But we already know all of this. So why are so many firms in AEC still competing on fee or pushing their teams to do everything cheaper or faster instead of better or more innovative? Everything listed can be explained by what we have started referring to as the surviving vs. thriving mindset. Strategy can help you price your services perfectly, can help you define and differentiate your brand, and can imbue you with financial literacy to keep sight of revenue vs. profitability. You can find shelves of books and entire MBA curricula dedicated to these topics, but if your organization is trapped in a survival mode culture and way of thinking, your teams will continue to undercut themselves and compete on price, even with loyal clients who would pay a premium for the service you provide Surviving vs. Thriving When we first began approaching the conversation that would become this guide, we continued to gravitate to the practices we saw as harming our firms and our teams. Namely some old attitudes that were, we believed, creating problems in how our teams and firms viewed the nature of the marketplace, the attitudes of our clients, and how the world views the services we provide. We realized that the challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion were just some of many growth opportunities firms want to pursue but find themselves limited by time and cash flow concerns. We found ourselves gravitating to the term “surviving vs. thriving” which has become a bit of a buzz term in recent self-help and mental health circles, but we came to see it as applicable to organizational attitudes as much as individual life approaches. Survival mode is often the term used for the stress response individuals might take on from trauma. It is fight-or-flight, it is the frenetic and continual repetition of old patterns, focused on reacting to external factors to keep the wheels turning no matter what. Survival mode is to exist under a constant barrage of external stimuli that those within the firm must constantly react to and are seldom if ever prepared for – often this is referred to as “firefighting.” Survival mode is where there is “no time” for truly deep strategic conversations or deep reflection on the brand or core competencies. In survival mode, new project opportunities, positioning, and client relationships are not consistently interrogated for their long-term value, or that value is somehow divorced from profitability. Survival mode often involves logic that insists that suffering today will create the potential for unspecified benefit “in the future,” and is often more concerned with heading off the activities of competitors (being reactive to their strategy) rather than in how the firm in question can better position or improve their results. Indeed, in survival mode, long-term vision is often vague, and the strategy or differentiation of the brand cannot be uniformly articulated by team members because it is not consistently communicated or reinforced. Wins are celebrated, but expected net fee or anticipated profitability is not interrogated or shared – creating fundamental misalignment in what your teams are taught to target. Survival mode celebrates winning projects and being busy as though the two were synonymous with profitability and high utilization (spoiler alert – they aren’t).
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