5 Essential Skills to Improve Your Permitting Outcomes

Poker involves luck. Investing comes with uncertainty. And still most of us see both as activities that require skills and strategy. The best players may not win every time, but over the long run, their experience and strategic decision-making gives them an edge.

Permitting should be seen the same way, but often it’s regarded more like winning the lottery: project teams submit an application, cross their fingers, and hope it comes back approved quickly or on time.

Here’s what we’ve noticed: the more projects a team does in the same jurisdiction, the faster their approvals get. The first initial projects come with new learnings. Then over time, the timeline begins to trend down. Knowing local processes, common red flags, and what reviewers are actually looking for starts to help shave weeks off the process.

In other words: permitting outcomes aren't just random. They're shaped by practice, pattern recognition, and knowing how to play the game.

Why Permitting Often Feels Like Luck

Permitting exists for a reason: it ensures that all construction activities meet safety standards and environmental regulations. But that doesn’t mean the process and systems are easy to navigate. We’ve explored in the past why is permitting can be so slow, and why building requirements can seem unclear. There are many reasons why it often feels more like luck to get an on-time approval:

• The rules are complex and not always documented clearly
• Processes vary wildly across 19,000+ jurisdictions
• Most teams don’t permit often enough to recognize patterns
• And reviewers are humans who are subject to interpretation, priorities, and delays

The 5 Skills You Need to Improve Permitting

Just like in poker or investing, success in permitting comes from understanding the rules, making informed moves, and stacking small advantages.

Here are the five skills that can make all the difference between achieving a 3-week approval verses a 6-month delay.

1. Play the Game Often

Permitting one or two projects a year can make it hard to learn. But if you start to get approvals across 10, 20, or 50 projects, that’s when you start to be able to recognize patterns, identify risks, and build more process muscle. The more applications a team submits, the better their outcomes, because experience compounds.

2. Speak the Same Language

Sometimes the best outcomes simply come from having good communication and relationships with reviewers. Meeting with the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ), consulting with local experts, and understanding how a code is being interpreted can unlock small but meaningful advantages.

3. Study the Code

Permitting may feel subjective, but so much of it is actually rule-bound. Jurisdictions have specific standards, formats, and processes that need to be followed. Doing thorough due diligence upfront to understand exactly what’s required from a specific jurisdiction makes a faster approval much morel likely.

4. Obsess Over the Details

Permits can often get delayed over avoidable mistakes like a wrong file format, a missing page, or an unlabeled drawing. Skilled teams sweat the small stuff. They double-check submittals, follow naming conventions, and are diligent about meet every requirement.

5. Put Numbers on It

Wherever you can, use data to inform your planning: forecast timelines, track submittal metrics, and look for patterns and trends that can improve your process. This creates more predictability and control over scheduling, and can also help you communicate more clearly with other stakeholders like landlords, contractors, and execs.

Permitting Skills Are Built Over Time

Without consistency, you can definitely get lucky and get a fast approval. You can also get stuck with a frustrating reviewer and experience long, unexpected delays.

But once a team permits a meaningful sample size of projects, patterns emerge, and skills begin to build.

There's a clear path to faster approvals: permitting more frequently, following a structured process, tracking data, and investing in the right tools consistently leads better workflows, higher quality submittals, and fewer rounds of comments.

It’s not luck. It’s skill.

Win with Faster, More Predictable Permitting

Permitting will never be effortless. The rules are complex and varied, and the stakes are high. But it’s not just about pure luck.

At Pulley, we help high-volume project teams play the game better. Whether you’re a retailer opening five stores or fifty, Pulley can provide the support, strategy, and expertise to make permitting more predictable and big winsmore repeatable.

Read about how Pulley helps retail teams open faster.

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Or, let's chat and stack the odds in your favor.