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Society for Marketing Professional Services

I met Maribel Castillo, now associate vice president,

director of corporate communications for T.Y. Lin

International, several years ago while working

on a proposal. We’ve kept in touch but never met

face to face until Build Business 2010 in Boston.

In her current role, she leads all aspects of T.Y. Lin’s

global communications efforts, including corporate

positioning initiatives, mergers and acquisitions

integration, employee communications, and media

and public relations. Below we discuss her career

path, proposals, disenchantment, and the bottom line.

Matt Handal (MH): Tell us a little about yourself.

Maribel Castillo (MC): I have been in the industry for 17 years and

12 years working for large general contractors and international

construction management firms. My background is business

development, and I’m doing PR/communications now. But I think

my background in business development gives it a different twist

as I understand that the promotion of the company and publicity

are directly tied to new business. I always think in terms of “How

is this going to bring in new business to our company?” I’m very

much involved in the different strategic initiatives in our company

and different pursuits.

MH: How did you get into this line of work?

MC: I graduated from college in 1992. !ere wasn’t any work

at the time. !ere was a recession, and I ended up on a temp

assignment working for Lehrer McGovern Bovis in Los Angeles,

which is now called Bovis Lend Lease. I started in an admin role,

and I spent three months doing that. !ey were working on a

proposal one day and asked if I could help. I started helping

them, and they said, “You have to work for us in marketing.”

So, since then I’ve been in marketing. I spent three years with

Bovis, nine years with Swinerton Builders, and then I came over

to T.Y. Lin about four years ago.

MH: So run me through

a day in your life. What’s

Monday going to be like?

MC: Actually my day is

24/7. I was just with one

of my colleagues from one

of our sister companies.

We do work worldwide,

we have offices in Asia,

and our parent company

is in the Middle East. I am

literally on call 24 hours a

day. I could be checking

my Smartphone at two in

the morning and still have

email messages to respond to. When I wake up, the first thing I do

is check email to see if there are any fires to put out.

We have about 725 people in the U.S. and I can get an email

or phone call from virtually any one of those people with a

question they want answered or something they need. I consider

our employees my clients. I’m very responsive to them. I don’t

have a typical day, but in general I work on promotional projects,

press releases, some strategic initiatives, and stuff like implementing

Deltek, which is a huge undertaking.

MH: I understand you submitted a brochure to the 2010

SMPS National Marketing Communications Awards.

MC: Yes, we won a third place for the brochure.

When I started, we had a general brochure on our bridge practice.

Prior to being in corporate communications, I was overseeing mar-

keting for the bridge line of business. During my three years with

them, I developed this bridge brochure series focusing on different

types of bridges (long span, segmental, pedestrian, etc.) !ese are

all on-demand brochures, so we don’t print thousands of them; we

just print them as people need them. We can also customize them.

T.Y. Lin International’s Maribel CastilloBY MATT HANDAL

the build business interview

33

Marketer/December 2010

MH: How do you print them?

MC: Just a Xerox color copier. But it’s very advanced.

MH: Is it saddle stitch?

MC: No, it’s just a bi-fold. We print them in house on nice

stock and actually send them out to get cut and folded. !ey

have a lot of impact.

MH: I recently talked to an architectural firm in NYC. #ey

use Lulu.com to print their brochures. #ere was a time, not

even too long ago, where what you are talking about was fairly

impossible. Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to

print a brochure in house.

MC: And there are still some people who think that way. We don’t

print thousands of brochures, we don’t use outside printers, we

print it as we need it. Clients don’t expect you to have a 20-page

brochure. You can tell your message with a two-pager or a four-

pager. I’ve been doing marketing for a long time, and I know

proposals and brochures are important. But when it comes down

to it, it’s about the quality of relationship you have with the client.

You can have the most spectacular brochure in the world, but if

you are not able to connect with somebody, then it’s worthless.

Same with proposals. I believe proposals can make you lose a job.

I don’t think a proposal, in itself, will win a job.

MH: I always say whenever you submit a proposal that is

reasonable for you to go after, you have a 50/50 chance.

Meaning that there are so many things going on behind the

scenes, it’s impossible to accurately predict your chances of

winning. I know some people go by hit rate, but I haven’t

seen physical evidence that people can predict backlog.

MC: Metrics in this industry: I don’t think there is such a thing.

It’s very unpredictable. It’s very subjective. I think that you agree

there is always something behind the scenes going on.

In the U.S., they say, “We are going through this RFP process and

it’s fair, it’s objective, and there is scoring.” But it never is that way.

In my experience, when you work in another country, it’s much

more up front. In other countries, when four firms submit, they

will tell you which part of the work you’ll get. It doesn’t happen

all the time, but it happens.

MH: We’ve worked on a lot of proposals; we know how things

work. What I find hard is, while some agencies do make an

effort to be fair, we know that generally it’s not a fair process.

How do you communicate that to the younger staff who are

working on these proposals? It’s heartbreaking for me when

someone realizes, “Wait a minute, this isn’t fair!”

MC: I see there is a lot of disenchantment on the part of marketers,

because they do come across situations where they work really hard

on a proposal, sometimes months, and you can’t really say that

anything fruitful came of that work—besides what you learned

from putting it together, and I guess that’s one way to look at it.

Every proposal you work on, you learn something from that effort

and you can apply it to the next effort.

As a marketer in this industry, its very easy to become disenchanted

and feel like there is no career path for you. And feeling, “I’m going

to be doing proposals for the rest of my life.” In some points in my

career I thought that way. But I think you need to take a different

perspective on things and open yourself up to new opportunities.

One of the Build Business panels I went to said the marketer needs

to show their value in other ways, bring new leads to the company,

or go out and develop your own network. I think one of the best

pieces of advice I ever received was, “Develop your own network

and that network goes with you wherever you go.” As a marketer,

I think that’s what one of your top goals should be.

MH: I always scratch my head when I hear marketers say,

“I haven’t touched a proposal in 10 years.” I can’t imagine

that world, especially in a 50-person firm.

MC: It’s a little scary. When I moved into corporate communica-

tions, I had been doing proposals for a long time. I don’t miss

proposals, but I’m still contributing to proposals in a way whether

it is setting up the platform for proposals, developing templates,

or helping to define the image of the company. I don’t feel discon-

nected from the business development process, and I try not to be

disconnected from that process. !e value you bring as a marketer

is “How do you add to the bottom line?” If you are not adding to

the bottom line as a marketer, engineer, or architect, your value

to the company is always tenuous.

Editor’s Note: "is is a new series of interviews conducted by

Contributing Editor Matt Handal during Build Business

2010 in Boston.

About the Interviewer

Contributing Editor Matt Handal serves as

marketer for Trauner Consulting Services, Inc.

(www.traunerconsulting.com) and as producer

of the Construction Netcast podcast. Contact

him at Matt.Handal@traunerconsulting.com,

Twitter.com’s @MattHandal, or subscribe to

his articles at HelpEveryoneEveryday.com.

“If you are not adding to the bottom

line as a marketer, engineer, or

architect, your value to the company

is always tenuous.”