CVG in ARCHITECT Magazine: How To Design Your Design Business

BuildingWork, an architecture firm in Seattle, has grown from 1% profitability and 4 employees in 2016 to 19% profitability and 10 employees in 2020 through a focused business planning collaboration with CVG.

Business advisors hear it all of the time: “If our firm is good enough at design, success as a business will just follow.” This is rarely the case, however. Creating a thriving business takes attention, time, and effort that is separate from the work of providing architectural services. Like most good design solutions, this is an endeavor worthy of deliberate thought, creativity, and values-based action.

As a firm approaches a size of 10 full-time employees, the need to focus more energy on business functions becomes abundantly obvious. Often principals are beginning to feel overwhelmed and unable to track everything that’s happening at the firm, and they worry about mistakes slipping through the cracks. The old ways of management that worked when the firm was five or six people no longer work. Firms in this position tend to see growth in top-line revenues but a reduction in profits.

“This is the time to get serious about running your firm as a business,” says Rena M. Klein, FAIA, vice president of Investment Partnerships at CVG, a business consultancy that guides the growth of small and mid-sized architecture firms. “A firm’s prosperity will be measured by the sustainability of revenue flow, project profitability, and growing the value of the business entity.”

Excellence in design can contribute to your firm’s success but will go unnoticed without marketing efforts. Revenues rarely increase in a sustainable way without consistent attention to business development. Talented staff seldom stay for the long haul at a firm that offers no future for their careers…