Winning Work Begins Before the RFP Ever Drops

In the competitive world of sports architecture projects, winning starts before the first move. By the time the RFP hits your inbox, the best-positioned firms are already 10 steps ahead. They have a strategy, a team, and an approach for their presentation.

In April 2025, I wrote a post on LinkedIn comparing golf tournament preparation with pre-pursuit planning in the AEC industry—emphasizing how the work done before the real competition begins is often what determines the outcome.

That mindset is a fundamental truth in business development, and critical when you have a sales cycle of months (or years) before a lead turns into a an interview presentation, and hopefully, a project WIN. Because the truth is:

By the time the RFP hits your inbox, the best-positioned firms are already 10 steps ahead. They have a strategy, a team, and an approach for their presentation.

Winning work doesn’t start with a proposal response. It starts with a process.

A smart pursuit strategy starts early— one that forms the right team, understands project challenges, client priorities and hot buttons, and delivers design solutions clients can champion.

Here’s what’s missing in most firms that don't win consistently:

🧭 Discovery Without Depth

Many pursuit teams ask surface-level questions—or skip discovery altogether. They don’t have a repeatable system for uncovering what matters most to the client: their true priorities, internal pressures, or vision of project success. You need to master the art of open-ended questions during early stakeholder discovery engagement and ensure you have the perspective of ALL key stakeholders.

📖 No Written Frameworks

If your pursuit process only exists in someone’s head, you can’t teach it. You can’t scale it or continue to refine it, as the industry evolves. And you certainly can’t trust that it will be done consistently across pursuit teams, markets, or offices.

🧩 Disconnected Strategy

Firms often respond only to what’s written in the RFP—rather than augmenting the response with what’s been learned from early conversations. Proposals and interviews should be a reflection of client intel gathered upstream: the story they need to hear, not the one you want to tell.

🛠 Lack of Systemized Preparation

From discovery to consultant team selection, proposal writing to interview rehearsals—there should be a structured approach for how your teams prepare. Not ad hoc. Not last-minute. But a real process with checkpoints, tools, and collaborative input across disciplines.

💡 If you can’t write it down, you can’t teach it. And if you can’t teach it, you can’t execute with success across multiple teams.

The most successful AEC firms don’t just win great work—they’ve built systems built on best-practices and can be taught. That’s how you train up your next generation. That’s how you scale. That’s how you move from chasing projects to winning strategically.

If you're still relying on instinct, memory, or a few rainmakers to drive growth, let’s talk. I help firms build pursuit systems that will improve win rates—so you don’t just hope to win… you plan for it.