trying to answer the phone and greet people at the front desk and clean the kitchen and clean the conference rooms.
The burnout is ridiculous.
The turnover is like every year.
And it does not do justice to either of those roles because both of those roles are so important and deserve to have the time and space to really execute on what each of those jobs entails.
But I knew this firm, I really respected this firm.
And I also knew that they had never had marketing before.
And they had been around for years.
So I thought, this is really, really cool.
I'm going to take a chance here.
And I wrote them a letter and said, I am so excited to see that you're hiring for marketing in your firm, but I'm going to tell you, I think you're thinking too small.
Yeah.
I know you're from, I know, you know, I mean, this is like writing the cover letter for the proposal.
Always start with a declarative statement.
So I came in with this like kind of a, a diss to them in a way, like you guys are wrong.
But then I couched it by saying, I really respect your firm.
I've been following your work for years.
I would love to come in and talk to you about this.
And they took the meeting.
It was amazing.
They took the meeting for an hour.
It ended up being a three hour long conversation about what marketing is.
And by the end of it, they not only realized, yeah, we have to split these roles into two, but that what a company truly resides on, the foundation that it sits on is a three-pronged team.
It's accounting, it's administration, and it's marketing.
And if you try and short shrift even one of those, you're going to create a really unstable platform for your firm to function on.
And that it's not just about hiring a person, it's about making an investment into it.
You're so brave and bold to share that, and actually kind of doesn't surprise me at all knowing you that you would make a recommendation.
And even if that didn't work out for your benefit, I think knowing you, you came at it with, this is important for them to hear, or at least your strong opinion of it, and it informed what they could go and do throughout their hiring process.
Did you take that job?
And how was it?
It was...
So I had the three-hour long meeting.
At the end of it, I said, Look, this is not at all what you were thinking of when you decided to do this.
I realized that you might need some time to think about this.
Just let me know.
I would love to work here.
I would love to dream up with you what this could look like.
I got a call that night at 5 o'clock with a job offer, and it was a mic drop moment in my life of I took a chance and it worked.
And then I immediately was like, What am I going to do?
Right.
I've just sold them on this idea of building out a true marketing department, because in that conversation, I even sold them on the fact that they couldn't hire for just one person.
I was like, you need to.
You have to have someone to be a part of the board conversations, be a part of strategy, start really becoming a thought leader within the firm, and you also need someone else who can help them.
And they said, okay.
So I hadn't even submitted my resignation to the firm I was working at yet, and I was already interviewing people for this other role.
Jumped in both feet.
Yes.
And what that translated into was the two of us together.
Well, I was wearing the hat of marketing manager at the time.
That's the title I had coming in.
We were making it up as we went along, but I'd had enough time in the industry to know, okay, well, here's the basic components.
I knew how to make a chocolate chip cookie, basically.
I'm like, I know you need flour.
I know you need sugar.
I was able to create the platform on which we were going to build this department, knowing, okay, we're gonna name everything with a certain filing convention.
We're gonna have a house style guide, a branding document.
We are gonna have all of the resumes look identical to each other.
We're gonna have a set number of templates for our proposals.
That kind of stuff was really easy, but I knew that if we were gonna turn this into a team and grow it, that was gonna have to be something that was way more intentional, and it couldn't just be me inside my own head trying to figure it out on my own.
So you mentioned that small firms or growing firms may have a marketing person that wears multiple hats, and I totally agree with you that that approach may be fine for a while.
It could be a starting point.
I do think it is better than nothing, but it's not a recipe for the long term.
And building that team out is the better strategy, right?
What would you recommend is the starting position?
Say they really are only able to bring on one person.
What's that one position look like?
Well, I think that it all starts with a conversation with the true visionaries in the firm, the people that are in control and have their hands on the steering wheel of the firm, and ask them, what do you want?
What is your five-year plan?
Do you want to grow?
Do you want to stay the same size, but maybe enter into different marketplaces?
What is the clientele really understanding?
Where are they getting their work from and knowing that you have the right resources in house and in place to chase it, and then discussing with them the best way to get that.
And if it starts with being one person, you have to go in with your eyes open and be realistic about what that person can achieve on their own.
I think the experience I had is really, really rare to go into an established firm that had no marketing database.
And so I got to create it from scratch.
And in the way that I wanted to, most of us inherit something.
And the things that we inherit are usually cobbled together in the moment as we are working on several different things and we're just tossing stuff into places.
And it's usually a motley crew, which makes it really, really hard for pulling anyone new into your team because then they have to try and read your mind on where all of these assets live, which just really creates a lot of stumbling blocks in the pathway to growing a team.
So you have to know what the long-term goals of the company are so that you can determine if you are gonna be a marketing department of one.
How are you going to utilize the time that you have each week to make progress towards those long-term goals?
All right, so then you grew your team to two, and obviously that wasn't the end of the growth of the marketing team.
How did you decide what next roles to add, and what was the right size at the right time?
Well, as it turned out, the first hire that I made, she was new to the industry, and because we were terming a marketing assistant, that was fine.
But within the year, she'd realized that AEC marketing was not for her.
So she went off to explore new opportunities, and it ended up being really fortuitous because we'd had a year to decide what were we missing?
And it was graphic design.
I'm like, you know, this isn't an assistant role anymore.
This is, let's make this a marketing coordinator role and put an emphasis on graphic design.
So we went out, we hired again for that.
And now I had a little bit more skill sets coming in and more in-house talent and skills I didn't personally have that we could play off of.
And then the next step was firm leadership wanted to grow into a new city and it's like, okay, if we're gonna really do that, we need boots on the ground.
We need to have someone there in marketing.
It doesn't have to be someone at my level.
We can have an entry level.
I can fly up and support them, but they have to be there to support the staff in the day to day and make those connections with SNPS, start to understand the competition and how to track the leads.
And they agreed.
And so we then became a team of three.
So it was very organic, but it was very much tied to what are the skills we're missing, how do we hire for those, and how does this all tie back to the strategic vision of the firm?
Right.
And the location piece of that.
I think that's really smart.
If at all possible, having marketers in your different regions, I mean, there's simple things like the acronyms with the, you know, state organizations.
You know, you want to know that, and it's not all a new language because, you know, you're not based in that region.
There's just little details like that, that make the marketing more effective.
And those human connections too, with the team, that trust that we've talked about before, where if you have that marketing person right there and they can see them working hard and telling their stories and building those relationships, I mean, there's a lot of value in that.
Oh my gosh, that could be its own podcast.
I mean, let alone you're reading the local news.
You know what's happening with funding cycles is you can weigh in on things that are really going to position a firm to know where the opportunities are going to be.
I'd love to talk about that more at some point, but Wendy, I'm really curious, given your utterly unique perspective, having been in-house talent and running your own firm, you know the value of marketing, but now you're also in charge of the bottom line.
How do you make those tough balancing act decisions between this is the money we have to play with, this is the money we can invest, and knowing when to expand out your FTE and grow your team?
To answer the question more from our client's perspective, if you're a general contractor or architect, specialty contractors, I get this question a lot.
And by a lot, I mean every month maybe, or something like that.
And it's been a very busy hiring time for marketing in AEC, so that question has picked up quite a bit.
So I'll have a firm leader, usually a principal or vice president or something, call and say, I'd like to pick your brain on my marketing team size.
Here's what we're struggling with.
Here's what we think we want.
We can't find this.
We haven't been successful in our city.
I mean, there's just so many elements.
And they'll say, what's normal?
What are you seeing?
What are other people doing?
And so, through that, I've kind of done a little research in poking around and get some information, but I've also just had my own rule of thumb from being a part of those teams.
And so, let me just run through those quickly.
Of course, this isn't like, I don't have real, real data to show anyone on this, but it proves true again and again.
So, I feel pretty confident in sharing it.
On the general contractor side of things, I say the rule of thumb is one full-time marketing team member per $100 million of revenue.
And that's top line.
That's the number that you submit for awards and that kind of thing.
So, if you are a $250 million a year general contractor, I think you're going to have two and a half or three marketers.
I think a caveat to all of these numbers I'll give you is it really does depend on the number of seller, doers, business development people, and kind of the unique resources in your team.
That's why there's probably a range you could have, for that example, on the GC, two or three, because you may have some other team members who are wearing a little bit of the marketing hat themselves and coordinating things and doing certain amounts of writing or whatever it might be.
Or you may not have that resource because of the way your operations and technical team is structured.
And so you need more marketing support.
Oh, gosh, and that is the real double edged sword of coupling the A, the E and the C together, is that these are very different arenas that our folks are working in.
In construction, the dollars are much bigger than, say, in planning.
So you'll have a planning firm.
They're looking at a $250,000, $350,000 project, and that's pretty good.
You know, that's a decent pro, like, yeah, let's go after it.
You look through the RFP, and the requirements for responding to it are exactly the same as for a $25 million project.
It's going to be the same amount of hours to put it together.
You're going to have the same amount of competition going after it, and the look and feel of them is going to be super glitzy.
You're going to be going up against firms that have beautiful templates and branding.
You have to bring your A game every single time.
And when you're at a firm with the RFPs that are at a much lower dollar amount, you might have to chase a lot more of them.
So the number of marketing staff you need might actually, ironically, be more at a firm that has less top line revenue.
Yeah, yeah, that's a perfect point.
And I actually don't have experience working in-house on the architecture design engineering side.
And I guess that you could put planning in there too.
But we've reached out to our network through SNPS and had conversations.
And so the number that I have heard, and Allison, I'd love your thoughts on this, if it rings true to you too, is one full-time marketing person per every 25 employees.
They're not doing it based on revenue.
And of the folks that we sampled, that actually range from 20 to 40, that's kind of a big range.
So I brought it at 25 and kind of averaged out the responses.
Does that sound right to you based on your experience?
Yes, it absolutely does.
And I'd say it is exponential.
So you get up to like 300 staffers.
You can get really creative with a team of four and still do a really good job.
But you have to staff up for marketing before the growth has occurred, in my opinion.
That's where you get the most bang for your buck.
So say you have 50 staffers and you have two marketing professionals servicing that, but your firm leadership are really hungry and their eyes are really big for the Denver market.
Like, we're going to open up in Colorado.
It's like, okay.
There's a lot of work that goes into that.
You're going to need to hire for marketing before you've added one staffer.
I mean, okay, maybe you got the one staffer.
You found the ringer in Denver that's willing to take a chance, join your team and open up the Denver market.
You are going to have to hire to support that role, even if that is a local position in the headquarters of the firm, because the amount of time and effort it's going to take to understand the ecosystem of a new marketplace and start making those relationships and start understanding how to track leads there.
And all of the players and stakeholders throughout that entire new aquarium that you're swimming in is going to require a lot of marketing support.
And what you really don't want to do is try and siphon that off of your two existing folks that are already at capacity.
So I wouldn't call it a gamble.
You just have to put a little bit of money upfront.
In my opinion, FTE of marketing is always going to be, I think, in the best case scenario, one step ahead of the growth.
Yeah, I think about it as how fast do you want to go?
You know, you can get there.
Do you want to get there in five years or do you want to get there in one?
I mean, I want to kind of go fast.
I put the marketing resources there and go for it.
You get a ton of value from a skilled marketer.
And so I just think, yeah, I definitely err on the side of, let's put those resources there.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that that marketer in a new area of the country is wearing multiple hats in that they are probably doing some business development activities or at least understanding and doing research.
And so they're not exactly so focused on one area of marketing, they're supporting multiple.
A ton of value for someone that is coming in at market rate.
The return on that investment, if you get someone who's really skilled at what they do and is fully supported by their firm is absolutely mind-boggling in terms of the amount of money, brand recognition and pre-positioning that can happen from that.
It is absolutely magic.
And it's one of those things like, oh my gosh, the widget people get this.
The people that sell a thing of cell phone, a car, they understand the value of share of voice and brand recognition and being there, being out in front of people.
It's just a harder sell sometimes in professional services.
Well, I don't want to leave this topic before we hit on our specialty contractors and trade partners.
They're such an important part of the construction cycle and their metrics for deciding how many marketing FTEs is quite different than the GC or the design and engineering folks that we just talked about.
Our specialty contractors who use Middle of Six for marketing before they're kind of at that threshold to hire their first team member is really great because they're able to leverage the expertise of a team of six, focused really only on the one pursuit or a handful of business development strategies.
So what we recommend or what we've definitely seen, and then it feels like it proves to be true, is that probably you have one full-time marketer per every 50 million to 75 million of revenue if you are, let's say, a mechanical contractor.
The reason why that number is quite a bit higher than the GC is if you've ever had the pleasure of responding to the number of RFPs and requests for resumes and all the bids and things that happen in the trade partner world, it's a heavy load.
Luckily, a lot of the project managers and project executives take a share of that.
So it's not all on marketing, but we've seen over the last five years and maybe even a little bit more before that, this move to alternative delivery and the qualifications that a trade partner needs to submit to win work has really just risen to the level that we used to see on the GC side of things.
So I would expect that if we looked at the number and the data.
That we gave earlier.
Yeah, and another thing to really keep in mind is that submitting proposals is more than just giving an approach methodology, some resumes, and a schedule, it's storytelling.
That's exactly what marketing is for, is to figure out how to communicate your brand, get it to the client, and win the work.
And if you're constantly expecting all your technical staff to just know how to write, how to pull together proposals, and how to craft a winning message, you're really lucky if you pull it off.
But more often than not, you got to bring in some skilled talent to accomplish that.
Okay, here's this week's listener question.
We are experiencing an increase in competition for proposals.
This race to secure new work is putting a strain on our marketing resources.
How do you make the case to your firm's leadership to increase your resources?
Well, I think that first you have to decide if you really should or if you should dial in your go-no-go, because as the competition increases, the hit rates are gonna fall, especially if the rationale for the projects that you're chasing is based off of magical thinking or fear.
Like, oh, we've got to just chase everything because we're worried about our backlog.
That's a really hard conversation to have, but it's the one you have to have first.
If after having that conversation, you decide, yeah, we really do need to chase this number of proposals, then you have to pull your time sheets again.
You got to look at where the time is going and decide, we can't just be proposals all the time because the system is going to break down.
People are going to burn out.
All of the opportunities to expand your share of voice are going to absolutely evaporate.
You have to pay attention to your online identity.
You have to pay attention to the templates, making sure that they don't break over time.
Just like pop the hood and look underneath it.
And being a part of the strategic vision beyond the one that exists currently in the firm, I think that some marketing departments are going to have a harder time than others at convincing their leadership.
And that's for a range of issues.
A lot of our firms are led by seller-doers that got really good at what they do as an engineer or an architect or a builder.
They aren't MBAs and they don't inherently understand the value of marketing in the way that those types of professionals do.
So the conversation can be slower.
It can be more aggravating.
It can take longer than other firms that are more savvy and like, just tell me what you need.
You've made the case, obviously you're swamped and you're not getting to the other internal to-dos.
If that's the case, then you can just hire greats.
If you happen to fall into the other category though, where they're just their appetite for bringing on another FTE is just not there, you got to explore utilizing external contractors that can pinch hit when you are too swamped with proposals and bring them in to help with those or with other facets of the work, fixing aspects of your website, helping to create infographics, helping you facilitate workshop trainings around proposal writing or interview prep.
Well, this was a very good conversation on right-sized teams.
Scratch the Surface, we have way more to talk about.
We will dig into those on subsequent podcasts.
But for today, I think that wraps it up.
Thank you, Allison, for sharing your expertise.
This is a pleasure chatting with you.
Oh, you too, Wendy.
Thank you so much.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.
Kyle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Allison Rose.
If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
See you next time.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.