By Marie Grieve, Founder and Managing Director, Costello Palmer Communications & Global Vice Chair, Women in BIM

Growth is an ambition shared by almost every business I work with. The objective may be to increase revenue, strengthen market position, develop new services, enter new sectors or geographies or build greater resilience into the organisation, but what differs considerably is the clarity around how that growth will be achieved.

Throughout my career in marketing and strategic growth, I have worked with business leaders to translate corporate ambition into a clear direction for growth. That work extends beyond marketing and communications, to encompassing business strategy, internal capability, business development, brand positioning, market entry and the commercial decisions that connect them together.

One principle has remained consistent: businesses do not necessarily need more marketing, they need greater clarity about where growth will come from.

Once that direction is established, marketing becomes significantly more valuable because it is supporting an agreed commercial strategy.

Growth requires strategic choices

Growth strategy is fundamentally about prioritisation. Recent research from McKinsey spanning across more than 4,000 companies globally, found that only 25 per cent achieve sustainable growth over time. This research also found that approximately 80 per cent of growth typically comes from maximising the value of the core business.

The significance, for me, is the discipline behind growth. Businesses need to understand what they already do well, where they hold competitive advantage and where the strongest opportunities exist before determining where to invest.

Over the years, I have found that the most valuable part of developing a growth strategy is often not identifying what a business could do next, rather creating the clarity to decide what it should do next. That distinction really matters and makes significant difference on successful outcomes.

Understand the business first

My starting point is always the business itself. Before considering campaigns, channels or communications, I want to understand its corporate objectives, commercial performance, clients, services, markets, people, reputation and ambitions.

Where does revenue currently come from? Which services create the greatest value? Where is the business strongest? What do clients genuinely value? Where is there untapped potential? What internal constraints could prevent growth?

This process frequently reveals that the perceived challenge is not the underlying one.

A business development problem can be a market selection problem. A positioning problem can expose a lack of strategic differentiation. Difficulty entering a new sector may have less to do with awareness and more to do with whether the proposition is relevant to the people making purchasing decisions. An effective strategy starts with diagnosing the right problem.

Define the direction

The next stage is determining where the business intends to go. That requires clear corporate goals and growth priorities, defined markets and audiences and a differentiated value proposition. It also requires decisions about what will not be prioritised.

This is particularly relevant within business with the AEC sector. An engineering firm for example may see opportunities across rail, water, energy and highways, an architecture practice may have the capability to move between residential, hospitality and commercial markets and specialist consultancies may increasingly see opportunities to extend their expertise across different stages of the asset lifecycle. Each opportunity can appear credible in isolation, however pursuing all of them simultaneously rarely represents a strategy.

Market potential needs to be considered alongside existing expertise, reputation, competition, client demand, investment requirements and the organisation's capacity to deliver. Strategic growth requires choices.

Build the growth roadmap

Once the direction is established, I translate it into a practical growth roadmap. This is where corporate strategy becomes commercial action.

Business goals connect to priority markets. Markets define target audiences and audience understanding informs the proposition. The proposition then shapes positioning and messaging, and business development and marketing activity can then be aligned around clearly defined commercial objectives.

For an AEC firm which is targeting a new infrastructure market, for example, market entry is not simply a communications exercise, it may require new expertise, recruitment, partnerships, framework strategies, client relationships, thought leadership, bid capability and investment. The roadmap has to connect to all of these elements.

This is also where internal growth becomes critical. Professional services businesses are built on people and expertise. Growth in revenue without corresponding development in leadership, capability, processes and systems can create scale without creating a stronger business.

The objective is not simply to determine what the business wants to win. It is to understand what the business needs to become.

Execution must remain connected to strategy

The final stage is execution and measurement. Marketing has an important role here, but it should be an expression of strategy rather than a collection of independent activities.

When markets, audiences, positioning and commercial objectives are clearly defined, decisions about content, events, communications, digital channels and investment become considerably more focused. Business development and marketing can work towards the same outcomes and performance can be measured against commercial priorities.

AI creates a further opportunity to strengthen this process. I see its greatest strategic value not as a replacement for creativity or judgement, but in its capacity for analysis.

AEC businesses hold significant information across CRM systems, project pipelines, bids, frameworks, client engagement, digital activity and marketing performance. Too often, however, that information remains fragmented or underused.

AI provides an opportunity to interrogate that data at greater scale, identifying patterns in audience behaviour, connecting activity with commercial outcomes and providing a clearer understanding of return on investment (ROI). This can help leaders determine which markets, channels and activities are generating value and where resources should be redirected.

For me, this is where AI becomes particularly relevant to growth strategy: turning data into knowledge that supports better commercial decisions. Technology informs the decisions, with leadership that makes them.

Why this matters now

The built environment is entering a period of considerable change. Infrastructure investment, sustainability, skills pressures, AI and changing client expectations are creating opportunities while challenging established business models. Responding to every change is not a growth strategy.

The businesses best positioned to succeed will be those with the clarity to determine where they can create the greatest value, the confidence to prioritise and the discipline to align their organisation behind those decisions.

That is what strategic growth means to me: understand the business, define the direction, build the roadmap and execute against it.

Because ultimately, growth is not simply about doing more, it is about making better decisions about what comes next.