There are only five below mentioned primary methods through which projects are acquired by any given company in the construction industry. But almost no company ask strategic questions around project acquisition or track their data in answering those questions to create business strategy. BizInterface begins with asking the following questions:

What method of acquisition is more efficient and profit generating for a company? What method requires more efforts in relation to the net profit? What method of project acquisition carries more liability and/ or risks? Or in general how to define success for a company in relation to the types of projects delivered or attracted and its succession plan?

I am not aware of any other solution that provides such strategic perspective that can be planned in an integrated fashion and tracked jointly by various departments within the organization. I request reader to comment on it and tell me if there is any. It is recommended that a session is held with BizInterface Certified Business Managers – to create a long term strategy and a plan for your company in relation to the Methods of Project Acquisition.

Methods of Project Acquisition:

Following are the methods that any company engages in acquiring projects:

Likability: Through relationships a company makes social and personal call to others in accessing opportunities by creating preference through likability. Most of the business development activities are targeted to acquire projects through this method. The primary premise to spending marketing cost on likability is that: Clients don’t buy services or products they buy people, especially for the services. But how is likeability targeted? If it is focusing on and framing only one person in the company, then we can say, that such liking will not go too far. It is extremely important that liking is created with more than one person in a company, that matches the long term relationships and succession plan. Encouraging likability require some interesting initiatives, like charity participation, helping out the other companies as part of the learning, etc. We would strongly discourage you to have traditional dinner based likability relationship. There is no harm in supplying lunch with meetings, but it is extremely important that budgets are assigned for such expenses and goals are set with the budget.  BizInterface sets targets on existing and targeted companies, whose business is, or can be, extremely important for the companies. Different grades of relationships are set and budgets are tracked in relation to the prospective projects.

Return Customers: Although the return customers reflect quality of previous service, but the consistency of the quality of service is difficult to control or measure, especially when there are multiple managers in a company are involved in the projects delivery. Smaller companies are better positioned to provide consistency to their quality. The principal fact is that the quality of service ensures return customers. However, in the absence of service quality, or for its further enforcement, the company leadership gets involved, steering and adjusting the inconsistency through appropriate profiling of the services and stakeholder management. This is when Business Development officials work directly with the Executives, or instead Executives enact as a Business Development officer. Turning a customer through likability and turning them into a potential return customer is what most of the companies concentrate on, especially the trade contractors. A customer is returning primarily for the quality of service or product he received, or even in the absence of such quality and satisfaction of previous service the customer still likes the company. Driving and controlling quality consistency is through mature systems and standards. BizInterface measures and improves on the maturity of systems and organizations based on the standards and guidelines suggested by Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) of Project Management Institute (PMI). BizInterface has an elaborate Quality Management Program for organization to climb up the maturity model.

Open Tender Invitation: Open tendering invitation are primarily on public projects. The primary cost for such project acquisitions are on the writing of proposals. Generally around 9 out of 10 proposals are  unsuccessful by most organizations. There is tremendous amount of time and resources of senior executives spend on proposal writing.

How can organizations minimize the cost of proposal writing?

1. Selective procurement invitation
2. Google and Yellow Page Calls