Win Better Work.
More Deliberately.
Business development for specialist construction, engineering and built-environment businesses.
You’ve built a good business.
If you wanted to win more of the work you actually want — how deliberately could you make that happen?
I help established technical businesses build a systematic approach to winning the right clients and projects.
Good businesses can still be quite accidental about growth
A lot of successful construction and engineering businesses grow in much the same way.
You do good work, a client comes back, somebody recommends you, an old contact moves somewhere new and gets in touch, a tender lands or one of the directors knows somebody who knows somebody.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, reputation and repeat business are wonderful foundations for a company.
The difficulty comes when you want to influence what happens next rather than simply respond to whatever comes your way.
Perhaps you want to win larger projects, enter a different market, replace a client you have become too dependent on, create a stronger pipeline or simply understand where the next few years of growth are supposed to come from.
At that point, it helps to become a little more deliberate.
Who do you genuinely want to work with? Where are the best opportunities likely to come from? Who inside those organisations is worth knowing? Why might they be interested in speaking to you? How are those relationships going to start before the tender or enquiry appears, and who inside your business is actually responsible for making all of this happen?
Those are the sorts of questions I help businesses answer, and then turn into something practical rather than another strategy document nobody looks at again.
Two ways to work with me
Programmes
Consultancy
For businesses that want to build the skills, process and confidence to create and develop new business opportunities.
For businesses that want me to identify where their best opportunities lie and work alongside them to pursue those opportunities.
From £6,500 + VAT
(per participant)
Fees agreed individually
You probably don't need somebody to teach you how to sell
If you have built a successful £2m, £5m or £10m technical business, it would be ridiculous for me to walk in and suggest you do not know how to win work - clearly you do.
The more interesting question is how much control you have over the type of work that comes next.
If most new business still arrives through existing relationships, repeat clients, referrals, networking, tenders and opportunities that happen to appear, that can work perfectly well for a very long time.
It becomes more important when you decide you want something different.
Perhaps you want to enter another sector, win a particular group of clients, replace a significant account, create more security in the forward pipeline, make the business less dependent on the founder or simply have more choice over the work you accept.
At that point the issue is not whether the business can sell.
It is whether it can deliberately create more of the opportunities it wants rather than relying largely on the opportunities that happen to find it.
That is the problem I am interested in helping solve.
Straightforward About Investment
I prefer to be fairly open about fees because there is no great benefit in either of us spending an hour talking only to discover that we had completely different expectations.
Training programmes start from £5,000 + VAT
Consultancy engagements from £20,000 + VAT
Managed (fractional) business-development appointments from £5,000 + VAT per month
The actual fee depends on the size of the business, what you are trying to achieve, the complexity of the work and how involved you want me to become.
A three-day training programme is obviously a very different appointment from spending nine months helping a leadership team build and embed a business-development function, so I do not try to force everything into artificial packages.
You Don't Need to Become a Salesperson.
A lot of the best people I have worked with in construction and engineering are not particularly interested in “sales”, and I understand why.
They do not want clever closing techniques, scripts, manufactured urgency or a daily obligation to perform on LinkedIn.
Nor do they need any of that.
Good business development is much more ordinary than people sometimes make it sound. It is knowing the sort of people you want to work with, giving them a sensible reason to know you, having good commercial conversations and staying close enough to genuine opportunities for something useful to develop.
Some businesses want to learn how to do that themselves. Some want help building the system around it. Others want somebody to come in and take a proper share of the responsibility.
Those are simply the three different ways I work.
I've Had to Win the Work Too.
I didn't start as a consultant. I started as a professional who had to find my own clients, start my own conversations, and close my own deals.
I know what it feels like to worry about where the next piece of work is coming from, and I know the discomfort of not wanting to be 'that' salesperson.
Everything I teach comes from a decade of winning work in the real world for my own businesses.
The point is not simply to become busier
Ultimately, I think good business development is about creating choice.
Choice over the clients you work with, the projects you pursue, the sectors you enter, the work you decide not to take and the sort of business you are gradually trying to build.
There will always be an element of chance in business, and there is nothing wrong with referrals, recommendations or a good client ringing you unexpectedly.
I just don't think they should be the only plan.