The key to success? Adopt new tech.

Most design professionals come roaring out of school with a clear vision for their astronomical career path. But after a few years’ apprenticeship and work, one realizes it’s not as easy as all that. Those who have achieved singular success attracting business seem to be either the top 0.001% (sometimes referred to as starchitects), or they’re niche players towards whom clients gravitate for lack of options. Some, it seems, are just fortunate to attract a small coterie of loyal clients. In any event, your average design firm is left scratching their heads at the marketing success of others—especially those whose work they may privately consider to be inferior to their own.

In pondering how to attract more business, it is instructive to pay attention to the changing world of the client. For, whether acknowledged or not, clients of all types—from corporations to governments to institutional owners—are asking for new heights of productivity, efficiency, and technological integration.

These clients see examples in the world around them, and indeed in their own businesses, of the power that technological advancement has to drive profitability and reduce errors, costs and lead time. Why shouldn’t they reap the same benefits from their building projects?

In every other industry, labor productivity has improved markedly. Amazingly, productivity for the construction industry has failed to keep pace. A recent study of by the McKinsey Global Institute makes the disparity clear:

This report highlights one of the most telling features that all design professional firms must come to address: across the architecture, engineering, and construction world, there has been a reluctance to adopt new technology.

The failure of the professions and the construction world to implement innovative productivity-enhancing methods — from so-called “5-D” building information modeling (BIM) to new product specification software, to data driven budget and planning methodologies—is holding the professions and the construction industry back from improving profitability and productivity.

Projects are becoming increasingly complex. Demands to minimize and eliminate unwarranted cost overruns are rising. The firms that can differentiate themselves by training and applying new technologies to achieve greater efficiency and design sophistication will consistently win new business.

Will you be one of these champions of technology-enabled design? Can you take the necessary steps to position your firm within the next two years to secure more complex, higher-paying projects? Will prospective clients seek you out because you bring new talents and new productivity-oriented technologies together?

I’d love to hear about where your firm fits in the spectrum of adapting or staying put when it comes to new technology. I know where I hope you come out on this subject.