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O P I N I O N
When times get tough, you have two choices: You can cut expenses and eliminate all investments, or you can double down on making improvements in your business. Give it the gas – or let off the throttle?
I f you are driving your car up a long hill, and it starts to slow down, what do you do? Do you let off the gas because it is straining – or do you give it MORE gas to get over the hill?
Entrepreneurship and business ownership of an A/E firm is much the same. When times get tough, you have two choices. You can cut expenses and eliminate all investments, or you can double down on making improvements in your business, increasing marketing expenses and making key hires and investing in things that make you more efficient. Why do so many people in this business do the former versus the latter? Is it a matter of confidence? Is it a matter of perspective? Is it a matter of fear? I don’t know. But it doesn’t change the facts. The response of “letting off the gas” could be the worst thing for the business as it goes into a tough market. It will slow it down even more. If you don’t want this to happen to your business
and aren’t planning on winding it down, “pouring on the gas” means increasing marketing spending. And please don’t ask me what a “normal” marketing budget should be for a firm like yours. High design firms can spend up to 15 percent of net service revenue on marketing. MEP and structural engineering firms that do most of their work as subconsultants to other firms in this business can spend as little as 3 percent of net service revenue on marketing. Everyone else in this business falls somewhere in between. The significance of these numbers is singular. You need to do more than you did marketing-wise over the last 10 years of boom times. That translates into spending more.
Mark Zweig
And while I am on this topic of marketing
See MARK ZWEIG, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER DECEMBER 14, 2020, ISSUE 1371
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