3
O P I N I O N
Valuable values
Branding and growing a diverse firm while staying true to your roots is possible, but you have to know why you’re in business.
I f you track AEC news daily, like I do, you probably notice a constant theme of consolidation among firms. Maybe you’ve even been part of a team on the buy or sell side of a merger or acquisition. For those concerned with strategy and branding, all this merger or acquisition activity raises these questions: How does this affect our identity? Who are we now? If your firm’s strategy has a strong M&A component, you may even be wondering if branding a growing and diverse firm is even possible.
Eric Anest
Possible is an understatement. Although growth brings its challenges, it also brings you a unique opportunity to build something truly magical that keeps your firm true to its roots while staying flexible for the future. BUILD GROWTH ON YOUR VALUES. Outside the AEC indus- try, advice is abundant for how to differentiate a company. Search the internet and you’ll see many articles offering six, seven, 10, and even 21 ways to brand a firm, including everything from price, making a better product, having better service, reaching buyers/clients more efficiently, and build- ing trusted relationships. AEC firms – even those growing through M&A – can spend valuable time thinking about those things. They’re the basics of every business.
And that’s the problem – they’re the basics of every business. Your competitors are trying to do the same thing you are. What if you took a different path? What if you built your company’s growth on values, and let your values influence your approach to M&A, not to mention pricing, who you serve, how you serve them, and the many other ways firms distinguish themselves? What we’re talking about is the difference between a firm serving a specific function that happens to have values, and a firm with values that happens to serve a specific function. The firm built on
See ERIC ANEST, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 19, 2019, ISSUE 1309
Made with FlippingBook Annual report