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you and your employees are happy. It involves cultivating a refined skillset around activities like networking, billing, hiring, branding,
community involvement, and more.

Relationships are the lifeblood of business
If there’s only one lesson to take to heart, it’s to recognize that a strong
business relies less on project volume and more on building relationships.
“Relationships” doesn’t simply refer to client relationships. It also
encompasses relationships with fellow surveyors, tradespeople, and
smaller and larger companies.

“Business development I think of mainly as retaining existing
relationships, building new relationships, and also fence-mending and
making sure that the people and clients that we might not feel great
about, or project managers that are gone, that we always reach out.
It’s all about relationships in business development and having that
key capability to be able to gather intel and have it first,” says Dorina
Bustamante, Director of Business Development at Ritoch-Powell and
Associates.

“I’d also say that it’s vital to have healthy relationships with your colleagues and competitors. Sometimes we have to divide and conquer.
Sometimes if it’s government work, you can only win so much with a certain agency. So we’re constantly discussing how we prime or
sub. And the teaming dynamic is very exciting.”

In terms of clients, you want to establish your reputation as a reliable expert. In terms of other survey firms, you want to be able to
partner together if the need arises. And in terms of fellow professionals, you want to maintain a working knowledge of who does what,
and who you might want to someday hire.
Relationships function like compound interest. The more you put into them, the more you’ll get out of them over time.

Don’t chase commodity-driven clients

But how do you get out of the day-to-day trenches and into the point
where you’re focused on those higher-level goals?
The first step is to think hard about the clients and projects that you’re
pursuing.

Ideally, you don’t want to work with clients who view surveying purely as a
commodity, without any value for your expertise.

“I refuse to race to the bottom. I am trying to find those clients that are
going to respect what I do and pay me the most I can,” says Nolan Mark,
owner of On The Mark Land Surveying LLC.

“I’m not charging $200-300 for a lot survey. It’s just ridiculous. I don’t want
to go out there and burn my time to do something like that, or maybe a
mortgage lot survey that’s just two pins, tape up a house, and throw in a piece of paper and then the realtor’s happy and they get a
close. I’m going to tell you what I think the cost is going to be, and that’s what it’s going to be.”

When you go from working for someone else and having a secure paycheck to running your own business, you need to think about
profit. That means aiming to be the lowest bidder to win work is usually a losing strategy in the long run.
Nolan would much rather quote a price that’s higher, and have clients choose to pay him that rate because they trust him to get the job
done.

Michael Thompson is the President of Halma Thompson Land Surveys Ltd., where he has a staff of seven employees. He says that he
occasionally will take commodity clients like land-transaction surveys, but it’s not his focus. It’s just to fill in the gaps.

“We will do that, but that’s just something to keep the guys busy while we’re not doing work that actually makes money, the better
margin work that we really want to go after,” he says.

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