Featuring Mario García Méndez,
Business Development Manager
at ROIG Construccions
Some clients commission a building. Others own a portfolio of them. The distinction sounds minor. It isn’t. A client with a single property is making a one-off decision — they need something built or refurbished, they procure it, and when it’s finished the relationship has served its purpose. A client with several buildings is making a different kind of decision. They’re choosing who to work with, and the first project is how they find out.
When a client owns a portfolio rather than a property, the first commission isn’t only a job. It’s an opening — a chance for a firm to demonstrate something that a tender document can’t capture. And what the firm does with that opening determines whether there’s a second project at all.
Mario García works with corporate clients who own property portfolios rather than single assets. His experience is in building long-term relationships with exactly this kind of client, and his approach to the first project is more deliberate than the language usually suggests.
Mario García Méndez
Business Development Manager at ROIG Construccions, where he works with corporate clients on refurbishment, fit-out and building transformation projects across Madrid.
His path into business development is not a conventional one. He began as an economics journalist, writing for El Mundo and Cinco Días, before moving into marketing and commercial roles across real estate, technology and workplace sectors. For over a decade he led business development at Steelcase, working with large corporate clients on workplace strategy and office environments — an experience that shaped his approach to understanding a client’s business rather than only their brief.
He joined ROIG Construccions in 2023, bringing that corporate client perspective into the construction and refurbishment sector.
Connect with Mario García
The Signal That Isn’t in The Brief
Whether a client has more work behind the first project rarely announces itself. It emerges through what they say when the conversation moves past the immediate commission. García points to a shift in the conversation itself.
The main sign is when the conversation goes beyond the specific building and focuses on the client’s overall real estate strategy.
That’s a specific kind of listening. Scope-based listening hears what the project requires — the works, the budget, the timeline. Strategy-based listening hears something else: operational needs that extend across buildings, growth plans that imply future sites, challenges that point to something larger than the current brief.
The distinction he draws is between understanding the building and understanding the business. The first is technical and it’s what the project asks for. The second is commercial, and it’s usually not written down anywhere. Clients don’t put their real estate strategy into a tender pack. It exists in the way they talk about their assets when the conversation moves past the immediate job.
Our role is to ask the right questions from the outset, anticipate their needs and identify opportunities that often have not yet been formally defined.
That last phrase is where the value sits. An opportunity that hasn’t been formally defined isn’t in any pipeline. Nobody is competing for it. It exists as a possibility in the client’s own thinking, and it becomes real only when someone puts a shape around it.
Generosity
With a Boundary
If the first project is read as an opening rather than a job, the approach to it changes. García is direct about what that means:
We approach the first project with a vision that goes beyond execution, aiming to become a trusted partner for the client.
The practical consequence is doing work that isn’t in the contract — anticipating risks, sharing knowledge, helping the client make decisions that aren’t strictly the firm’s responsibility. None of that is billable. His position on how far that goes is worth reading carefully.
However, this must be a considered investment in the relationship, not an unlimited service.
That clause sets a boundary around the generosity, and the boundary is the interesting part. Unbounded over-delivery trains a client to expect more for less, and it converts a commercial relationship into a discount arrangement that nobody has agreed to out loud. What he describes instead is closer to a deliberate position: this is what we’re putting in, this is what we expect it to produce, and this is where it stops.
The distinction changes what the extra work is for. Undirected generosity is a cost the firm absorbs. Directed generosity is evidence — it shows the client something specific about how the firm works, in a way they can observe rather than be told about.
What Happened When They Asked
The example he gives is worth examining because it shows the mechanism rather than describing it.
A corporate client owned several properties. There was a maintenance issue on one of them. The conventional response would have been to price it, schedule it, and deliver it.
What happened instead was a conversation. Rather than treating the issue as isolated, the firm asked about it in the context of the wider portfolio — whether this was the first time, whether similar problems had appeared in other buildings, how the client had handled them before, and what it meant for how they were managing their assets overall.
Those questions moved the discussion away from the immediate commission and towards the client’s broader position. And in that conversation, the client disclosed something they hadn’t been asked about directly: an asset in the portfolio that wasn’t performing.
What followed was the move that changed the shape of the relationship. Using their own B2B network, the firm connected the client with a corporate tenant looking for space.
The maintenance issue became a repositioning project.
What the firm contributed wasn’t construction. It was a piece of commercial intelligence — knowing a tenant existed and having the confidence to suggest the match. That’s a relationship asset rather than a building capability, and it produced a project neither party had identified at the start.
It also required taking a position. Recommending a tenant to a landlord is a view on the client’s asset: what it’s worth, who should be in it, what the building could become. If the fit had been wrong, the firm would have been the one who suggested it. That risk was accepted in exchange for the possibility of something larger.
The relationship extended across the portfolio. Not because the maintenance work was done well, but because the firm had demonstrated an understanding of the client’s business at a level beyond the brief.
The Relationship That Was Never Built
The third part of this is the assumption that having delivered the first building gives you an advantage on the next one. García’s view is:
Yes, but it is an advantage, not a guarantee.
The advantage is real and it’s specific. Working with a client before means knowing their processes, their standards, and the actual preferences of their teams. That knowledge reduces friction and makes it easier to produce a proposal that fits. But he’s careful about how much it’s worth.
Every new project must be earned. Clients continue to rigorously assess proposals, costs and the value delivered
The risk he’s pointing at is a particular kind of misreading. Winning the first project can produce a belief that the relationship is already secure — and that belief generates its own kind of arrogance. Assumptions get made about a long-term relationship that was never actually built. What existed was a single project, delivered and maintained. The relationship itself is a separate thing, and it has to be earned rather than presumed.
His position is that the completed project is not what carries into the next pursuit.
The real competitive advantage is not simply having completed the previous project but having demonstrated that we understand their business and can continue to add value across their entire real estate portfolio.
The advantage isn’t relational — it isn’t “they know us.” It’s evidential. The client has watched the firm operate and formed a judgement about whether it can be trusted with something larger. That judgement can be lost as easily as it was earned.
Seeing the Business or Seeing the Building
Three things run through García’s experience, and together they describe an approach to portfolio clients that is more deliberate than the language usually suggests.
The first is that the pursuit begins before the brief. The signal that a client has more work is rarely found in the documentation. It’s found in what they say when the conversation moves past the current project — which means someone has to be listening for it. And if the shift doesn’t happen on its own, the questions have to be asked to bring it about.
The second is that generosity has to be a decision rather than a reflex. Going beyond scope creates the evidence a client needs, but only if it’s bounded and intentional. A firm that over-delivers habitually isn’t investing. It’s discounting without saying so.
The third is that incumbency is a hypothesis, not a position. The previous project doesn’t win the next one. What wins the next one is whether the client, looking back, concluded that the firm understood something they hadn’t asked it to understand.
For García, that conclusion is the actual deliverable of the first project. The building is the vehicle. What the client takes away is a judgement about whether this is a firm that sees their business, or one that sees their buildings.
Only one of those produces a second project.