Budgeting for 2026 — Fund the Work That Matters
This is Part 3 in Oomph’s 2026 Planning Series.
Part 1 walked through your marketing and BD inventory—what’s in place, what’s working, and where the gaps are. Read the article here.
Part 2 helped you translate that review into focus—choosing the strategies and tactics that deserve your attention next year. Read the article here.
Now, in Part 3: Budgeting for 2026 — Fund the Work That Matters, we turn those priorities into numbers. You’ll learn how to decide what to fund, how to balance dollars and hours, and how to manage your budget through the year so plans stay on track.
Next up: Part 4 — Putting It All Together: Strategy, Calendar, and Start Plan.
IN BRIEF
A marketing and business-development budget is the bridge between strategy and action. It turns ambition into measurable activity—ensuring the right priorities are properly funded, and the firm’s resources are matched to its goals.
In Oomph’s methodology, budgeting follows a full review of your systems and tactics. Once you’ve clarified what matters most for 2026, this step makes sure you’re resourced to make it happen.
1 | TURNING STRATEGY INTO RESOURCING
By this point in the planning process, you already know what to focus on. Step 1 surfaced the strengths and gaps in your marketing and BD systems. Step 2 identified the priorities that will shape 2026—where to concentrate effort, which markets to pursue, which tactics to keep, pause, or retire.
Now it’s about assigning weight.
Budgeting isn’t another analytical exercise—it’s the point where decisions become commitments. The spreadsheet is simply the medium; the message is about where the firm will place its energy and investment next year.
The task is to translate direction into numbers:
How much time and money each initiative deserves
What support systems (internal or external) will be required
Where trade-offs must be made to stay realistic
Think of this step as drafting the construction documents for your strategy. The concept is approved; now you define scope, sequence, and cost. A good budget gives shape to your intent—it ensures the brilliant ideas from Step 2 don’t dissolve under the weight of daily billables.
In short, budgeting is how strategy becomes operational. It sets the framework that allows your priorities to move from planning into practice.
2 | FROM PRIORITIES TO PERCENTAGES
By this stage, you’ve already clarified what you want to achieve in 2026. The next question is how much investment it will take to make those priorities real.
There’s no single formula that applies to every design practice. The right level depends on your firm’s goals, visibility, and internal capacity. The principle is straightforward: your marketing and business-development budget should match the scale of your ambitions.
A practical benchmark is to allocate marketing and BD as a percentage of gross annual revenue, not profit. This keeps planning stable from year to year and avoids distortion from one-off expenses or variations in margin.
For most firms, the typical range sits between 3 % and 5 % of revenue:
Around 3 % is a conservative “maintenance” level — enough to sustain visibility, refresh materials, and support ongoing client relationships.
5 % represents a healthy, steady-growth budget — sufficient for consistent outreach, content, and incremental upgrades.
When you’re planning a major shift — entering a new market, launching a new service, or repositioning the firm through a rebrand or new digital infrastructure — expect to invest more aggressively. In those cases, a short-term allocation in the 8–10 % range is realistic and often necessary to gain traction quickly.
Rather than fixating on the number itself, focus on alignment:
Maintenance year → 3 %. Sustaining presence and relationships.
Growth year → 5 %. Expanding reach and building visibility.
Rebuild or expansion year → 8–10 %. Funding transformation — new systems, new markets, new story.
Your budget is ultimately a statement of intent. It shows not only what you plan to do, but how serious you are about doing it.
3 | TRANSLATING STRATEGY INTO BUDGET LINES
Once your 2026 budget envelope is set, the next step is to decide where to put it to work. The categories should look familiar — they mirror the areas you reviewed in your earlier audit — but this time you’re allocating resources, not evaluating performance.
A clear structure keeps spending visible and defensible. Here’s how to translate your priorities into the core budget lines most AEC firms should track.
The purpose isn’t to replicate someone else’s ratios — it’s to make your firm’s priorities visible in financial form. If a line doesn’t connect directly to a 2026 goal, question why it’s there.
4 | RECOGNIZING INTERNAL TIME AND SPECIALISTS
Every AEC firm tracks time. What most don’t do is translate those hours into the budgeting process. Marketing and BD plans are typically expressed in dollars — 3 %, 5 %, maybe more of annual revenue — but that percentage also represents time. If those hours aren’t defined and distributed intentionally, the budget won’t reflect the firm’s true capacity to deliver the plan.
Connecting Dollars to Hours
When you set a marketing and BD budget — say, 5 % of annual revenue — that figure covers both direct spending and staff time. To make it meaningful, convert a portion of that budget into hours.
For example, if 60–70 % of your marketing effort goes to proposals and business development, translate the remaining 30–40 % into actual hours. That exercise quickly shows whether your team has enough bandwidth for other critical activities — website updates, content creation, client communications, events, and broader visibility initiatives.
This isn’t about micromanaging timesheets; it’s about ensuring the firm is properly resourced. If the hours available for proactive marketing add up to almost nothing, you’re under-staffed for anything beyond pursuit support — which is exactly why so many smaller firms find themselves doing proposals 100 % of the time.
Proposals Drive Revenue — But Not Visibility
Proposals will always be the primary tool for winning work. They’re measurable, essential, and deserve the majority of marketing effort. But long-term growth also depends on the activities that precede and reinforce every pursuit:
Consistent visibility,
Clear messaging,
Credible thought leadership,
Client touchpoints that strengthen trust.
Budgeting time for these activities doesn’t compete with BD; it supports it. Firms that make space for brand-building and communication find that their hit rates improve because they’re already known and trusted before the RFP ever lands.
Budget for Specialist Support
Converting budget percentages into time also highlights where outside help can add capacity. If your analysis shows zero available hours for content, design, or digital upkeep, that’s a sign to budget for specialist support — writers, photographers, designers, or digital consultants who can execute without overloading internal staff.
Specialists don’t replace your team; they protect it. They allow internal staff to focus on strategy, relationships, and proposal strategy while keeping the broader marketing program alive.
The Payoff
When budgets account for both dollars and hours, you get a realistic view of your marketing and BD capacity — not just what you can afford, but what you can actually deliver.
This approach keeps firms honest: if there’s no time or funding allocated for visibility, content, or communications, those things won’t happen.
In short, proposals keep the firm busy today.
Allocating time for marketing ensures you’ll still have work tomorrow.
5 | Allocating the Budget: Choosing What to Fund
Once you’ve defined your overall spend and accounted for both dollars and hours, the next challenge is deciding how to distribute that investment. Not everything can be funded equally. The art of budgeting lies in knowing which initiatives will move the needle now, and which can wait.
Start With Strategic Priorities
Your Step 2 planning decisions already gave you a shortlist: the markets, sectors, and initiatives that matter most for 2026.
Begin there. Fund the initiatives that directly support those priorities first. If an idea sounds appealing but doesn’t advance one of those strategic goals, park it on a watch list for later review rather than squeezing it in.
A simple rule: fund fewer things, fully. Under-resourced initiatives drain time and deliver little. Fully funding a smaller set of priorities delivers clearer results and a stronger story to the market.
Group by Impact and Timeframe
To make allocation decisions tangible, sort initiatives into three buckets:
Immediate drivers: activities that support short-term revenue or near-term pursuits—proposal development, client events, BD campaigns.
Reputation builders: longer-term efforts like thought leadership, awards, and PR that elevate visibility and credibility.
Enablers: investments that improve efficiency—systems, templates, analytics, training.
Every budget needs a balance across all three. Too much in the first category creates dependence on constant pursuit. Too much in the second delays results. Too little in the third erodes efficiency.
Apply a Continue / Pause / Test Framework
When reviewing existing programs, use a simple three-way filter:
Continue: initiatives that clearly support your 2026 strategy and show measurable benefit.
Pause: items that still have merit but can wait a year while capacity is focused elsewhere.
Test: small-scale pilots or new ideas funded from your strategic-reserve line.
This approach keeps the budget dynamic and guards against the “we’ve always done it” trap that so many firms fall into.
Fund for Depth, Not Breadth
It’s better to deliver three initiatives well than six in name only. For example, if the plan calls for a new sector push, fully fund the research, content, and events needed to make that move credible. Don’t spread the same amount thinly across unrelated campaigns.
Sequence for Realism
Once priorities are set, map them against the calendar and your team’s bandwidth:
Front-load foundational work such as website updates, CRM setup, or content planning.
Pace marketing and BD campaigns through mid-year when client activity peaks.
Hold reserve for late-year opportunities such as awards, RFPs, or sponsorships that emerge unexpectedly.
Check the Mix
Before finalizing allocations, step back and ask:
Do we have a healthy balance between short-term revenue pursuits and long-term brand building?
Are we investing in the systems that make our marketing more efficient?
Does our current staffing align with the hours each initiative requires?
If the answer to any of these is “no,” the budget will look good on paper but fail in practice.
The Takeaway
Budgeting isn’t about slicing a pie evenly; it’s about assigning weight where it matters most.
When funding decisions mirror strategic intent, the budget becomes a management tool—one that helps the firm stay focused, disciplined, and ready to adapt as conditions change.
6 | TRACKING AND MANAGING THE BUDGET
A marketing and BD budget is only as good as the discipline used to manage it. Once the plan is approved, the work shifts from allocating dollars to actively tracking how they—and the associated hours—are being used. The goal is to treat the budget as a management tool, not a spreadsheet that’s filed away after planning season.
Connect Funding to Capacity
Every funded initiative carries two costs: dollars and hours. Before you move forward, confirm that you actually have the capacity to deliver what you’ve funded.
If you’ve budgeted for a major campaign, content series, or website update, make sure the internal time to execute it is built in—or identify where outside support will be needed. Otherwise, even well-funded initiatives stall for lack of bandwidth.
Sequence Spending Across the Year
Spread your budget deliberately, rather than evenly.
Front-load foundational work (like systems upgrades, rebranding, or website improvements) early in the year when internal focus is higher.
Pace campaigns and events to maintain visibility midyear.
Reserve funds for opportunities that appear later—client events, awards, or sponsorships that can’t be predicted in advance.
Mapping spending this way keeps the team realistic about timing and ensures that priorities don’t collide with high workload periods.
Monitor Progress and Adjust
Schedule quarterly reviews with leadership to compare planned versus actual spending—and to assess whether the current allocation still supports firm priorities. Adjust when new opportunities emerge or when initiatives underperform.
AEC markets shift constantly: municipal programs appear or vanish, funding cycles change, projects re-scope midstream. Budgets need to move with them. Treat these reviews as checkpoints for responsiveness, not just accountability.
Build Flexibility Into the System
A resilient budget allows for change without losing control. Build flexibility in four ways:
Strategic Reserve: hold back 5–10 % of total funds for unplanned but high-impact opportunities.
Stop-and-Start Rule: each quarter, evaluate what’s working. Stop or pause low-value efforts to redirect resources toward stronger performers.
Scenario Planning: create “base” and “stretch” versions of your budget. If work accelerates or slows, you know exactly which activities to scale up or defer.
Rolling Forecast: update projections monthly so leadership can see how marketing and BD spending are pacing against both workload and revenue.
This approach gives you agility without chaos—structured flexibility that allows the firm to respond quickly while staying on plan.
Keep Systems Up to Date
Plan modest annual allocations for marketing and BD system upkeep—your CRM, analytics tools, templates, and digital asset libraries. They’re the quiet enablers of efficiency, and when they’re neglected, costs show up elsewhere in duplicated work and lost information.
Together, these practices—tracking time and spend, sequencing activity, and building in flexibility—turn the budget into an active management instrument. It becomes less about control and more about course correction: staying responsive to conditions while keeping the firm’s marketing and BD strategy firmly on track.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR FIRM
By this point in the planning process, you’ve moved from analysis to action.
You’ve reviewed your systems, set your strategic priorities, translated those into a funded plan, and built in the structure to manage it. What comes next is execution—and the discipline to keep it visible.
A strong marketing and BD budget does three things:
Clarifies priorities. It shows what the firm has chosen to pursue—and, just as importantly, what it will not.
Balances ambition with capacity. It ties dollars and hours together, so goals stay realistic and deliverable.
Keeps strategy alive through the year. By tracking progress and adjusting quarterly, the plan evolves with market conditions instead of falling behind them.
When budgets are treated as management tools rather than accounting exercises, marketing and BD become easier to defend, measure, and sustain. Leaders see where their investment is going, teams see what’s achievable, and the firm stays aligned on direction and pace.
The next step is to bring it all together—translating your funded plan into a practical, working calendar that shows what will happen, when, and who’s accountable.
