Tim Heatley of Capital&Centric on portfolios, timing and why most approaches arrive too late.

How architects and engineers can win work from developers

Almost every architecture and engineering practice I work with has a wish list. The developers they'd love to be working for. The names that come up when you ask what good work looks like in five years time.

Very few have a plan for getting there.

What most practices do is watch for the announcement that a scheme is going ahead, then get in touch. Which means joining a queue of people who all read the same press release on the same morning.

I put this to Tim Heatley, co-founder of Capital&Centric, on The Built Environment Marketing Show. They're an investor, developer and operator spending between three and four million pounds a week on regeneration across the UK, so he sits on a fair few wish lists himself.

By the time a scheme is public, it's too late

Tim gets a huge amount of incoming from architects and engineers who have seen he's acquired a site nearby and want to know if they can get involved. His view is that by then it's way too late.

What he wants is to be brought opportunities before they're public. That's a completely different activity to the one most practices are doing. It comes from a relationship built over years, not an email sent in response to news.

Which means the work starts long before there's anything to bid for.

Good architecture is a given

Everyone on the shortlist can design. That's why they're on the shortlist.

So the question isn't whether your work is good. It's what else you're bringing that's useful to the people you want to work with. Local knowledge. A view on how a site could work. Relationships with the council. Something that makes you worth a conversation before there's a project on the table.

Curate your portfolio ruthlessly

Tim's advice on websites was direct. If you've got a scheme that's a bit naff, take it off. Focus on your best work and let it stand as the clearest representation of what you can do.

I've had a version of this discussion with a lot of practices. Everything goes on the website because everything was hard work and somebody in the office is fond of it. But nobody outside your firm is scrolling through forty projects. They're forming a view in about ninety seconds, and the weakest thing they see does more damage than the strongest thing does good.

His reasoning is the bit that stayed with me. A developer looking at a duff scheme on your site is lying awake wondering whether theirs ends up being the one you'd quietly call naff. That's the sort of thing marketers mean when we talk about what keeps a client awake at night.

Show your best work, and the work that takes you where you want to go next.

The relationships that matter aren't only with the developer

Earlier this week Tom Larsson at Grow Places posted a thank you to his partners. Councils, consultants, architects, agents, all in one grid with no distinction between them.

Two things worth noticing. The first is that a developer's idea of who they work with includes local authorities and the public sector, which tells you a lot about where the relationships that matter actually sit. The second is that this is a free and public list of who a developer already trusts.

Most people scroll past posts like that. It's about as clear a picture of a target client's world as you'll get without asking for it.

Which brings me to something practices often shy away from. Politics is your business. Local authorities, councillors, community groups, the people who shape what gets built and where. If you're serious about working somewhere, you need relationships across that whole ecosystem, not just with the developer's name at the top of it.

The pub test

I asked Tim whether talking to people outside the industry was effectively his market research. He described it as whether you can get someone in the pub, who isn't especially interested in property or regeneration, interested in what's happening to their town. And whether you can get them to express an opinion on it.

I love this as a filter because it catches so much of what we write. He gave the example of "we've started on site", which means nothing to a member of the public. But "we have commenced construction" is worse, because it sounds far more complex and brings nobody with you.

Speak plainly. Everyday language beats our curious brand of archi-babble every time.

Being visible as a person, not a logo

Tim films himself on his phone. No crew, just his arm outstretched, three or four takes to get one clean run. He grabs footage of what he's seeing on site and a colleague adds B-roll afterwards so the final edit isn't a talking head. He reckons being visible as an individual has done more for trust in new towns and cities than any corporate identity would have. It signals he's open, available, and not planning to take the money and disappear.

There's a business benefit too. People arrive at meetings having already decided they like him. As he put it, the ones who don't like him don't invite him.

He encourages his colleagues to build their own profiles as well, partly to share the load, partly because that audience stays with them for their whole career.

If you've got senior people who go quiet at the suggestion of putting themselves out there, this is a useful case to make. It isn't vanity. It's what gets you in the room early and builds your reputation before you need it.

On AI, his take was that it averages everything out. Which led him to a conclusion I keep thinking about: personality will be premium in the future.

From supplier to trusted advisor

The practices that win this kind of work tend to do the same things.

They scope out sites themselves and turn up with a point of view on how a deal could be done. They build relationships across the whole ecosystem, not just the developer. They curate what they show. And they start years before there's anything to bid for.

That's how you get to trusted advisor rather than another name on a tender list. Watch the full interview with Tim below or listen to the audio version.

The bit nobody teaches you

None of this is complicated. But it's one of those things practices easily drop, because it isn't directly anyone's job.

Most senior people in architecture and engineering practices haven't been taught how to build these relationships. They've been promoted on the strength of being brilliant designers or technical experts, and then left to work the rest out on their own.

That's exactly what I build bespoke marketing and BD training around. Storytelling and influence, so you can get buy-in and bring people with you. Building networks and communities in a way that plays to your strengths. Using LinkedIn to drive real business relationships. Practical sessions built around you and your team, and usually quite fun.

If your leadership team could do with that, get in touch and let's have a chat