“Selling” the Joint Venture

Joint venturing on projects is common practice in the A/E/C industry to add capacity, strength, or portfolio to a project pursuit.  In some cases, firms joint venture at the suggestion of the potential client, but most of the time, they do so to increase their competitive advantage.  Having been a party to creating presentations for multiple JV teams, let me add my voice to the discussion of how to successfully joint venture on a project.  Regardless of financial arrangements between firms, real management structure, communication flow, and all the other things firm leadership must consider in a joint venture, I’m primarily concerned with how we sell the JV to the potential client to give the team the maximum chance of winning the pursuit.

In my experience, most JVs aren’t successful in the pursuit – not because the JV wasn’t a good idea, but because in the push to meet all parties’ needs in the venture, the needs of the potential client and the project were forgotten. If the firm leadership hasn’t carefully considered how the JV is going to work for the client and project, I find it’s almost impossible to win with  the JV team.  In many cases, firms push for a  “balanced” JV relationship, making sure no one firm is slighted in the arrangement. Too often, this results in double staffing:  two project executives, two project managers, two technical leads or split design responsibilities, etc.  Looking at this from a client perspective, not only is it difficult to identify a single point of contact, the client sees a team that’s overstaffed and appears very expensive.

On one hugely successful pursuit, I had the honor of working with a JV team that got it right.  This team’s leadership put their collective egos aside and thought about what it would take to win the project and create comfort for the owner in the organization of the team.  The client was presented with one project executive, one senior project manager, one project architect, one design lead, and a clearly defined set of technical experts.  Roles and responsibilities were clearly presented in the proposal and the team did not waffle on roles and responsibilities in the interview.  Interview time was used to explain how the team would approach the client’s work, not on explaining the organization or giving talk time to multiple project managers or designers.

Conversely, on a recent JV design/build pursuit, we had to bring almost 20 people to the interview:  two designers, two project managers, project executives from each firm, etc.  The firms’ leadership was so busy worrying about not offending each other, making sure each firm had equal talk time that they forgot that they had to win the job first.  As a coach, I found it difficult to focus the team on relevant differentiating content because team members weren’t coordinated in their approach or their relationships.

If a team can’t put corporate politics aside and come together in a united proposal and presentation, it’s pretty clear the client is going to have problems with this team as they deliver the project.  Surprisingly,  I’ve found that most potential clients don’t actually mind a JV – in fact, they can see that partnering on projects can bring the best expertise to technical and community challenges. But, these clients need to see a real partnership and teaming arrangement from the beginning in order for them to have comfort in the team organization.

The most important discussion the leadership of a potential JV should have – once they’ve figured out they want to pursue a project together – is what the organization chart should look like.  Independent of percentages and final division of the work, what does the potential client need to see relative to leadership and organization?  How can the team look streamlined and well organized?  The “math” is pretty simple:   If the combined firms don’t figure this out and communicate it clearly in the proposal,  they lose. 

Joint venture partners need to consider the logic of the project, not the logic of how they will divide up the work.  Organization charts need to make sense – to the team and most importantly, to the client.  We should never have two project managers.  We might see deputy project managers responsible for specific scopes of work, but there should be a single point of contact for the client. Similarly, we should never see two lead designers.  There should be one unifying design vision for the project even if specialty designers will handle specific portions of the project.  And, there’s no reason for two project executives.  Owners can still get the combined resources of both firms with one executive speaking on behalf of the joint venture.  From my perspective, if firm leadership doesn’t trust their partner to speak on their behalf, there’s a bigger problem at play than who has what title on the organization chart.

At the end of the day, from a marketing perspective,  the best joint venture relationships are seamless:  The client doesn’t see different firms. The client sees the best technical and management experience brought to bear to resolve project challenges and create project excellence.