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O P I N I O N
Local and organic
G rowing your business organically in a new market is tough. Certain factors – geography, lack of local presence, risk of failure – can present challenges, but they can be overcome. Despite the associated risks, organic growth is often critical to the long-term success and growth of a firm. A lot can go wrong while establishing an office in a new market, but if you find a niche and hire strategically, you can succeed.
Jon Faucher
Five years ago, Mead & Hunt was looking to expand our aviation services in the Pacific southwest region, including Arizona and southern California. The market is saturated with a lot of qualified consultants. Starting a larger operation there had its risks, but we ultimately decided the benefits outweighed them. We moved forward to strategically plan our organic growth in the market. I’ve experienced both the challenges and the rewards of growing a market in a new region organically, and I can speak to a few key things that proved instrumental to the process. 1)Find a niche to get your foot in the door. Breaking into a new market prior to winning any submittals there is tricky but not impossible. Submitting on a project providing a niche service can be a great way to gain a foothold in a market before you have a strong local presence.
For Mead & Hunt, our first Arizona win in this new endeavor came from a niche-service submittal. This small win gave us the momentum and confidence needed to submit on other engineering services projects in the region. 2)Local presence is a plus. While having a local address is no guarantee that you’ll be successful on every submittal, it does vastly increase your odds and shows that your firm is fully committed to growing in this area. Luckily, in our case, one of our young professional engineers volunteered to relocate to the Phoenix area. This move was crucial to growing our market there. After finding a local office location, we were able to check the “local” box on submittals, which greatly helped us in this process. Clients work with people they know and trust, and a lot of that comes from living and working in the same areas.
See JON FAUCHER, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER December 30, 2019, ISSUE 1325
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