Technical expertise is merely table stakes in the AEC industry. How firms approach their relationship-building is the true differentiator, with the potential to completely change the game for decision-makers. Brad Thurman, Chief Marketing Officer at Wallace Design Collective, shares his experience to help firms nurture authentic relationships — and knock cold outreach down from the top of their priority list.
Brad unpacks three relationship-building principles that helped transform his firm into a powerhouse with more than 300 professionals across eight offices: prioritizing responsive communication, celebrating client milestones and aligning authentic connection with the firm’s core values. As he puts it, "It's not just a product ... It's buying into the entire life of a project."
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn
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The ineffectiveness of cold outreach in the AEC industry, and the burden it puts on potential clients.
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Why technical competence is merely table stakes in winning business.
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Practical ways to celebrate client milestones and deepen connections.
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The importance of aligning relationship development with a firm's core values.
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Examples of simple gestures that can make big differences in nurturing long-term relationships.
About our featured guest
Brad Thurman, P.E., FSMPS, CPSM, is a Principal and Chief Marketing Officer of Wallace Design Collective, a professional consulting firm offering structural and civil engineering, landscape architecture, surveying and assessments. He joined Wallace in 1987 and is a licensed professional engineer. Since 1998, Brad has helped lead Wallace’s marketing and business development efforts across four disciplines and eight offices. He is a past president of the Oklahoma chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS), served as the 2013-2014 President on the SMPS national board, and is a past president of the SMPS Foundation board of trustees. Brad is a certified professional services marketer, was named a Fellow of SMPS in 2009 and was inducted into the SMPS Oklahoma hall of fame in 2015. He was also elected to the National Academy of Construction in 2018.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript
Disclaimer: What you’re reading is an AI-transcribed version of our podcast. It may contain mistakes, including spelling and grammar errors.
[00:00:00] Brad Thurman: I've had people reach out with these types of emails about janitorial services and different things that I'm just totally not in the market for. They just have no idea. I think what this industry is built on is true person-to-person relationships.
[00:00:21] Announcer: Welcome to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
[00:00:38] Michelle Calcote King: Hi everyone. I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host and I'm also the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and thought leadership marketing agency for B2B professional services firms, including architecture, engineering, and construction firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
While cold outreach has its place in the world, it isn't a scalable tactic to grow an architecture, engineering, and construction firm. Our guest today says these approaches create transactional relationships when authentic relationships really make up the foundation of success in the AEC industry.
Brad Thurman is with us today to talk about the importance of going the extra mile to build and nurture real relationships, especially with your long-term clients. Brad is the Chief Marketing Officer at Wallace Design Collective. He joined the design and engineering firm in 1987, originally serving as a professional engineer before moving full-time into the marketing department.
Brad's been around the industry for a while. He served as the Society for Marketing Professional Services National President from 2013 to 2014, and as the SMPS Foundation president from 2018 to 2020, and he was also elected to the National Academy of Construction in 2018. So welcome to the show. I'm really excited to talk to you.
[00:02:03] Brad Thurman: Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here.
[00:02:05] Michelle Calcote King: Tell us a little bit, obviously you've got a significant background in this industry. I'm excited to meet you. Hopefully I can see you at maybe AEC Amplify or something like that.
[00:02:25] Brad Thurman: Well, that's an interesting story. When I was in grad school, I had a professional practice class and our textbook for that class was Weld Cox's Marketing Architecture and Engineering Services. So we kind of got a flavor of what marketing would be like. It was like half of a semester, eight weeks, something like that.
I was just always interested in graphic arts and communicating and everything like that. Even with the engineering degree, my degree is in architectural engineering, so that gives me a design background with that as well.
Finally, I'd been with the company for a while, just going to project interviews, helping run stuff. Had this lady that worked with me that had been leading a group. Our marketing director resigned. I said I would step in and start filling that role and eventually my partner said, "I think you can do this." And I segued out of engineering and into marketing business development. It's not your typical career path, but it's been fun for me.
[00:03:36] Michelle Calcote King: I love it when an opportunity presents itself, step up and take it. I tell my employees that all the time. Tell us a little bit about Wallace Design Collective. I've obviously heard the name, but for those who might not be familiar with the firm, tell us a little about that.
[00:03:53] Brad Thurman: We started off as a structural engineering firm, Wallace Engineering, which a lot of people still know us that way. But now we have structural engineering, civil engineering, land surveying, landscape architecture. We do roof assessments and special inspections. We've grown — my employee number's 24, we're at over 300 now. We have eight offices across the U.S. We work nationally in all sorts of different business sectors. We do a lot of retail, a lot of healthcare, a lot of commercial. Those are our largest ones.
[00:04:31] Michelle Calcote King: So you've got to see the growth of the firm through many stages. That's fantastic. So we all experience cold outreach. I don't think any of us go through a day, especially in the AEC industry, and I don't know why it seems like AEC is kind of inundated with us, especially such a relationship industry. Tell me your take on why in this industry cold outreach is such a waste of time.
[00:04:57] Brad Thurman: I know there are people that will swear by it and they might say that it's not, but my biggest issue with it is it always puts the onus on me to respond back. Whether it's email outreach, whether it's a cold call on a phone, it's just to the point to where it's transactional. They've put something out there. If I don't respond, there's no response back except maybe a couple of more emails until they finally give up.
You don't really have the opportunity to learn what someone does and why they might need your services. I've had people reach out with these types of emails about janitorial services and different things like that that I'm just totally not in the market for. They just have no idea.
I think what this industry is built on is true person-to-person relationships, business-to-business relationships that transcend just an approach.
[00:06:06] Michelle Calcote King: Absolutely. It gives marketing a bad name for those people who are doing marketing right. It makes it seem like we're all out there just sort of blasting out these emails and calls. That is transactional. It's not an authentic relationship. It's requiring you to do the real lift when they should be doing that lift. I completely agree with that. I'm sure you get the follow-up email that is like, "I'm waiting on your reply."
[00:06:43] Brad Thurman: "Maybe you aren't the person to talk to at Wallace."
[00:06:48] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah.
[00:06:49] Brad Thurman: Or the infamous, "I'd like to bump this up to the top of your inbox."
[00:06:53] Michelle Calcote King: You recently wrote an article on this topic and I was reading your article and one of the things you talked about was buyers, after a while, especially when they're working for a firm that has the reputation like yours, they assume competence. If they've gotten to a stage that they're evaluating your firm, they're going to assume a certain level of competence. Tell me how authentic relationship building plays into that if competence is assumed.
[00:07:26] Brad Thurman: I say that a lot of times in presentations and it makes engineers kind of take a deep breath. It's assumed, but it's also job one, right? You've got to be competent, you've got to do a good job, you've got to have a quality design.
When I say that's table stakes, everybody's assuming that you can do that. So really, what makes a difference in that relationship and how it builds over time is how you deliver those services. The type of relationships that you build, the value that you bring to the relationship, going the extra mile when you need to.
All those sort of secondary things that people realize that they want in a relationship, but then a lot of times they just say, "well, we want whoever's cheapest." And that's the problem, is you can't differentiate yourself. If you really can't find a way to express your value, it's going to come down to price. Nobody really wants to compete on price. You want to be able to build that relationship and be able to get a project and the next one, and the next one, and the next one as it comes along.
[00:08:39] Michelle Calcote King: I think that's so smart. We just had our agency retreat and I hope that because there's some study out there about how clients will evaluate agencies and it's not things like results, it's things like do they respond quickly to your emails? It is surprising. It goes back to that they assume competence. Then it becomes, are they responding to my emails quickly? How do they make me feel? Is it something that I just like? The technician is always thinking about the work.
[00:09:22] Brad Thurman: I heard of an owner one time, he was with the university system. Whenever it got time for a project interview, he would go to the person at the front desk or the person that was like the gatekeeper for the office and ask, "Have these people been here before and how did they treat you?" Because if they treated that person poorly, then he didn't believe what they were saying in their interviews.
It's top down. You've got to deal with everybody in the company. You've got to treat everybody well. If you do that, I think you can really develop long-term relationships that last 20, 30, 40 years. You can build relationships at different tiers in the company. As the principals age out and they retire, then you've got the younger architects and engineers moving up and you build that peer-to-peer relationship at those levels. It can just continue to generate the relationship through the years.
[00:10:24] Michelle Calcote King: That was going to be my next question. How does that look in practice? What are some of the ways you help your engineers implement this in practice? What are the ways to create those long-term relationships?
[00:10:41] Brad Thurman: We really work with them to try and host client events or do different outreach when they have major events in their lives, like maybe it's a job change or maybe it's promotion, or maybe it's a child. We encourage people to let us know so we can help them put something together to give over to them to help celebrate that. It doesn't have to be a lot. It doesn't have to be a big deal, but it's just the thought and the fact that you've sent something over there and they thought you thought about them in that moment.
It's not intended to be calculated. It really does come from a point where we really want to help celebrate that person's success or that moment in their life. When people need you to go the extra mile or work late on a night or over the weekend, and when you do those things and you're always there for them, they respond in kind.
[00:11:47] Michelle Calcote King: Absolutely. How do you help them shift that mindset from transaction to relationship? Is there a way to kind of get them to understand the difference or how do you help shift that mindset?
[00:12:08] Brad Thurman: It kind of comes down to the DNA of the company and the belief system of the individual. One of our core values is responsiveness. We always want to make sure that we're responding. If somebody's sending you an email that doesn't sit too long before you get an answer back, even if the answer is "I can't answer this right now, but I will answer it in two days." Just always making sure you're keeping those lines of communication open.
If you start that relationship, and we've been fortunate to have some really good long-term ones, then they see it in action. They see that the principals are friends and they do things together. We encourage them to go to industry events to meet with other people. In our case, we're active in the AIA chapters in our different cities. It's a great chance to help sponsor different things, community events, and attending groundbreakings when we know when they're coming up and topping out ceremonies and just being a part of the whole process.
It's not just a product. It's not just we started here, we gave you signed drawings, we've done some site visits and we're done. It's buying into the entire life of a project.
[00:13:34] Michelle Calcote King: Clients want to know that you're fully bought into their industry, their business. You're not just doing your part of the project and onto the next thing, but you are in it. You're thinking about it. You're part of that. So if firms want to be more intentional about nurturing, why is it important for them to continue investing? So if you've got a client in, you've done that project, why continue investing after you've already finished and done?
[00:14:20] Brad Thurman: I think it's just trying to communicate to people that that's how you build careers. That's how you build relationships. You want to move up in a company and have more responsibility, maybe move into a position of ownership or a leadership position. Those are the types of things that you need to do to be that person.
Back to that technical side, you've got to have the technical side. But to really help the firm grow and to help everybody be successful, you've got to build these relationships with all of your clients. It's the old "all boats rise with the tide." You're trying to do it across the company. If you've got one group of people that are really good at it and another group of people that aren't, you want to work with them a little bit and try and improve that.
It takes small things. It doesn't take a lot of effort to show somebody some kindness or send them an article that you read about them and say, "Hey, I saw this, I thought you might be interested in a copy of it." It's just little things like that that can make a huge difference.
[00:15:36] Michelle Calcote King: I remember being told the value of relationships when I was younger, and I think it's something that doesn't really hit home until you start seeing the benefits of it. If you can start implementing those small things when you're younger and actually see it and understand it, that can be incremental for you throughout your career. But you're absolutely right. It's how careers, it's how companies are built.
[00:16:04] Brad Thurman: It's not really anything that's taught in school, at least in the architecture, engineering, and construction sphere. There's really not a lot of that marketing relationship type thing that's built. You're taught that if you build the better mousetrap, if you design the best looking building, then the world will beat a path to your door. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. But a lot of times you have to go out, you have to get the next project. You've got to be prepared to take those steps. It's a learning curve, but they're smart people. They learn fast.
[00:16:44] Michelle Calcote King: They've got a good marketing person who understands that. That's why people underestimate the value of marketing people and often we're the people behind the scenes making those connections and helping them understand that value. I'd love for you to pull it all together for us. If you were to give our listeners one final thought around this theme, what would it be?
[00:17:14] Brad Thurman: I'd say look deep into the firm, do a little self-reflection on what the core values of the company are and the type of entity you want to be and the type of legacy you might want to have, and then use that to fuel concepts to build those relationships.
If you want to be a friendly, family-oriented type firm, then you build those relationships along those lines. If you want to be a high design firm, you can still build those relationships. They're just different relationships. I think if you really are true to yourself — if you're not true to yourself and the culture of the firm, it'll tell on you real fast. People think you're fake.
So figure out who you are and then you can really start to drive those qualities into relationships and build those long-term commitments.
[00:18:05] Michelle Calcote King: I love that. I'm all about authenticity. I think that that's everything. The more authentic you are, the more people are drawn to you or the people that you want to be drawn to you. Fantastic advice. Well, thank you so much. This is a great reminder for all of us and especially for younger architects, engineers, construction professionals coming up. It's foundational to great marketing in this industry. We've been talking to Brad Thurman of Wallace Design Collective, so thank you for your time today.
[00:18:42] Brad Thurman: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:18:47] Announcer: Thanks for listening to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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