Business Details

BY FRANK A. STASIOWSKI, FAIA

Making the Transformation to Trusted Advisor

Many of the end users for whom you provide design services may employ a designer only a handful of times in their personal and professional lives. Working with a designer presents a myriad of apprehensions and confusions for many clients—not to mention the added pressure of timelines, large financial investments and the expectations of other stakeholders in the project. In short, you bear a big responsibility along with your client. But along with this responsibility comes a tremendous opportunity. When you seize this opportunity, you transform from a vendor of a service into a trusted advisor in the eyes of your clients and their communities. In this column, I will give you some insights into how successful designers have made the leap to trusted advisor and what the implications have been for their businesses.

Addressing the Client's Unmet Needs

Since many of your clients have limited experience with design projects, you automatically start the transformation to trusted advisor from a position of strength—you have the experience that your clients need to help them address their unspoken and unmet needs. Your clients generally solicit you for help through specific project requests, but if they have never requested anything like the current project, they may not have requested (and indeed may not even have known about) important requirements critical to the overall success of the project. How good are you at recognizing and addressing your clients' unmet needs?

Clients are looking for something more from you. You need to dedicate yourself to helping them achieve the objectives of their project. For example, a landscape architecture firm in Marin County, California offers clients a water-management consulting package. The firm analyzes the client's water consumption, systems and maintenance procedures, then generates recommendations as to how the client could make modifications to save money.

Other firms educate clients on the need for design-related services and position themselves as experts in these competencies as well. The more you know about your clients, the more chances you'll have to offer them design-related services such as financial analysis, market analysis, site investigation, regulatory approvals, lending negotiations, presentation materials and systems management, to name just a few.

If you're smart, you are taking the time to get to know your clients when you are presented with specific project requests. You use what you learn both to identify their unspoken needs and to communicate the unique value of your skills.

Addressing a Community's Unmet Needs

You need also to work this process from the other end: Take the time to connect with targeted groups of your prospects, bring out their unmet needs, and communicate the value of your skills to set up specific project requests.

You probably have three sources of new business:

1. Existing clients who enjoy working with you and value your work. These clients are pleased to give you repeat business and recommend you to others as long as you keep making them happy.
2. Potential clients who've heard about you and think they might like to work with you. They might initiate a contact with you or, at the very least, they're pleased to hear from you if you initiate the contact.
3. Potential clients who don't know anything about you. Maybe they'll stumble onto your Web site, or maybe you'll just send a proposal in response to an RFP.

The most direct way for you to address the unmet needs of all three groups of clients and prospects is to provide them with useful information that grows out of your experience and the particular expertise you have that positions you as a trusted advisor.

For example, a consulting firm that works with property owners to evaluate and improve elevator service targeted the high-rise commercial and residential building market. To establish a presence in the market and promote their expertise, they published a 14-page booklet, "Owner's Guide to Better Elevator Service." They sent press releases about the booklet to real estate trade publications, used it at trade shows, distributed it at speeches and presentations, and mailed it to anyone who requested it as a result of their publicity. The technique brought them several big new clients.

Another example: Several years ago, civil engineering firm Psomas of Los Angeles, California created a checklist for developers on how to get land entitlements approved in politically sensitive communities. They e-mailed the checklist to their list of potential clients.

What useful information can you offer to get attention for your firm and build its credibility among potential clients? Ask yourself questions like these:

1. What do we know or do that nobody else does?
2. What seems to mystify or confuse clients about our area of expertise?
3. What questions are we often asked?
4. Where do we see clients making serious mistakes?
5. What success factors seem obvious to us, yet most people don't seem aware of them?
6. What processes could clients simplify or streamline?

When you work this process from the individual client's side and the prospect groups' side, you become recognized not as a vendor of services to your clients, but as a relevant and valued member of the community. As a profession, our tendency is to look at our fixed institutional position and then find needs to serve within it, rather than looking at the needs of our core clients and adjusting our position to serve them. We need to leverage our position as valued member of the community and learn to communicate to clients the fact that we are inseparable from their cultural and social structures.

Where to Go for Help

For more information on business development for design firms, check out How to Get the Best Clients at the Highest Fees at www.psmj.com/publication/?id=191.

Frank A. Stasiowski, FAIA, is president of PSMJ Resources, Inc. in Newton, MA.