Not long ago, I sat down with the leadership team of a large research institution that was ready to build. They had a site, they had buy-in from their board, and they were eager to get moving. The energy in the room was great. Everyone was excited to talk about the building. So the first thing I said was, let's not talk about the building yet.

Before we talked about the specifics of the building itself, I wanted to understand what this investment needed to do for the institution. What outcomes would make this transformative and not just functional? Who needed to be part of it, and why would they want to be?  And what were the things sitting right in front of them, relationships, assets, adjacencies, that maybe nobody had thought to connect to this project yet?

Within an hour, the conversation had gone somewhere none of them expected. Opportunities that had been sitting in plain sight but not fully considered started clicking together. The project they walked in ready to build and the project they walked out imagining were fundamentally different, and the second one was significantly more valuable to their institution and their community.

That moment is the part of the work I find the most energizing. Most people assume the exciting part of development is the groundbreaking or the ribbon cutting. For me, it's watching a room full of smart, mission-driven people realize that what's actually within their reach is so much bigger than what they originally came in looking for. The ingredients are almost always already there. They just haven't been connected yet.

A Phase That Deserves More Attention

In our world, we typically talk about development in three phases: pre-development, development, and operations. But over the years, I've come to believe there's a fourth phase that precedes all of those, one that I've started calling the development concept phase, and it may be the most consequential of them all.

This is where you figure out the foundational stuff. What is the long-term vision? What are the near-term priorities? What does success look like not just at ribbon cutting, but a decade from now?

It's not about site plans or construction budgets or financing structures. Those are all pre-development activities that assume you already know what you're building. The development concept phase is where those fundamental questions get answered.

When this phase gets rushed or skipped, and it happens more often than you'd think, the consequences tend to surface later in ways that are difficult and expensive to unwind. From what I've observed, roughly half of the projects that run into serious trouble can trace their problems back to this early thinking not getting the attention it deserved. And a significant number of others never get off the ground at all for the same reason.

What makes this work so compelling to me is that every client's situation comes with its own unique set of challenges. Some are navigating complex stakeholder landscapes where ten different groups need to align around a shared vision. Others have the vision but haven't found the right financial structure to make it real. And some have all the pieces but can't yet see how they fit together. We're working with a client right now who came to their construction partner ready to break ground, and after spending time with them, the honest conversation was that they needed to step back and work through some foundational questions first. In each of these situations, the most valuable thing we can bring is the willingness to slow down, listen carefully, and help them find solid footing before the momentum of the project starts to build.

A Developer, Not a Consultant

People sometimes ask how what we do in this early phase is different from consulting, and it's a fair question. The difference is that we carry the full accountability of a development partner into these conversations. Everything we're thinking about, every direction we explore with a client, is informed by the fact that we'll be the ones responsible for making it actually work. That naturally shapes what we recommend and how we recommend it.

Having been through the full lifecycle of complex projects many times, from the earliest conversations all the way through delivery and operations, we bring a perspective to this phase that is hard to replicate without that experience. We know what decisions made today will create challenges two years from now. We know which financing structures work under which conditions. We know where stakeholder misalignment tends to surface and what it costs when it does. That's not because we're smarter than anyone else at the table. It's because we've been through it enough times to recognize the patterns.

For our clients, that means the person helping them think through the big picture is the same person who will be there when it's time to execute. We think that continuity matters, and the feedback we've gotten over the years suggests our clients think so too.

Connecting the Dots

One of the things that makes our team unusual is that none of us are siloed into a single project type or a single phase of development. In any given week, I might be working with a university on their research strategy, a hospital system on their facilities planning, and a manufacturer on a site selection challenge. On the surface, those are very different conversations. But underneath, they share something important: each one is a client trying to solve a problem that happens to have a real estate component. The real estate is the vehicle, not the destination, and when you approach it that way, the conversations become much more interesting and the outcomes become much more valuable.

That breadth of experience has a compounding effect that I think is easy to underestimate. Because our team works across so many different sectors, geographies, and project types, we're constantly seeing patterns and solutions that can be translated from one context to the next. Lessons from one project inform how we approach the next, and over time that accumulation of perspective becomes one of the most valuable things we bring into any room.

Where This Is All Heading

I've never worked on a project that wouldn't have benefited from us being involved a little earlier. That's not a criticism of anyone. It's just what the work has taught me over the years: the decisions that carry the most weight are almost always the ones made first, and they deserve more time and attention than they typically get.

What excites me is that I think the industry is starting to catch up to this idea. The old model of issuing a solicitation, picking a team, and racing into delivery is giving way to something more collaborative, where clients and development partners find each other earlier and build the kind of trust that allows for honest, creative problem-solving from the very beginning. I think we're heading toward a world where institutions choose a partner, not just a vendor, and where that partnership starts long before there's a building to develop.

That's the kind of future we're building toward, and it's what reminds me why I love this work so much. There's nothing quite like sitting down with people who care deeply about their mission and helping them discover that what they can achieve is bigger than what they originally thought possible.