Most of the decisions that ultimately determine whether a development project succeeds or falls short are made long before construction begins. They happen in the earliest phase of the work, when the scope is still taking shape and many people aren't paying close attention yet. That's where the problems that would have cost millions later get found and solved quietly. And that's where the opportunities that nobody saw coming get uncovered.

I've always believed that about 90% of a project's value is determined by the first 10% of decisions. If you get those early decisions right, everything that follows has a strong foundation. If you rush through them or don't dig deep enough, you spend the rest of the project compensating for what was missed.

The Pipe Nobody Knew About

On our civic center project in Long Beach, we needed to sell a piece of city-owned land to make the overall financial model work. It should have been straightforward, but it wasn't.

A seven-foot diameter storm pipe belonging to Los Angeles County was running right through the property, encumbering about half the site and making it essentially unbuildable. The city didn't know the pipe was there, and it didn't have a recorded easement, so it technically didn't have a right to be there either.

I went down to city hall and started going through microfiche. Old land records. Not glamorous work. But in those records, I found that an unrecorded easement for the pipe was attached to a recorded easement on the adjacent property, and that the developer of that adjacent parcel already had a legal obligation to relocate the pipe off the city's land. Nobody in the city knew any of this.

Negotiating that resolution unlocked the full value of the property and brought millions into the project. If nobody had taken the time to dig through those records, the project would have moved forward with less money and more compromises. Instead, it was solved before it ever became a visible problem.

The Land Nobody Thought to Check

In Falls Church, the city needed a new middle school and had been asking developers to go find land for it. In a city of two and a half square miles, that meant looking outside city limits and bussing kids out of their own community. Everyone had accepted that as the only option.

Before going down that road, we looked at what the city already owned. The high school property had enough room to accommodate a new school if the pieces were rearranged. That insight eliminated millions in land acquisition costs, cut years off the timeline, and kept the school in its jurisdiction, where it belonged.

Nobody asked us to look at the high school property. The assumption that new land was needed had been accepted by everyone involved. But taking the time to question it before moving forward saved the city millions of dollars and years of process, and completely changed the trajectory of the project.

An Opportunity Sitting in Plain Sight

More recently, a county came to us looking for a new government building. The brief was clear and well defined, and we could have simply responded to what was asked. But before putting a proposal together, we spent time looking at the county's broader capital plan and long-range projections to understand not just this one project, but what else was on their horizon.

What we found was that the county also had a performing arts center in their pipeline, a completely separate initiative that nobody had thought to connect to the government building project. By bringing the two facilities together on a single site, the combined development would be significantly more valuable and impactful for the community than either building would be on its own.

That kind of discovery doesn't require any special methodology. It requires the willingness to look beyond what's being asked and spend time understanding the bigger picture before jumping to a solution. In our experience, that extra step at the front end is often what separates a project that meets the brief from one that transforms a city.

Why the Early Work Matters Most

None of these discoveries required anything proprietary or complicated. They required patience, curiosity, and a willingness to get into the details before jumping to a solution. They required being comfortable sitting in a basement going through old records, or spending time with a client's capital plan when we were only asked about one building.

The first 10% of decisions on any project will determine whether the outcome is adequate or exceptional. That is true regardless of the project's size or complexity. The difference is whether someone is willing to invest the time upfront to make sure those early decisions are the right ones. In our industry, there's a tendency to move quickly past that early phase and get into execution as fast as possible. We understand why, but we've also seen firsthand how much gets left on the table when that happens. Opportunities that would have changed the project entirely go undiscovered simply because nobody stopped long enough to look.

We've found that when you spend the extra time upfront, the project that comes out the other end is almost always fundamentally better than what anyone originally envisioned.