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FROM THE FOUNDER
The strategy of over-marketing
When used consistently, this strategy will allow you to grow faster, raise fees, shed bad clients, and ramp up your pipeline of job candidates.
I spend a certain amount of my time on LinkedIn. I like that it isn’t full of politics and conspiracy theorists, and, for the most part, people there are talking about business. I will say, however, that I see a lot of architects talking about how underpaid and overworked they are, along with a certain number of engineers complaining that they can’t get good fees. All of them are usually also griping about having too many hoops to jump through to get a project, and then when they do, they struggle with getting paid by their clients on time. Oh yeah – and don’t let me forget to mention the difficulty most companies claim to be having filling their job openings.
Mark Zweig
The answer to all of these problems – and more – could be solved over the long haul by employing a strategy I have only recently decided to start referring to as “over-marketing.” What is over- marketing, you might ask? I can describe it quite simply as consistently spending more and doing more marketing-wise than what would be considered “normal” for a firm of whatever type yours is. How much more? Let’s say one-and-a-half to two times what everyone else is doing. And for how long? Forever. That means you never stop. I have been a student, teacher, and active participant
in the AEC industry and entrepreneurship for most of my life. And I am going to make a bold statement: I have never seen a firm in the AEC business, or any industry that actually used this strategy over the long haul, fail to succeed well beyond its peers – ever! Let’s take a look at a “typical” architectural firm of about 20 people. Maybe it has a couple of owners. They do about $3 million a year in net service revenue. They have an effective labor multiplier of 3.2. They spend about 7 percent of net service revenue on marketing. The principals make a couple hundred
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER JANUARY 23, 2023, ISSUE 1473
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