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F R O M T H E F O U N D E R
Seven good reasons to look at implementing a market sector-based organization structure in your firm. Market sector-based organization structures
I have long been an advocate of market sector-based organization structures. Susie Peden introduced me to the idea of market sector-based organization structures when I was working at Carter & Burgess’s Fort Worth headquarters back in 1986. We hired her away from another local firm, Freese and Nichols, as our marketing manager and she immediately had a positive impact.
Mark Zweig
At that time, Carter & Burgess was way too dependent on land development-related work and needed to quickly diversify into other market sectors, including transportation, aviation, U.S. Postal facilities, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, industrial, etc. In her first weeks on the job, Susie came up with a new scheme to do that, and organized all of our marketing efforts along market sector lines. She created a unique graphic icon to represent each sector and then developed market sector-based marketing and promotion plans for each, working with someone as a lead technical or design professional from one of our three offices and many discipline-based departments. The results were fantastic. Over time, the line (production) organization reflected the client-
facing, market sector-based marketing structure. And while there were most certainly a few hiccups along the way, such as assigning the wrong person to head up a particular sector, or defining a sector that didn’t really have buyers with common wants and needs, the firm became very successful, growing over a couple decades from what was then a 250-person company into a more than 3,000 person company that was eventually acquired by publicly-traded megafirm Jacobs. And while we at Zweig Group (then Zweig White) worked with Carter & Burgess over about 15 years to help them recruit hundreds of people and buy a number of other companies, I credit the market sector-based marketing approach with being fundamental to their incredible success.
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 18, 2021, ISSUE 1413
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