If variety is the spice of your MSP life, and you enjoy out-of-the-box problem solving (and marketing), then the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry may be for you.
From drones, to high-powered workstations and servers, to laptops that may get dropped at job sites, the vertical segment’s hardware, software, and networking needs run the gamut. That reflects the wide range of user roles in AEC: carpenters, plumbers, HVAC professionals, furniture distributors, engineers, architects, construction and project managers, and more.
MSPs who service this industry say these firms pay their bills, tend to be loyal, and won’t nickel and dime you if they can get their jobs done–whether that’s during normal working hours, after hours, or weekends. Importantly, downtime doesn’t fly.
And you’ll always know where you stand with them, which is both the reward and challenge of this industry, says Kelley Sanford, CEO of Nerds in a Flash, an MSP based in Austin, Texas. “They’re not bashful when they’re annoyed about something,” he notes.
Sound like a good fit? Sanford and other MSPs specializing in AEC have some tips on what you need to know and how to get started.
Know Their Pain Points, Speak Their Language
Because the user roles in this vertical are so varied, so are the pain points. Across the segment, “everybody does want to know about getting rid of the old server in the closet and going to something cloud related,” says James Evans, CEO and president of American Frontier, an MSP in Apex, North Carolina. But, he adds, “A heating and air company has got a totally different set of pain points than a surveyor flying drones and doing all this digital imaging.”
One key issue is rightsizing their technology and helping them budget for refreshes. For instance, workers on job sites need something more durable than a consumer-grade laptop, while the ones doing 3-D modeling need more powerful workstations. But Sanford says he finds these firms are either under-purchasing or over-purchasing, so setting expectations is important: Computers designed for word processing and internet browsing are not appropriate for running complicated graphics, for instance.
And those that have made high-end investments tend to hang on to them for too long, he adds. “We’ll come in for a network assessment and see a decade-old server and 8-year-old towers that were super expensive, but they’ve stretched them out because they’re trying to get their money’s worth,” Sanford explains.
Sanford warns against suggesting a rip and replace, however. “There’s a lot of fatigue across all segments of the vertical, feeling like they’re being oversold, especially if monster MSPs have gotten hold of them. They want to be assured that they’re dealing with somebody that is no nonsense and [is] not going to try to sell [them] something when [they] don’t need it.”
Uptime, another pain point, is not unique to AEC, but responsiveness is critical, says Charles Swihart, CEO of Preactive IT Solutions, an MSP in Houston, Texas. “These guys can be up late on a Friday night working on a bid; they need everything up and they need you to be responsive if something doesn’t work.”
Right behind uptime is security, Swihart adds. “Construction is one of the most heavily targeted industries for invoice email fraud. They get in your mailbox, they see your pattern of invoicing, they wait for a big one, and they try to dupe somebody into sending the money to the wrong place. The bad guys have figured out that construction companies don’t have $5,000 invoices; they have $50,000 and $400,000 invoices. So, they’re a big target for that kind of mail fraud. We’ve seen it happen here.”
Problem Solving and Revenue Streams
Swihart decided to specialize in construction and engineering because they were their biggest and best clients, a methodology recommended in The Pumpkin Plan. It was also a natural fit, since he had a background in AutoCAD and had taught engineering drafting technology.
Preactive IT Solutions manages the licensing for line-of-business applications such as AutoCAD, Bluebeam, and Revit, acts as the liaison with the manufacturers, and provides some Tier 1 support.
Preactive also sells hardware and builds custom workstations. “One of my engineering firms spends probably $50,000 a year on workstations,” says Swihart, who adds that they help them with solutions for sharing 3D models across office locations. “We’re not hosting any of that yet,” Swihart says. “I think one day we might.”
Like Swihart, Evans liaises with the line-of-business manufacturers on behalf of his customers. “We’re interacting with those folks all the time and collaborating on the support side, because the company that make[s] that software or hardware [doesn’t] know what’s on the ground at the client’s office, and the client doesn’t know the technical details to explain it to them and vice versa. And then we’ve got to make sure that the systems are actually operating securely.”
For Evans, engagements start with conversations about basic IT support and security, but then they’ll dive deeper to understand their specific workflows and tools. For instance, the MSP helped its surveyor customer improve the way they were capturing imagery from drones and importing that data to their desktops. “We tweaked their process just slightly and managed to get them probably three times the throughput on that stuff because it’s such a massive amount of data to download and churn through. Some little technology optimizations got them from being able to process one job in a day to being able to process three or four jobs in a day.”
Evans recommends looking beyond the obvious to solve pain points too. “There are solutions in other industries that the construction world has never seen before, and there are a lot of problems you can solve.” Evans and one of his engineers are both gamers, and they came up with a solution from the gaming space to improve that surveying firm’s ability to manipulate the complicated, 3D graphics they were capturing with the drones. “Between that and the changes to their workflow with the way they import all the data, we’ve had tremendous increases in performance and the ability for them to get work done.”
Getting in the Door, Building Rapport
If you’re prospecting, the decision maker will typically be the owner for smaller firms and the CFO for larger firms, Swihart says.
For co-managed engagements, Evans says the conversation may start with the management team or IT, “but I’ve found that it’s usually better to work with a CFO because they understand the risk and revenue models.”
Research the firm ahead of time, Evans advises, and try to build rapport. “They’ve all got stories about that job site where they were doing something simple, and they opened up a wall and found all these problems. We can relate to that and even exchange IT versions of those same types of stories and they see the connections. It’s very easy for me to create analogies and metaphors for their space on how something technical works because so many things are about data flow. For a plumber, it’s the water flow. For an electrician, it’s electrical flows and currents.’”
Creative Marketing Required
Sanford, Swihart, and Evans all utilize outbound outreach campaigns to target AEC firms. Evans sends out marketing letters and has his SDRs make the follow-up calls, exploring the prospect’s IT headaches and security needs. “I think the casual, 10-minute call definitely opens doors more than trying to schedule anything larger than that upfront,” he says. “Once you have that quick call and establish a little bit of rapport, then you can move forward to whatever the rest of your sales process might be, whether it’s assessments or presentations.”
Swihart makes it a practice to hold lunch and learns for construction-related companies and sponsor his customers’ golf tournaments, which he says have been their best source of leads. He even designs some industry-specific swag for the bags, such as bottle openers with hard hats.
He also sends 3-D printed “port-a-cans” to prospects with messaging such as, “Is it time to dump your crappy IT company?” Swihart says engineering and construction companies “love the humor.”
In addition to marketing campaigns, Swihart recommends joining industry-related organizations, such as Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) and Associated General Contractors (AGC).
Referrals are not as easy to get as in some verticals, however. They’re happy to give you a referral if you ask, according to Sanford, but they’re not likely to pass your name around, particularly architecture and engineering firms. “They don’t mingle quite as much in their industry as one might expect,” he explains.
Swihart agrees. “We have yet to reach that status where just everybody wants to call us. We’re aiming for that, but it’s not happened yet.”
Sanford adds the different segments of AEC will refer among themselves, but not necessarily do the same for their IT services. “If you ask an electrician if they know a good plumber, they know somebody. But no one asks the electrician if they know a computer company.”
Challenges and Benefits
Evans likes the down-to-earth nature of the people in the industry, but warns that you have to be ready to jump when a critical piece of equipment or program is having an issue.
Getting pricing right can be complicated too, Evans says. For instance, a 50-person plumbing company may only have 10 office workers, whereas a general contractor or builder may have a lot more knowledge workers on-site at various locations. “Each different slice of the space has different ratios of devices,” he explains. “And when you start calculating device pricing versus end-user pricing and things like that, it can be difficult to capture it all.”
Supporting high-powered workstations and servers for doing 3D modeling and CAD can be a challenge too, says Swihart. “You’re going to have situations where you have people in the field or other remote locations that need to be able to do things as if they were in the office. That’s not always as easy as it sounds,” he says, particularly for larger CAD drawings and 3D models.
But these customers are loyal, Swihart adds. “They’re not going to leave you to save a buck. They see the value of what we do.”
Advice for Getting Started
Before diving into this target market, Evans advises doing some research to find locations that are experiencing a building boom. “If you’re in one of those markets that’s going through a building boom, you can do very, very well. If you’re in one of those markets that is not, then you can sink a whole lot of resources into marketing to folks who are in a financial pickle already.”
Swihart suggest gathering strong testimonials from AEC customers and having familiarity with their line-of-business software such as AutoCAD, Procore, Revit, Bluebeam, and possibly SolidWorks, and consider getting staff trained or certified. An understanding of accounting programs like Sage, Deltek, and QuickBooks Enterprise is helpful too.
Finally, this vertical is not that different from other verticals, Sanford says, but bear in mind that they’re wary of being oversold and they don’t like a hard sell. “If you’re coming in with that forceful nature, they’ll just tell you to pound sand.”
For more insights into strong MSP niches, check out our last installment in our industry vertical series, on why MSPs are choosing the public sector.
