Background
A land development and site civil consultancy with an established East Coast practice decided to open offices in Texas, Arizona and the Carolinas within the same fiscal year. The expansion followed several national homebuilder clients who had asked the firm to support their work in those markets, which meant the new offices would open with committed backlog rather than speculatively.
The Challenge
Opening four markets simultaneously created a consistency problem the firm had not faced before. Its reputation rested on a particular standard of grading and stormwater design, and clients moving between markets would notice immediately if quality varied by office. The firm also needed office leads who were credible locally, which in practice meant recruiting from competitors while those people were still employed and while the firm had no presence in the market to point to. Local entitlement and municipal review processes differed enough between the three regions that experience did not transfer cleanly.
The Solution
Advastar ran the four searches as one coordinated engagement rather than as separate assignments, with the same recruiters covering all markets so that the calibration bar stayed consistent. Office leads were approached confidentially and assessed against a shared scorecard covering technical depth, local entitlement experience and client relationships that could reasonably transfer. Beneath them we recruited site civil designers and CAD staff to a single skills specification, adapted only where local municipal practice genuinely required it. In two of the four markets the firm was uncertain how quickly backlog would materialize, so those designer roles were filled contract-to-hire, giving the firm a way to confirm workload before committing to permanent headcount.
The Outcome
All four offices opened staffed and within the same fiscal year. Client feedback across markets has been consistent, which was the outcome the firm cared most about. Both contract-to-hire designers converted to permanent positions within six months as backlog held, and the firm has since used the same coordinated approach for a fifth market.