A Lesson From The Art Of War

By Ted Garrison, Garrison Associates

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu

I hope contractors don’t have battles with their clients, but contractors would be well advised to adapt Sun Tzu’s advice to their business environment. Contractors who better understand their clients and their own capabilities to deliver on those will enjoy a competitive advantage.

Too often contractors focus only the technical aspects of the project, but that is the commodity portion of the project. Since everyone provides what is called for on the plans and specifications, there is very little room to create any significant differentiation among contractors. In order to maximize this effort, there are six areas to evaluate:

1. Obviously clients look at the contractor’s past or historic performance. It’s essential that you have a reputation of high performance and reasonable price. But it’s just as important for you to understand the history of the client. If you have a client who has a reputation of caring about only price, then a value approach will probably have limited success. A roofing contractor in Wyoming and Colorado is a value-driven contractor, so if a client focuses only on price, the contractor won’t waste his time. The result is he obtains well more than 90 percent of the projects for which he submits a proposal.

2. What’s the client’s attitude toward your approach? Has he had a bad or good experience in the past? In reality it may be very difficult to overcome someone’s bad past experience. So you might be better off seeking those prospects who have had a good experience with your approach or are at least neutral.

3. What are the client’s needs and desires? This is where the greatest opportunities are hiding. The most successful contractors get past the plans and specifications and focus on how the finished product can make the client’s business more successful by either reducing cost or improving productivity. Because these solutions can go on saving dollars for years, the contractor can even create a situation where it saves the client more than the cost of the project. A perfect example is the St. Anthony Falls Bridge in Minneapolis. Flatiron-Manson’s rapid schedule saved the community more in transportation costs than the cost of the bridge.

4. What objectives should you anticipate? Contractors that have done their homework on the client should know what their concerns they have about a project. Typically most issues revolve around quality or performance, schedule or budget. The issues are merely the risks the client cannot afford to take. The contractor that best addresses these and offers the best solution for minimizing those risks has the best chance of getting the contract.

5. Are you communicating with the right people so you understand what’s important? If not, how do you expect to deliver on the correct desires and needs? The number one reason for project failure is the lack of a clear goal, so if you aren’t communicating with the true decision makers, you are setting yourself up for failure.

6. Understand how the decision-makers make their decision. This may not seem important to some, but it’s vital to success. Unless you understand how the client processes information, you are likely to miss the target. Unfortunately, most people tend to provide information to others as they would want to receive it. In other words, they focus on what’s important to themselves instead of what’s important to the client. Left-brained individuals require facts and figures to give any explanation credibility, while right-brained people require an appeal to their emotions. Failure to provide the information in the client’s preferred method might easily result in the wrong decision.

In the end the more you know about the client to address his or her needs, the greater your chance of success. Failure to follow Sun Tzu’s advice and learn about your client is likely to result in failure. In the end success goes to those who put forth the effort to learn about their clients.

Ted Garrison is a catalyst for change and construction business visionary. An author, speaker and consultant, he is also the host of the Internet radio program New Construction Strategies. He can be reached at Ted@TedGarrison.com.

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