This blog content comes from an interview conducted on July 16, 2026. For more information or context, watch the full episode where you get your podcasts.
“I realized very quickly they had no plan. They had no presentation for the interview the next morning, and they were rapidly trying to pull something together. I just went, ‘We don’t have a chance in the world of winning this job.’”- Tim Griffin, Author, Winning Work
Business development is easy to neglect when backlogs are healthy, but the moment of truth usually arrives in a project interview. On this episode of the AEC GrowthCast, host Greg Hart talks with longtime PSMJ instructor and consultant Tim Griffin, an engineer with more than 35 years in the industry, about his third book, Winning Work. Griffin explains why so many firms lose, how a team can beat bigger competitors, and how to build a culture where everyone helps bring in work.
1. Most firms don’t know why they win or lose
“I don’t think for the most part they have any idea why they won or lost. A lot of times, especially if they’re losing, they say, ‘Well, it was politics,’ or ‘Somebody knows somebody,’ or ‘Something underhanded happened,’ or ‘It just wasn’t our turn,’ or ‘We just didn’t get lucky this time.’ But they don’t grasp that they have some control over the outcome.”
Griffin recently hired a mid-level electrical engineer from a competitor and asked about that firm’s approach to interviewing:
“The first thing he said was, ‘Well, they chase everything.’ The second thing he said reminded me of the quote, ‘If you keep doing the same thing over and over, you shouldn’t expect different results.’ They were doing every interview the same and expecting to get different results.”
The good news is how low the bar can be. In the interview that inspired the book, his team came in second out of six shortlisted:
“What does that tell you? The bar is really low. You may say, ‘Well, I’m an engineer, I’m an architect. How could I be good at this?’ You don’t have to be that good to win. You just have to be better than everybody else.”
2. Treat the interview like a championship game
“Of everything we do in our business, it’s the most like sports. There’s very few things that we do as architects or engineers where at the end of the day you can quantify did we win or did we lose. Often on prestigious projects, you can have thirty, forty, fifty proposals or more. And from there there’s a short list. And from there, one team’s going to win and the other teams are going to lose. There’s no partial winners. If you’re second, you’re just first loser.”
He relishes being the underdog:
“You’re an underdog coming in against somebody that everybody thinks is going to win. So many people shy away from those opportunities, but to me that’s when my juices really get flowing. Many, many times I’ve been able to lead teams against Goliaths that were expecting to get the work and often complacent because of that. And we’re really ripe to come in with a creative approach and to beat them.”
He compares the two weeks before the Super Bowl to interview prep:
“The coaches are sitting down, and some of the coaches are thinking about what are our strengths that we’re going to use to attack them. Some are thinking about what are our weaknesses that they’re going to try to attack us with. How do we offset those weaknesses and leverage our advantages? It’s the same idea with the interviews. What are your strengths you’re going to sell? What are your opponents going to try to sell that you have to offset and minimize in order to win that project?”
3. Know who’s leading, who you’re up against, and who’s in the room
“It starts with knowing who’s leading your team. A lot of times we get into this hot potato: ‘We just got shortlisted.’ ‘Well, who’s leading it?’ ‘Not me.’ ‘Not me.’ In my experience, in twenty-eight years, I’ve never seen us win a job where we were playing hot potato over who was going to lead it.”
Then comes the strategy:
“You’ve got to figure out who your competitors are. That’s one of the most important questions, because without knowing who your competition is, how do you differentiate yourself from them? Next, you’ve got to know who the audience is, who’s on the selection committee, so you can figure out what it is that matters to them. Not only do I have to differentiate myself from the competitors, it has to be a difference that matters to this particular audience.”
And a discipline many engineers struggle with:
“Scientists have found that people remember things better when you talk in threes, when you share three ideas to support why you’re better, versus four, five, or more. And engineers in particular are bad about this. We want to tell them every reason they should hire us. And we might have a hundred reasons. And certainly the more you tell ’em, the less they remember. So being focused in your approach and only talking about what matters, and having the guts not to try to dive into all the rest.”
4. Clients need more than engineering, and they’ll pay for it
“If you think it’s hard for us to find good people, good engineers and architects, it’s harder for them, because they often don’t have the ability to pay and the benefits and the career opportunities that we can offer. So their need to get us to help them more in non-engineering and architectural responsibilities, like project management, client management, communication, all those kinds of things, is growing and is going to continue to grow.”
He sees opportunity in that shift:
“If we’re good at these things and we get ourselves out of our traditional engineering and architecture box, there’s all kinds of bolt-on services we can sell that add value and that we can get paid for, but at the same time also differentiate us from our competition.”
5. Make winning work everyone’s job
Griffin remembers a client meeting early in his career:
“In the middle of the discussion, the lead client looked at my boss and said, ‘Hey, are you guys busy?’ And my boss kind of leaned back and said, ‘Well, we could use more work.’ And I went, ‘More work?! Are you kidding? We can’t get done what we have now.’ My boss had a long talk with me on the ride back to the office. And he explained something I didn’t know. You can’t wait till you’re not busy to start marketing.”
The lesson he passes on to young professionals:
“Over time, power comes to those who can bring in work. And if you’re a leader, when somebody brings in work, particularly if they’re younger, celebrate it. Celebrate it loudly. Let everybody hear you. Because people are always trying to do what their bosses want them to do. They just often can’t figure out what it is.”
He also set out to make best practices automatic:
“Eight years ago I got a chance to take over our corporate marketing team, and my thought was how do we institutionalize this? How do we create processes where everybody is using best practices kind of automatically without even having to think about them. And it’s worked very well. For the last three years, we’ve won over fifty percent of our interviews.”
At RMF Engineering, one program stands out:
“As engineers, we are not naturally good public speakers, architects as well. Toastmasters is a safe environment that will help you become adequate at public speaking. And adequate public speaking is much better than your typical engineer or architect.”
And it paid off in an unexpected way:
“I brought in Toastmasters primarily to help us win more work. What it did though was it helped us be better at delivering quality work. If you’re a project manager, you’ve got to lead meetings all the time. The same skills that helped us win work also helped us to be better at delivering engineering services.”
6. Treat leadership as a laboratory
Asked what he’d tell leaders rising up behind him, Griffin shares the mindset that shaped his career:
“I decided to look at it as a leadership laboratory. You go to training and you read books on leadership, and what a leadership laboratory does is it gives you a place to come back and try it and see if it works or not. And when you have a lab, it doesn’t matter if it works or not, because it’s data. What doesn’t work is just as valuable as what does work.”
He ties it to how engineers think:
“As engineers, especially, and architects as well, we don’t want to be wrong. And because of that, it keeps us from wanting to try novel things. But it also bugs the fool out of us when it doesn’t work out like we intended. So if you can just change that mindset to thinking of it as a lab that you’re experimenting and learning from, I think it will free you up to really grow as a leader and learn what works and what doesn’t.”
Hear the full conversation
Watch or listen to the complete episode above, and subscribe to the AEC GrowthCast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss the next one.
Want more from Tim? His book, Winning Work, is available in the PSMJ bookstore.