John Brand is no stranger
to corporate growth.
Butler, Fairman & Seufert Inc., a civil engineering firm
with 2007 revenue of $15.3 million, recently acquired a
Lafayette civil/environmental
company after partnering with
the business for several years.
In addition to making the
acquisition, Brand — the company’s president and a principal — says Butler Fairman has
grown by balancing new
opportunities with maintaining
existing client relationships.
“Our integrity and our firm’s
reputation is paramount,” he
says. “We’d like to be viewed
as a trusted adviser.”
Smart Business spoke with
Brand about how he and his
team of 145 employees have
become trusted advisers to
their clients.
Q. How do you communicate
to your clients that you will
follow through?
First and foremost, we make
sure that we take care of our
existing clients so that they
keep calling back and asking us
to take on the next project.
That’s just demonstrated on our
past performance, and that’s
very important. Sometimes, it’s
really hard for clients to sort
out until they have some experience with the firm.
It’s easy for everybody to
come in and say, ‘I can do this
job; I understand what needs
to be done here,’ but to really
separate yourself from others,
you have to promote personal
service and be responsive to
your clients.
Your clients identify a problem, and they don’t know what’s
needed for a solution. They rely on you to come up with a solution. They trust that you’ll be
prudent with the decisions on
their money and their schedule;
they have a lot at stake. They
need to know that you’ll be able
to follow through and get the
job done for them.
Q. How do you promote
personal service?
We like to get a lot of face
time with our clients. We have
seven client services people
on our payroll. Since we
founded the company, we
chose to call that department
client services rather than
business development because
sometimes business
development gives the
connotation that you’re
always pursuing other
projects that you don’t
have.
We do pursue new
projects, but I’ve found
that we’re able to grow
if we devote four days a
week to servicing existing clients and one day a
week to pursuing new
opportunities and new
clients.
