My second hire wasn't a drafter

Adapted from my conversation with Branson Bowen on episode one of Beyond the Blueprint.

The obvious first move when you start an architecture firm and get busy is to hire production help, someone to draft so you can keep designing and selling. I did that, it was necessary, and it worked.

What I didn't expect was that filling that gap immediately exposed a bigger one. Once drafting was handled I could see that the sales and business development side was struggling, with proposals going out slowly, contracts taking too long to turn around, and the whole front end of the business bottlenecked on me. So the next hire covered sales and business development along with project management and client communication. I'm told that isn't typical for a young firm, and I believe it.

The reasoning was unglamorous. I love the design work and I get into a kind of time blindness with it, going deep on getting the design right and meeting the objectives of the project while client communication and bookkeeping and everything else that isn't the drawing in front of me falls behind. That's not a habit I've been able to fix by trying harder, and an architecture practice cannot survive clients who feel ignored, not because it's rude but because it is the fastest way to lose a project and the referrals attached to it.

So the useful move was being honest with myself about it. I am never going to be the uber-communicator who answers email instantly and responds to a client text at one in the morning, but I can find someone who is, and I can make sure the client knows exactly who their point of contact is so they feel taken care of regardless of whether I'm heads-down on their wall sections that week.

The mental shift underneath all of it is that the firm is its own entity rather than me with a business card. Once you accept that, hiring to fill your weaknesses stops feeling like an admission of failure and starts looking like the only sensible way to build the thing.

Listen to the full conversation

This post came out of episode one of Beyond the Blueprint with host Branson Bowen, where we got into starting a firm in April of 2020, the math on adding a licensed architect, and how nine out of ten early projects arrived.