Nine out of ten early projects came from people who already knew me

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

I started the firm in April of 2020, which sounds worse than it was. I had no office and couldn't have afforded one, but nobody was in an office anyway, so the thing that should have been a liability just wasn't.

Then the home renovation market did what it did. Everyone was suddenly spending all day inside a house they had previously only slept in and deciding they didn't have enough room, or didn't like the room they had. We did a lot of additions and renovations along with some full teardowns and rebuilds, with clients living in RVs and trailers on their own land while we worked. That volume is what kept us cash flow positive during a stretch when a lot of people were out of work.

Almost none of it matched my background, since my professional experience up to that point was almost entirely commercial with residential as the occasional one-off, and commercial is still where the practice is oriented. The residential work is what got the firm off the ground, though, and those residential clients turned into commercial projects later, which is how it tends to go in an industry where relationships compound and transactions don't.

On the question of how the work actually arrived, nine out of ten of my early projects were referrals, either from people I had worked with previously or from personal contacts who knew who I was and what I stood for and were happy to send something my way. I had no capital to advertise and nobody was going to find me, so if those people hadn't known what I was doing, there wouldn't have been a firm.

Which leads to the advice I would give someone at a firm now who is thinking about going out on their own, which is to tell people. It doesn't need to be a secret. A lot of architects assume it has to be, and I understand why, since plenty of firms frown on anything that resembles moonlighting, but if you have a manager or a mentor you respect, letting them know what you're planning is usually fine and often useful. If you're at a firm of any size you aren't competition, because you are not landing a museum commission as your first job, and meanwhile that firm turns down work constantly. Somebody wants an addition on the back of their house, that isn't what they do, and now they have somewhere to send it. The risk of being passed over for a promotion isn't much of a risk if you don't want the promotion.

And if you're still in school, take the business courses. I did a master's in architecture at Syracuse and a master's in entrepreneurship at the same time, and the accounting and management background has been something I've fallen back on constantly. Not all of it survives contact with the real world, but you figure out fast which parts translate, and guessing at this stuff is expensive.

Listen to the full conversation

This post came out of episode one of Beyond the Blueprint with host Branson Bowen, where we got into why I left my last firm, hiring to fill weaknesses instead of the org chart, and the real cost of adding a licensed architect.