The Fatal Flaw that Most Contractors Make When Hiring a Business Developer

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Contractors often hesitate to hire a business development resource, and I understand why: It’s a true overhead seat. It doesn’t pour concrete, set pipe, or run projects. When margins are already feel thin, it’s hard to justify adding more overhead into the equation—especially in a role where it can be difficult to measure the true ROI. 

So we wait. Then the backlog tightens, the phone feels quieter than it used to, and eventually we jump. We hire a BD pro and tell ourselves, “This is the year we get proactive.” 

And then something frustrating happens. 

Your BD goes out into the market and starts having meetings like crazy. Leads start coming in… but they aren’t the right ones. Your estimating and precon teams are churning through budgets for projects that don’t fit. The BD is busy—hustling, meeting, following up—but the work they bring back doesn’t align with how you build or where you win. The organization grumbles. The owner starts to wonder if hiring BD was a mistake. Fingers point toward the new person. 

Nine times out of ten, it’s not the BD’s fault. It’s the company’s. 

Here’s the analogy I like to use: If you’ve hunted with dogs, you know there are good hunting dogs and bad hunting dogs. The good ones are simple: you shoot a duck, they find your duck, and bring it back to your hand. The bad ones run out, come back proud… with a goose. You appreciate the effort. You even admire the heart. But you didn’t come for a goose. You came for a duck. 

That’s business development inside most construction companies. You say, “Go get us work.” They go. They bring you something. But without clear direction, they bring you a goose. You wanted a duck. 

The natural reaction is to blame the dog. “They don’t understand us.” “They’re creating waste.” “Precon is overwhelmed.” I’m not dismissing the burden—the cost of misaligned pursuits is real. But the flaw is upstream: we never told the BD what a duck looks like at our company. We didn’t define it with enough clarity that another human, working hard and in good faith, could find it reliably. 

Before you hire a BD resource, you have to clarify your go-to-market strategy. That is not a slide deck. It is a decision. It answers, in detail, two profiles: the Ideal Customer Profile (who we serve) and the Ideal Project Profile (what we build). It names the owners, geographies, delivery methods, contract types, sectors, project sizes, schedule realities, risk tolerances, and relationship dynamics that equal “duck” for your firm. It draws a bright line around “no-goose” pursuits so your BD doesn’t junk up precon with work that will never become good backlog. 

At the highest level, one client said it perfectly. He gave his BD three filters: 

1. Are we good at building it? 

2. Can we make money at it? 

3. Are the people good to work with? 

Start there. If a lead checks all three boxes, bring it home. If it doesn’t, keep hunting. That’s not simplistic—it's the beginning of alignment. Over time, your BD will refine those three into something sharper: what “good at” truly means in methods and manpower; what “make money” means in contract structure and risk transfer; what “good to work with” means in submittal flow, change order practices, pay apps, and how a client shows up when things get hard. They’ll learn to spot a duck at a hundred yards. But they can’t do that if you’ve never said, clearly and out loud, “We are duck people, not goose people.” 

This is where ROI shows up. A BD who understands your ICP and IPP will invest time only where it can compound. They’ll stop chasing bad pursuits. They’ll stop flooding precon with long-shot bids. They’ll build relationships with the right PMs, facility managers, and owners who value how you actually build. Estimators will notice the difference because their calendars will go from “budget chaos” to “qualified pursuits.” That time gets reinvested into better proposals, tighter scopes, and win plans that match how your field wins work—by executing. 

It’s also how you keep good BD talent. Nothing burns out a hunter faster than bringing home geese to a team that wanted ducks and never said so. When you equip BD with a real strategy, they can win. When they win, everyone feels it—precon, ops, accounting, field. Your hit rate climbs not because you hired a unicorn, but because you created line-of-sight from strategy to pipeline to backlog to margin. 

If you’re reading this and seeing your company in the goose story, here’s the move. Don’t fire the dog. Fix the aim. 

Sit down—owner, precon, ops, and BD—and codify what “duck” means. Name the sectors, sizes, clients, and contracts that reliably yield profitable, well-run projects for your team. Name the ones that don’t. Write it plainly enough that a new hire can pick it up on Monday and prospect intelligently by Tuesday. Then empower BD to say “no” to anything outside of that lane without fear of getting second-guessed for a quiet week. 

Once that’s in place, establish a simple gate. If a lead meets the three filters—good to build, good to margin, good people—BD brings it back to the table. Precon and ops weigh in early. If it’s a fit, pursue it with discipline. If it’s not, bless it and release it. That single habit will keep your calendars clean, your hit rates healthy, and your field crews working on projects where they can shine. 

I’m not promising a fairy tale. There will still be gray areas and misses. Markets shift. Teams evolve. But if you give BD a real strategy, they’ll spend their time where it matters. And you’ll finally be able to measure the ROI you were worried about on day one—because the inputs will be consistent enough to evaluate and improve. 

Hire the BD. Then hand them the map. Ducks only. And watch how much better the hunt gets. 

Spark Notes:

1. Most contractors don’t fail at business development because they hired the wrong person—they fail because they never clearly defined what “good work” actually looks like.

2. If you tell a BD to “go get work” without a precise Ideal Customer Profile and Ideal Project Profile, don’t be surprised when they bring back pursuits that don’t fit how you win.

3. Alignment around what you’re good at building, where you can make money, and who you want to work with is what turns BD activity into profitable backlog.

4. Don’t fire the dog—fix the aim; give BD a real strategy and a clear filter, and ROI becomes measurable.