STEP 1: IDENTIFY

We’re going to cover the five steps that duplicate your very best projects that increase your cash flow, so that you can win the most fun, interesting, most profitable projects – all without ever having to go to networking events, fight to the death on RFPs or worry ever again about where that next project is going to come from.

Let us begin with step number one, which is to identify.

So the identification phase is where we take a look at your favorite project, the project that really lights you up, the project that when you think about it you think, “This project had a lot of interesting factors.” Maybe you think about your favorite project right now when you’re thinking about a project that was very profitable. It was very design heavy and it was just overall a great fit for your company and you had a lot of chemistry with the client and they were very compliant. They just let you do what you had to do to make the project go from A to Z, to get everything completed in the right amount of time and in the right amount of budgeting to really be profitable for you.

So let’s identify that project in terms of niche, let’s identify in terms of construction cost, geography then we’re going to talk about amount in just a minute.

So in terms of niche, it’s very important that we are very, very exact specific and precise in terms of the niche. If you give me a range answer here it’s not going to be very helpful for you because you need to focus on a specific, unique niche. And what I mean by that is that it’s not a range.

For example bad answer would be we’ll do anything from healthcare or retail, we’ll do commercial, we’ll do medical TI will do restaurant TI.

Rather than do that choose one and it doesn’t mean that that’s limited forever but it means that just for the purpose of this next marketing wave your next marketing campaign is going to be focused only on generating one type of project, hitting copy and paste from your most profitable project.

Once you’ve done that let’s move onto construction cost and there is a lot of times when I ask this question I’ll get a big range again from we’ll do anything from 5 to 100 million dollars. You know that’s that’s the kind of range of work that we CAN do and again we’re not talking about your capacity for or capability to do, a specific type of project.

What we’re really talking about is if we can duplicate a project what would that project be, maybe for you it’s 50 million in construction cost. And of course with geography, coast to coast or maybe a state, New York California, etc. that people will give me, they’ll say well we’ll do coast to coast (and by the way that’s fine with geography you can be broad).

Sometimes people say you know we want to have a 200 mile radius around our office and everything else is 200 miles plus we’re not gonna look at.

And again that’s fine. But what I would say is write down your answer is it going to be coast to coast or is it going to be around your office. Two hundred miles, close to home, closer to your office.

Now talk about the amount and what this means is how many projects per year can you take that fit that exact profile. So using the profile of what you’ve written down so far.

Maybe you said, “Jon, I could take on six of these projects every year in addition to everything else that we have going on.”.

So let’s say the project type is a multi-family and say that your construction cost is 15 million dollars. And to say that your design fees a healthy 8 percent and you can take on six of these projects per year.

So the first thing you can take a look at right over here is that you’re using these two numbers combined. That tells us that the total contract on that is worth one point two million. All right if you can take six of those projects per year that means there could be an additional seven point two million in additional contracts. So now that we’ve identified the project type the geography the construction cost the design fee how many of these projects you could take on per year.

And we’ve also looked at how much it’s actually worth to you on a per contract basis and what it’s worth to you if you were to achieve all of those projects to full capacity.

Now we have to talk about which is what’s coming up next, which is the attraction phase. How do you get organizations like developers corporations landowners to raise their hand and say we’ve seen your work, we love your work and we want to have you handle our upcoming project?