ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the business history of the heritage compliance industry, created in response to the National Historic Preservation Act, and discusses the two largest business challenges that exist for heritage compliance consulting firms in the United States: differentiation and capitalization. To achieve success in the twenty-first century, firms must return value to shareholders and differentiate themselves from competitors. To enable capitalization and take advantage of market opportunities, though, firms must figure out how to generate profits at levels that increase firm value, compensate investors for business risk, and build wealth for shareholders. Most heritage compliance firms, though, cannot achieve sufficient market share to make a commodity business model viable. Overall market growth has provided many individual firms with the illusion of business growth and success, even though these same firms may actually have only maintained, or even lost, market share and underperformed the market.
