Strategic marketing for AEC firms starts with a simple discipline: understanding the business before producing the deliverable. Katie sits down with Kevin Johnson, Senior Director of Marketing and Sales Enablement at H.J. Russell & Company, to talk about what it actually takes to build a marketing function that operations leaders trust enough to bring in early. Kevin shares the mindset shift that changed how his team operates, moving from "make this for us" requests to a real seat at the table, and why that shift only happens through relationships, not mandates.

Kevin sees marketing and sales as working toward the same goal. Marketing helps build awareness and gives seller-doers the tools and messaging they need to have stronger conversations with clients. But that connection also has to happen internally. Kevin talks about the importance of understanding what operations and technical leaders are dealing with every day, from managing risk and protecting margins to handling urgent job site issues. When marketing understands those pressures, it becomes much easier to get their attention, earn their trust, and work together more effectively.

Kevin shares a firsthand look at what it takes to introduce a CRM into an established AEC firm that had never used one before. Instead of rolling it out across the company all at once, his team started small, built the system behind the scenes, and introduced it gradually. As people began to see the value, adoption grew naturally, eventually reaching about 70 percent utilization in a year and a half. He describes the process as “crawl, walk, run” and connects it to another leadership principle he follows: fire bullets, then cannonballs. Start small, test what works, prove the value, and then make the bigger investment once you know you are headed in the right direction.

Marketing as a growth partner is the vision Kevin closes on, urging AEC firms to stop treating marketing as a production shop that simply executes requests and start treating it as a genuine growth partner that helps generate leads, strengthen client relationships, and hit the firm's financial goals. For any marketing or business development leader working to build trust between departments, this conversation offers a clear, tested path forward.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic marketing starts with understanding the business first. Learn the firm's goals and pipeline before producing deliverables, so requests shift from "make this for us" to "here's what we're trying to do."
• Marketing and sales enablement function best as one growth strategy. Marketing builds the content and positioning; seller-doers put it directly into clients' hands.
• Introducing a CRM, or any new system, works better as a crawl, walk, run process. Build quietly, prove value in small wins, then scale adoption once trust is established.
• Understanding an internal client's day-to-day world, their deadlines, risk, and pressure, leads to more collaborative requests and faster responses than transactional asks.
• The goal is for AEC firms to see marketing as a growth partner that helps generate leads and grow the business, not just a production shop that fulfills orders

Connect with Kevin Johnson

Sr. Director Marketing & Sales Enablement, H. J. Russell & Company

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-johnson-91046814/

https://www.hjrussell.com/

Connect with Katie Cash:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

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Project management in AEC firms generally doesn't go beyond the technical aspects of the business, such as schedules, budgets, and quality controls that keep a building on track. Marketing rarely gets the same discipline. Even though marketing teams juggle their own budgets, deadlines, and quality standards every week. Listen in as Katie Cash talks with Meredith Schroeder, Director of Operations at Smartegies, about why AEC marketing departments need real project management systems, not just good intentions and a color-coded whiteboard.

Marketing workflow visibility comes up early as the clearest sign that a team has outgrown its current systems. Meredith shares the telltale signs of a reactive marketing department: missed deadlines, last-minute requests, and no single place to see the full workload, and explains why a new tool or process document rarely fixes the problem on its own. She and Katie also dig into proposal management, tracing what it takes to coordinate a dozen internal contributors who do not report to marketing while chasing a must-win RFP deadline that never moves.

AEC marketing operations round out the conversation with a practical look at staffing versus workflow problems, and how time tracking data can show whether a team truly needs more people or simply needs better prioritization. Meredith closes with her five core project management practices: creating alignment early, building timelines around reality, making it easy for others to contribute, making the work visible, and owning the deliverable, along with her top tip for listeners: start before you start.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing departments deliver against budgets, schedules, and quality standards just like technical teams, and benefit from the same project management discipline.
• Reactive, last-minute work is usually a visibility problem, not a staffing problem. Get the full workload in one place before deciding you need to hire.
• Internal clients respond better to specific, well-resourced requests than to vague asks dropped on short notice.
• Time tracking by task, not by a single daily bucket, reveals where a marketing team's hours actually go and whether workload is balanced fairly.
• Meredith's five practices: create alignment early, build timelines around reality, make it easy for others to contribute, make the work visible, and own the deliverable.

Connect with Meredith Schroeder

Director of Operations, Smartegies

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mer-schroeder/

https://smartegies.com/

Resources Mentioned in Episode:

• SmartSkills Session: *you do have to have a subscription or pay to hear this webinar* https://www.bigmarker.com/smartegies/smartskills-work-smarter-not-harder

Connect with Katie Cash:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

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AI promised AEC marketing teams more speed. What it delivered was a mirror.

Katie Cash sits down with Rachelle Ray, Head of AEC Marketing Innovation at OpenAsset, about what has genuinely changed in proposal production since AI entered the workflow, and what has simply been exposed rather than fixed. Rachelle brings a rare dual perspective, having led marketing and proposals inside an architecture firm before moving to the vendor side, and she is direct about where AI creates real value and where it introduces contractual risk that firms are not yet prepared to manage.

Katie and Rachelle also discuss the guardrails firms need before rolling AI out firm-wide, from approved and prohibited language lists to structured training and review processes.

Key Takeaways:

• Speeding up misaligned pursuits with AI does not save resources; it burns them faster.
• AI-generated proposal language can create real contractual risk without a review process in place.
• Firms that succeed with AI treat it as a firm-wide rollout, with training and guardrails, not a single toggle switch.
• The AEC marketers who thrive in the AI era will build data literacy, relationship intelligence, and systems thinking.
• Knowledge management, capturing what lives in people's heads, is becoming essential infrastructure for AI to work well.

Connect with Rachelle Ray, Head of AEC Marketing Innovation, OpenAsset

https://openasset.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelle-ray-marketing/

Connect with Katie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

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AEC marketing is shifting from a reactive, proposal-driven function into a strategic discipline that drives demand. Justin Davidson of JE Dunn has helped lead that change from the inside.

Katie Cash talks with Justin about how that shift played out inside one of the country's largest builders, where JE Dunn built a dedicated vertical market model for its fast-growing industrial and manufacturing practice. He shares why a strong digital footprint now wins work from clients who find the firm online, and how video content and AI-optimized search are reshaping the way owners choose their builders.

Whether you support a single office or a national vertical, these lessons will help you move upstream and earn a seat at the strategy table. Listen to hear how JE Dunn turned marketing into a growth engine.

• AEC marketing
• construction marketing strategy
• marketing and business development alignment
• vertical market marketing
• video marketing for construction
• content generation
• industrial and manufacturing construction
• digital footprint for AEC firms
• AI optimized search
• JE Dunn

Connect with Justin Davidson, Marketing Director - Advanced Facilities Group, JE Dunn

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindavidson09/

JE Dunn: https://jedunn.com/

Connect with Katie Cash:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:

We hope you’re finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals. Your feedback is important to us and we’d love to hear from you.

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If your firm is still waiting for the RFP to show up before getting serious about winning the work, you are already behind.

Katie Cash chats with Noel Brady, Co-Founder and COO of ProjectMark, the CRM built specifically for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. They talk about what it actually takes to build a firm that grows with intention. Noel challenges the deeply ingrained belief that winning work is about personal relationships alone and makes the case that sustainable growth requires systematizing those relationships so they become a firm-wide asset rather than a liability that leaves when a key person leaves. From pipeline conversion ratios to the go/no-go decisions firms get wrong, this episode is an honest guide to replacing gut instinct with clean, actionable data.

Noel and Katie also dig into the cultural and behavioral shifts that distinguish firms that merely talk about being data-driven from those that actually do it. If your firm is ready to stop reacting and start leading, this episode is the place to start.

• AEC business development

• CRM for AEC firms

• architecture engineering construction marketing

• AEC firm growth strategy

• go/no-go decisions AEC

• pipeline conversion ratio

• data-driven AEC

• seller doer AEC

• project pursuit strategy

• RFP strategy architecture firms

Connect with Noel Brady, Co-Founder & COO, ProjectMark

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-brady-mscsi-mrics-aaaa4547/

ProjectMark: https://www.projectmark.com/

Connect with Katie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:

We hope you’re finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals. Your feedback is important to us and we’d love to hear from you.

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The old AEC marketing playbook is no longer enough, and as the AEC truth teller, Judy Sparks is here to say what the industry has been too polite to admit out loud… the way you’ve always done it is quietly costing you work.

Judy Sparks, Founder and CEO of Smartegies and Amazon bestselling author of "The Modern AEC Marketer," joins Katie Cash for a candid milestone conversation. This is episode 100, and they are celebrating with some long-overdue industry truths. The way you’ve always done work as an AEC firm has changed. And it’s time for your firm to catch up.

There is a disconnect between how AEC leaders think about marketing and how marketing actually works. Judy talks about the gap, from treating the marketing funnel as a discipline rather than a diagram, to why top-of-funnel investment is where most firms are quietly losing ground. She also walks through a practical alignment exercise that will quickly reveal who your firm’s highest-value customers are and how to reach them.

If you are ready to advocate for a seat at the leadership table, this episode will help create a clearer path for you to get there.

Connect with Judy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judysparks/

Connect with Katie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/

https://smartegies.com/

Grab Judy Sparks’ new book, The Modern AEC Marketer: How the Next Generation Will Lead the Industry Forward: https://a.co/d/0hNpFy1G

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:

We hope you’re finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals. Your feedback is important to us and we’d love to hear from you.

Here’s how you can help. Scroll to the bottom, rate our podcast with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Let us know what you found most helpful from this episode!

Podcasting may be the most underutilized business development tool in the AEC industry right now.

Tom Schwab, CEO and Founder of Interview Valet, is joining Katie Cash to explain why they believe podcast marketing deserves a real seat at the table in every AEC firm’s growth strategy. Podcasting goes far beyond content creation; it’s a strategic driver for relationships, reputation, and revenue. From podcast guesting to launching your own show, Katie and Tom discuss how architects, engineers, and construction professionals can build trust, deepen client relationships, and improve visibility in both traditional and AI-driven search.

Podcast interviews can be used to influence decision makers, strengthen trust, and create evergreen marketing assets. Katie and Tom even break down the realistic expectations around time, ROI, and how to align podcasting efforts with real business outcomes.

Podcast marketing is no longer just for consumer brands. For AEC firms ready to grow their reputation, strengthen relationships, and drive revenue, the microphone may be the most strategic tool in your marketing mix.

Connect with Tom Schwab, CEO & Founder, Interview Valet:
https://interviewvalet.com/aec

Connect with Katie: https://smartegies.com/

Grab Judy Sparks’ new book, The Modern AEC Marketer: How the Next Generation Will Lead the Industry Forward: https://a.co/d/0hNpFy1G

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:

We hope you’re finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals. Your feedback is important to us and we’d love to hear from you.

Here’s how you can help. Scroll to the bottom, rate our podcast with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Let us know what you found most helpful from this episode!

And if you haven’t done so already, give the podcast a follow, and you'll be notified when new episodes come out.