Strategic Planning

Current Typical Strategic Planning Practices, Potentials and Problems

It’s taken awhile but currently, most design firms, construction companies and owner-client organizations seem to do some type of strategic planning, usually using the three classic tools:

•  SWOT analysis of their organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat
•  Clarifying their Mission, Vision, Values and Goals
•  Launching Initiatives to address problems and explore opportunities

Many strategic planning efforts generate worthwhile results: improved employee alignment with organization goals, increased profit and productivity, development of new services, entry into new markets.  Ryan Hutchins, Executive Vice President at Gilbane, believes the company’s strategic planning efforts have shaped the company’s growth: “Our 2025 Vision Statement provided the roadmap that helped us grow to $6.5 billion in revenues in 2020, even against the backdrop of the pandemic.” Hutchins also credits Gilbane’s strategic planning with helping the company manage its response to the Covid crisis: “Part of our 2020 planning was a doomsday scenario for 2023.  That exercise put us into a much better position to respond to the Covid event.” 

Unfortunately, few organizations match Gilbane’s planning results. 

3 Mistakes Most Companies Make With Strategic Planning

Most make these three mistakes in their strategic planning: 

• Producing detailed documents more useful for accounting than plotting progress
• Failing to capture key aspects of the organization’s performance in SWOT metrics
• Coming up short in implementing plans

Why We Struggle

Traditional strategic planning is rooted in traditional businesses such as banking, insurance, retail and telecommunications.  More hierarchical than design firms and construction companies, their employees are more likely to follow top-down directives.  Design and construction professionals expect and require greater autonomy and control over their jobs.  It takes more than flashy power point presentations and videos to get them to embrace initiatives, new processes and methods.  

The four practices we describe here offer promise because they’re rooted in our industry’s flatter, more collaborative organizations.  

Our strategic planning consulting builds on these four practices to consistently achieve positive, lasting results:

1.  Anchor strategic planning in employees’ passions.  Jeremy Oberc, now a consultant served as architecture and engineering firm EYP’s Director of Operations for many years.  He describes an approach to strategic planning the firm took several years ago that differed significantly from the traditional SWOT: “From the outset, we based the entire effort on our passions, the types of design work that interested us most.”  

“Scott Butler, our CEO at the time, believed that architects will produce more profit if they’re working on projects they really care about.  We involved a large group of designers from all our offices and came up with a list of passions we used to drive our marketing and BD efforts.  It’s produced clear gains in productivity and profit across the board.”  

2.  Engage diverse employees in implementing the plan.  Most design firms and construction companies still rely on a small group of senior leaders to carry out their SWOT analysis.  That approach seemingly makes sense – only senior leaders would have the overall view of a company necessary to identify its SWOT.

Gilbane Building has taken a radically novel approach.  Ryan Hutchins explains, “We do our SWOT from the bottom up.  First, we involve a large, diverse group in identifying the SWOT items.  Once we have that list, we send it to all our employees to have them rank order and prioritize the items.  This process always provides us with useful information and perspective.”

Similarly, Jeremy Oberc describes a bottom-up approach EYP used to implement its plan.  Instead of assigning senior leaders to drive initiatives for improvements – the typical practice most firms use - the firm engaged all its employees.  Senior leaders published a list of the firm’s business objectives over the next 5 years, then invited all employees to submit a proposal that supported one or more of those objectives in one of 3 areas (service line extensions, geographic expansion or market sector extension).  Oberc notes, “We received 83 proposals for the 6 available awards.  One winner is to open a new office in a part of the country that leverages several of the firm’s key resources.  Another is taking action to open a new landscape architecture practice focused on sustainability.”

3.  Keep plans Big-Picture.  Oberc also relates, “One key improvement we made,” he explains, “was to trim the document’s’ length and level of detail.  One of our 5-year planning efforts produced a 250-page document that was excruciatingly detailed and not usable in any practical ways.”  The firm’s subsequent planning effort produced a much more brief, big picture-focused document.  “It’s more of a handbook than a report,” Oberc describes. “You can actually use it as a roadmap.  It’s helped create a much better awareness throughout all our ten offices of where we’re trying to go.”

4.  Identify more useful SWOT metrics.  Design firms and construction companies typically use the obvious financial and marketing statistics to determine their SWOT:  revenue, company profit, project profit, win rate, percent of work that comes from repeat business, employee retention, promotion from within the organization.  These numbers provide useful insight into some aspects of every organization’s performance, but they can cannot capture key aspects of performance that are especially relevant in design and construction. 

For example, one large construction company we’ve worked with tracks and pays bonuses to its senior leaders based on the results of their individual client satisfaction surveys.  The firm has studied these survey results in such detail that they believe they know the exact wording of the survey questions that predicts leaders’ likelihood of bringing in profitable repeat business.

About William Ronco, Ph.D. 

.  Dr. Ronco has led numerous successful strategic planning projects for technology, architecture and engineering, science and construction companies.  He has taught Strategic Planning seminars for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and written on strategic planning for the AIA Practice Manual Update and Genetics Engineering News.  Unlike most strategic planning consultants, Dr. Ronco focuses beyond writing plans to achieving full, meaningful employee buy-in and plan implementation.

Email Bill Ronco at wronco@gatheringpace.com to schedule a conversation to discuss your interests.