615: How the Best Architects Land Clients Without Pitching, Sales, or Proposals with Ed Thompson of Brick & Wonder | Otter.ai

615: How the Best Architects Land Clients Without Pitching, Sales, or Proposals with Ed Thompson of Brick & Wonder

Enoch Sears49min

Speaker 1

00:00

You going to an event, and you speaking with people, and you sharing your time with other people is a way of extending value to other people that opens the door to a new relationship. Hello

Rion Willard

00:11

and welcome to the Business of Architecture podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Willard, and today it's my absolute pleasure to introduce Ed Thompson, Director at brick and wonder a remarkable global platform dedicated to nurturing a vibrant community of small to medium enterprises within the built environment. Brick and wonder is all about bringing together owners, founders and senior leaders, providing them with the insights and connections to foster entrepreneurial spirit and empower them to craft a thoughtfully built world. Ed's path as a digital product leader and strategist has seen him launch and grow ventures across both sides of the Atlantic, with successful endeavors in the UK and the US across the B to C and B to B spheres with a foundation in English literature from University College London. Ed blends analytical rigor with a creative edge, qualities that have made him a distinguished voice in the architectural industry. In today's episode, we will be discussing the power of network and collaboration, how business friends lead to more business and more success, and what is a community business model and how does it work. So I very much enjoyed sitting down with a fellow Brit, both of us dressed for the occasion in matching green outfits, and it was a pleasure to be speaking about our American compatriots and the architectural scene here in New York and further afield across the US. So a lot of gold nuggets here for you guys, sit back, relax and enjoy. Ed Thompson, this episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architecture's flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smartpractice method.com or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how he might be able to help you, please follow the link in the information we are looking for architect developer stories for the Business of Architecture podcast. So are you an architect developer with valuable insights to share? We're always on the lookout for passionate voices in the industry to join us on the Business of Architecture podcast. If you're ready to share your journey, lessons, strategies with our global audience, we'd love to hear from you reach out to us to explore being a guest on our show and help inspire other architect developers on their path. We'd be interested in hearing your story, whether you're at the very beginning of your development story, or whether you have $100 million portfolio of projects already in the bag, completed, we'd like to hear from you if you're working with the developers, or that you've developed a number of small houses, or you're working at A larger scale. Ed, Welcome to the Business of Architecture. How are you? I'm

Speaker 1

03:03

very well. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you very much for having me on the show. It's happy to be here.

Rion Willard

03:07

Absolute pleasure. So you are the director of brick and wonder. And we've had, we've had drew Lange on the show previously, who gave us a little bit of a kind of taster of what brick and wonder is, but you're here in New York. You're a fellow Brit, that's right, doing the Englishman in New York thing. So we've got lots of talk about there. You've had a very interesting career that's brought you out to this side of the world, and now you're kind of working as the director here at brick and wonder. And brick and mortar. And brick and mortar has kind of grown quite amazingly over the last few years and has become an amazing network, kind of platform that's serving hundreds of interdisciplinary, small, medium sized businesses in the AEC industry. And really the kind of mission, as I understand, it gets kind of very much in line of what we're doing here at Business of Architecture, but connecting, supporting owners, founders, senior leaders, to hone their entrepreneurship and empower them to create a better built environment. So welcome to the show, and perhaps we could hear a little bit about your own pathway to how you've become the director of brick and wonder. And then we could talk a little bit about what brick and wonder is, where it's going, and some of the things that you guys have been accomplishing over the last few years.

Speaker 1

04:31

Sounds good, sure. Well, my I've had a I've had one of those kind of wandering paths. I think in my career, I am definitely a generalist. I studied literature at UCL in London. Lived in London for seven years. I worked on various different things, and then I had a job opportunity to move out to New York and set up a business for some entrepreneurs in the UK. One of the I think, sort of through lines in my work is that I've been involved in early. Age startups and kind of founding businesses for most of my career. And it's something I'm very passionate about. I really enjoy that kind of zero to one phase, the ambiguity, the risk, the kind of figuring it out, the sense of building something, you know, I feel like even you know now we're sort of solidly five years into building brick and wonder every day I come in, I'm kind of building, building, building. And it just feels like it's sort of an interesting arc to see. You know, the there's some big differences from where we started and where we are now, which is exciting. But, yeah, I think I've kind of worked on early stage startups for most of my career, and I've got a little bit of a through line in doing work on community based business models. Communities are very difficult to start, I think, but once they get going, they can scale. And they are an interesting type of business model. They do well in different economic cycles. So often, what we found we launched brick and mortar just into the pandemic. I mean, literally, had just kind of figured out exactly what we were going to do. Launched, it started doing in person programming, and then, you know, a month later, the pandemic hit, and we had to just sort of completely reframe what we were going to do. But actually, in that time, we saw people were very drawn to the idea of being part of a community and understanding how fellow entrepreneurs were navigating the changes of the pandemic and everything, trying to stay afloat and keep their businesses alive and all of that. So I think even in economic downturns at times when people feel a need for community more than ever. So they're an interesting kind of model. And I'd worked on a few of them before, and that was sort of, I think part of how Drew and I came together, I initially kind of responded to a sort of ad for someone to help with some marketing, digital marketing, sort of writing. There was no clear idea that we're going to build a community. And when I arrived and sort of met with Drew and sort of understood it was really brick and wonder was kind of like pre anything. It was sort of just an idea. There was an idea that there could be something. There was no idea what the something was. So I put together some strategy workshops to do some consulting around kind of different versions of a business model that we could create, and we knew that we wanted to build something that would be complimentary to the architecture studio. So actually, behind me on the wall, you can see some of the work from Lang architecture drew studio. We wanted to build something that would inform and reinforce what the studio was doing, and ended up kind of landing on through a sort of period of about 12 months of iteration and figuring it out, landed on a kind of community model. And so that was where some of my background kind of really was helpful. I think in sort of that early stage strategy, perhaps

Rion Willard

07:54

you could explain to us what is a community based business model? Yeah,

Speaker 1

07:59

that's a good question. I mean, I think for us, what that means is that the primary driver of revenue for us is is members paying an annual membership fee to be part of the community. There are other models where the participation in the community is maybe free or very low, a low cost to participate, but maybe the model is more supported by advertising. I think you see some publications that are sort of like have communities attached to them, or communities that become publications, and there's sort of like a more of an editorial component to it, but I think what it is is a group of people who share some common interests and some some aligned needs, and they have, you know, similar questions or similar experiences they want to kind of share and navigate together and then somehow around that, you're able to kind of monetize the work of bringing them together and curating experiences that binds people into a into a community,

Rion Willard

08:57

and going back to part of Your your other previous experience working with startups. What is it that's so unique about working with startups in that kind of you know, that first sort of five years, that's very different, say, from other sorts of of, of kind of more mature businesses. What are the sorts of things that that, what are the challenges and the problems that startups are typically facing and dealing with that that you personally enjoy.

Speaker 1

09:25

Yeah, sort of like my masochist, basically, a little bit I think. I mean, I think some, some people really like to have a clear sense of of where things are going all the time. And I think if you work for and in and around startups. You You got to love the opposite. Yeah, you sort of relish the opposite, right? You're kind of like, like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if we're going to survive. I don't know if we're going to run out of money or if we're going to hire. The wrong person, and that's really going to screw us up for a while. And actually, the kind of navigating that itself, the challenge of that is sort of part of the reward. I think, I find that to be the case. I think the kind of ambiguity, as long as it doesn't go on indefinitely, is quite fun. What's interesting about brick and wonder is, I think we had a period of sort of 12 to 18 months at the beginning, before 2020 when we really, like launched it, where we were, we explored one pathway that didn't really yield anything. We explored another pathway didn't yield anything. Explored another pathway that that cost a lot and didn't yield anything really. That led to a pivot that sort of led to us really getting it going in 2020 so we actually had a kind of period of iteration. In this case, it was, it was very helpful to be incubated by the architecture studio and to really be Drew was was keen to just sort of explore the lessons that he'd learned as a practicing architect and as an entrepreneur for many years, with quite with quite a long leash, you know, like sort of, we could go down a path and mess up, but at least because we were kind of under the umbrella of the architecture studio and very small and very lean, we could iterate a little bit towards something that eventually, you know, started to get some traction.

Rion Willard

11:19

So it's interesting, because I know Drew has been involved with the the project that they did up in the Hudson in terms of their own development. And it's quite an entrepreneurial practice in terms of taking on risk and doing things which are outside of the traditional architectural scope of services and and I know drew last time he was on the show, was quite transparent and in their in their lessons learned from development, and perhaps that wasn't a pursuit anymore. But what was the intention here with brick and wonder, what was the kind of the overarching vision or mission that was that or the problem that was being identified that brick and wonder was trying to solve? Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1

12:06

that's a great question. The development project you're talking about is actually this one behind me on the wall. This is the Hudson Woods development project. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the studio's work was really drying up and drew I think this is a story that other architects have experienced. So, you know, work dried up. They've got to do something to stay afloat and keep their firm alive. I think drew will tell you candidly, his wife was telling him it's time to get a job, but he was really keen not to do that, to keep his his studio going. And so he took on the the idea of doing this development project, bought a piece of land up in the Catskills, raised friends and family around, and did the Hudson Woods development. And I think that's a big project. It took five or six years to sort of fully execute its 26 beautiful homes for a

Rion Willard

12:57

first development project. It was no, you know, kind of a little adu or anything like that. It was a full on, yeah,

Speaker 1

13:04

it had some real scope and scale to it. And it's and what's interesting is it really made a place out of essentially a forest, while keeping most of the forest intact, which is not something that most developers do. But I think what the takeaway from that is it took a long time to build the right project team, to find the right landscape designer, the right pool subcontractor, the right window vendor to do the beautiful Gable window at the end of the kind of barn shaped buildings, the right hardware, the right flooring. You know, all of these different disciplines came together and and sort of collaborated and created the model house, which really kind of allowed the storytelling to begin and the place making to begin, and for people to really the prospective buyers, to really envision what they were buying into in terms of a development. But the interesting, I think, insight from that was we brought together all this, these amazing people to work with and do this amazing project. And yet we knew that when the time was was kind of at an end, the development project was done. All the homes were bought, the homeowners had all moved in, all the construction was finished. There was going to be this kind of end point. But what do you kind of do with those relationships at that point, right, that you've worked so hard to find the right people, and you've built this amazing thing together, and you've got this great chemistry, and then it's all going to be over. And so I think what we realized, and I brick and wonder, started sort of just as in the last couple of years at the Hudson Woods development project. So there was some overlap. We realized is that what we needed was a way of staying in touch with these people, staying connected to them, and continuing to have a relationship to sort of deepen the relationship, to stay in touch, to learn more from each other, to engage and collaborate on small things. And then the next time we had the opportunity to work with them, they would be right there. You know, they would still have. Relationship, it wouldn't be searching again for the people from scratch. And I think that's something people often talk about. You know, the kind of reinventing the wheel with architecture is one of those very frustrating things every building you do, whether it's a renovation or a new building, you just kind of are starting from scratch every time. Well, part of what's the starting from scratch, obviously your design has to be site specific and respond to the environment. To the environment and the light and the budget and so on. But part of this starting from scratch is finding the people to work with again. And I think what brick and wonder is trying to do is to use community as a sort of vehicle to stay connected with the best collaborators in the industry, to stay connected with the people that you care about, to share in your journey of entrepreneurship together with them, and then have a place to really nurture those relationships in between the transactional things that you do together. So you may collaborate with a certain structural engineer on a certain project, you may collaborate with a certain GC on a certain GC on a certain project, but they're not necessarily the right person for the next project, or this other typology, or this you know, other thing you're doing, or they're too busy to take your next project on, so you need a deeper bench of resources that you can go to. And I think what brick and wonder is trying to do is say, let's stay connected and share in our journey of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship together, let's kind of hone our craft of entrepreneurship. Let's learn as much as we can from each other, and have a reason to be together, even when we're not actively working on projects. And then when we do need to actively work on projects, you're coming at it. You're starting not from scratch, but from a place of deep trust and alignment, and knowing that there's a lot of kind of relationship, equity and capital between you, that you can embark on a project together, maybe a 234, year project, knowing I like this person, I know I can trust them. I've seen them in ups and downs where we we have some, some real sort of, you know, road behind us in terms of the relationship, and that, I think, puts people in a really strong position to do better work. So

Rion Willard

17:06

that's a very nice kind of emergence, if you like, of the brick and wonder that actually came from, in part this, this kind of physical community, and it's kind of like looking at how to maintain and enrich those kind of well developed professional relationships whilst we're in between projects. So what does that actually look like then? So if you, if you were to, you know, how do you keep in contact with everybody else? Is it a series of, is it like a digital space or a digital community, or is it a kind of physical meetups or a mixture of both. Or, what does the, what do the actual tangible things of enriching relationship look like and broadcasting? And, you know, because this is what's interesting about, you know, kind of a community business models is, what is? What is it? Because we can understand, we can we can understand, physically, a community. What does that look like as a, as a, as a more ephemeral organization? Yeah,

Speaker 1

18:08

that's a great question. I think I the way I describe it, as I'm often talking to people who build buildings, is like in layers. So the foundation is that there is and there are three layers. The foundation is that there's a private digital community that connects members online. So it doesn't matter if you're a member in London or San Francisco, Austin, New York, everyone has access to the same private online community. And it's kind of like a private LinkedIn or a private Facebook, the typical things you'd expect in a social network. You have a profile, you can message each other. There's a nice map view of the community. So everyone has a pin in the map that represents their sort of commercial address. And so you can see where, you know how the community is made up geographically. And in there you can ask questions a lot of people. You know, what's interesting is you see people ask very specific questions, like, has anyone someone was asking about a subcontractor to work on a specific type of boiler in a multi family, you know, rental project in you know that they're an owner's rep for the for the building owner, and it's like, you can't ask that question on LinkedIn, like everyone's going to think you're insane, you know what, what kind of thing you're talking about. But in the brick and wonder community there, there are people who can say, oh, yeah, we this sub would help you. This sub would help you. So it's you can get very specific in them. So that's the foundation, the digital layer to the community, and there's a mobile app for it as well. The second layer, and really the heart of what we do, a lot of where we spend our time, is the programming, and that takes place in person and online. The in person programming happens in currently four cities, New York, Austin, San Francisco and London, and they the idea of the programming is really to create this context where people can discover and develop professional relationships in the industry. We do small group in person roundtable discussions. We do some site visits, we do some panel discussions that are. Usually bigger. We have some just no agenda social gatherings where people can just meet up and have a drink together. And we do some online workshops that tend to be a little bit more tactical and kind of granular. So they're going into how to build your business on LinkedIn, or how to pick the right publicist to work with, or these sorts of things. And the, you know, the round tables, which is sort of our flagship programming, I think is, is sort of more strategic. It tends to be like thinking about growth and culture, or sales and selling, or, you know, built, you know, sustainable building, the sort of bigger picture. So I think of the programming falls a little bit into, kind of like strategic themes, tactical themes, and then social. So the programming is really where we spend a lot of our time designing that, curating it, and sort of finding the spaces and bringing people together. And then the last layer of sort of engagement, to come back to, the sort of layers metaphor, is we do a lot of curated matchmaking in the community. So we have this kind of like 30,000 foot perspective of like, who's doing what and when and why and where and what they're interested in and so on. And so we have a very kind of proactive community management approach, where we will connect members together based on shared interests and alignment and so on. And it can be sometimes it's transactional things, like someone might be looking to hire a lighting designer for their project, and we'll connect them to a lighting designer. Um, you know, the right lighting designer for the given project. Sometimes it's much smaller things, but they still, I think, create a lot of value. So we've had members, for example, we've introduced them together, and they've co hosted programming together. They've said, Okay, we'll put on a, you know, holiday event, or some of them did a tour of the Mercer gallery. It's like a digital, kind of immersive art experience in New York, you know, there was four brick and wonder members that we brought together, that put that together for their, you know, communities and their clients and so on. And that was a great success, at about 60 people come to that event. So we the connecting, I think we think of the sort of like the goal that we're always digging for in the community is, how can we bring two people together in a thoughtful way that has kind of like a mutual alignment, like there's they both have something to gain from knowing one another. If we can, if we can do that all day long, then we're sort of making the what could otherwise be a sort of like diffuse cloud of professionals who are just sort of in this sort of space together, with filling that with vectors that connect them to each other, and making it kind of a dense, robust cloud of connections and resources which let them share knowledge, share candidates that they might not be able to hire, but they think are great. They can collaborate on projects together. All sorts of different things happen. But so our kind of connection activity is helpful as well,

Rion Willard

22:45

in terms of the demographics of who's in, who's part of the network, what kinds of businesses do you have there, everything from architects to interior designers to other sorts of consultants to those, those sorts of firms and contractors, I'm guessing, as well, and engineers,

Speaker 1

23:04

yeah, we think very broadly about the built environment. And I think that's something that's quite unique about brick and mortar. It's one of the reasons I think it's either a completely insane idea or a good idea. We'll find out, I guess, eventually. But we really see the built environment through a very broad lens. And there are about 40 different professional categories that make up the community. I won't list them all, because it's long. So there's, you know, architects, yes, interior designs, yes. Construction companies, yes. There are also brand design agencies. There are, you know, attorneys that work on construction and real estate. There are real estate brokers. There are other vendors that work on SEO or strategy and business development consultants. There are passive house consultants. There are mechanical engineers, lighting designers, landscape architects, photographers. It's a very interdisciplinary bunch. And I think the reason why this sort of makes sense is regard whether you, let's say if you're an architecture firm that does mostly residential work, and like Drew studio right, mostly residential work, but they've done some gallery projects, and they've done some development work, and they've done a little bit of commercial work. They've actually sort of done a couple of restaurants and things. You need different resources for these different types of projects. And so it's not like you can really easily pigeon hole. Well, you do residential work. So you're in the residential lane. Everyone just kind of works with each other. Or, for example, if you think of a product right, a tile that gets specified into a residential project, could equally go into a kitchen in a commercial project, or it could go into a hospitality project or even a hospital project. So it's like the we can't really easily. And I think the tendency is to sort of silo the industry and say, Okay, well, real estate development lives over here. Real estate brokerage is its own thing. There's the AEC architecture, engineering and construction. And, and that's a sort of chunk, but it's, it's so connected, we really think that it's more like this sort of big, messy, organic ecosystem. And so I think that the way to make sense of where brick and wonder kind of like, who's it? Who does it make sense for to kind of jump in and participate in that has more to do with it's really aimed at, like entrepreneurs and business owners. It's typically going to be people who've been running their own business for 10 years or more. So they're pretty well established. They're pretty far along in their careers. They are, you know, seasoned entrepreneurs, and they're interested in growth. They have a growth mindset, and ideally, I think that they have 10 to 100 head count. So right now, brick and wonder it sort of, it's not a big it's not a great fit for, like, big corporate companies, unless there's one person who very clearly wants to participate in the programming and be active, and is that does have that kind of entrepreneurial lens. And when companies are too small, you know, they're too early stage, they're too young the you know, it's, there's, they don't have an awful lot that they can bring to the community, so that sort of, you know, they're not the ideal candidates to participate. So it's curated in the sense that it's, it's sort of interdisciplinary and and sort of aimed at entrepreneurs who are pretty well established. Do

Rion Willard

26:16

you have clients? Kind of people who hire architects and say, say, kind of the decision makers of development firms and other sorts of professional architectural clients, if you like.

Speaker 1

26:29

Well, that's it. Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic, because right now we're very B to B focused. We're focused on building a professional community for professionals who are practicing in the industry, whether it's residential, commercial, hospitality, cultural, whatever it's serving the professionals. But then there's this sort of gray area where, like, yeah, developer can come to us and say, Hey, I'm looking for this resource for my project. Do you know anyone? And so yes, we do some of that matchmaking. One of our developer members, the Brooklyn home company we do, we've done a lot of that for them, connecting them to resources. We connected them to a furniture brand that they're going to do a staging collaboration with. And it's like, it's not a transactional thing, but it's a big win for both of them. And so just just sort of like this, some of it's transactional, some of it's just sort of the softer matchmaking. And then occasionally we have clients come to us, just a private residential client and say, I'm looking for an architect for my project. You obviously have this pool of resources. You know, who should I work with? Or can you help? And I think we are interested in where we can go with that in the future. So sort of creating a portal where clients can come to us and say, This is my project. This is what I'm looking for. We can do that initial project qualification and then really help provide service to them, connections, the

Rion Willard

27:46

right people, yeah? So actually, kind of you, you guys, actually help facilitate, building out a team for their for their project, and help facilitating them, almost like, yeah, like a sort of client rep, sort of service,

Speaker 1

27:59

yeah, sort of thin slice of that, of that service where there's that, like initial onboarding and kind of understanding of the project, and sort of thinking about scope and so on. I mean, one thing we've done, and the way we've sort of tested this, is the architecture studio. The database recommended Lang architecture. They get a lot of project inquiries. Not all of them are a fit. Sometimes when Drew's busy, he'll ask me to do some qualification with a with a client. So I've had lots of calls over the years with clients who want to do a project, have a budget, have an idea of what they want to do. But so I've sort of really experienced directly the kind of like crazy knowledge gap, the really frustrating experience that the clients have coming to doing an architecture project and sort of seeing it from their perspective, like, you know, well, I've got, I've got a I've got a house, I've got some money. Why doesn't the architecture studio want to work with me? You know, like in any other setting, you go into a shop, you want to buy the thing, and you say, Here's the money. And they say, yeah, yeah. But you come to an architecture studio and they say, well, we're not sure if you're the right customer for our project. We're not sure if you have enough money, or we're not sure if this is the right time for us to do your project, or if we have the right person to do the you know, I think clients find that sort of mystifying. I think people don't understand cost very well. They don't understand the complexity of what they're getting into. And so I think what would be interesting eventually is if we can play a role that helps people with that sort of zero to one onboarding into okay, you're really going to do a project. This is the scope and scale of it. These are the resources you're going to need, and then handing you over to teams that can sort of take care of you from there. So, yeah, we're interested in that. It's just not something we're kind of doing a lot

Rion Willard

29:44

of yet. How many members do you have at the moment? So there are 300

Speaker 1

29:49

ish member businesses. So typically, it's the business owner or founder who joins. I think that's kind of the ideal way for people to participate. In some cases, you know, if they're bigger company. So they might have their head of business development, Head of Marketing, head of growth, join, and that's also fine. The person who joins really needs to be someone who's in a senior sort of strategic role in their organization that can speak to what are their challenges? You know? What are their opportunities? Where are they taking a business risk? Maybe they're thinking about opening a new office to start doing work in a new territory. You know that they someone who can really speak to the sort of business side of that? And I'd say the members are concentrated in New York. Probably 202 50 of them are New York based. And in 2024 we launched programming in Austin, San Francisco and London. So San Francisco is growing pretty quickly. We've got a good, good handful of members there. Austin's growing a little bit London. I think we feel like we need to spend some more time over there and really just kind of dig in and learn more about the kinds of programming people want. What I've started to kind of pick up on a little bit is that I think, you know, in the US, we've had this sort of pretty robust economic recovery from COVID, and the economy is in a pretty good shape. It could be better, of course, and like there's a lot of uncertainty about the incoming administration, inflation is sort of feeling sticky, but it's overall, had a pretty healthy sort of recovery from from COVID. I think the UK has had a much less robust recovery, and so it just feels like people are a bit more strapped. It's like the work's harder to find. People are very worried about spending money. So it's just interesting saying, like, Okay, well, how can we help build community and provide value in a context where people are just sort of, like, any additional cost is sort of, they're like, I don't know, no,

Rion Willard

31:43

that's an interesting observation. And I would kind of echo that with our own experience of, of, you know, of working with the, you know, both built environment in industries here and in the in the UK that the UK has, as it appears to be a much slower, less robust industry than it is here. And it's kind of, you know, it's a lot more polarized as well, where there's a kind of thin slice of success at the top, and then there's a lot of stuff, a lot of grind happening. So, yeah, that's quite, that's quite an interesting observation. Yeah, very good. So what are the what are your plans for brick and wonder in 2025

Speaker 1

32:29

Well, we think we, we think that we really want to sort of double down on the new cities that we started programming. So Austin, San Francisco and London are a big focus for this year. I think we've had quite a lot of people asking us about Miami. There's a natural New York to Miami kind of exchange of resources and ideas and people often have businesses with location offices in both locations. I think in we don't want to get into launching new cities in 2025 we really need to, sort of like, get the thing going in these new cities first. So that's our that's one, you know, big challenge on the agenda. One of the things we're really, like, focused on and interested in, from the point of view of being a community business model is, is like, how do we create a really strong sense of belonging and identity in the community? Right? I think what one of the things that we are, one of the things I feel like I've kind of seen and realized in the five plus years we've been working on this, is that there's a real difference between a community and a network. And like, a community has a really strong sense of give and get among the members, like you have to come in and participate and extend value and really, really extend value over and over and over again, really without seeking reward, to plug in properly to the community, to get embedded in it, and then to if you do that for long enough, you will start really, sort of reaping the rewards from it. Start getting known in the community. Start having really strong and valuable relationships of trust and alignment and so on, and project opportunities and so on. But I think it's it's gotta be. We really want it to be a community. We want it to be where something where people kind of come in and feel embraced. And so how do we cultivate this sense of belonging to our members? So we're doing some work on that kind of an interesting brand and sort of product challenge we're figuring out. So we're spending some time on that in 2025 and then the other thing that I'm personally very excited about is that we were, we feel like there's something to do with relationship management and referrals that that drives so much of what the businesses in the industry work on. And so, just to sort of give that some context, like most of the brick and wonder, members are service based businesses. They're GCS, they're, you know, architects, interior designers, lighting designers and so on. Many of them have a kind of a service based business model. They're, of course, developers invest. Investors and product companies, the product companies that are selling in the architecture space are very service led with their products, right? You've got to really explain how products going to integrate into a project, and you've got to, you've got to provide a very high level of service, to work with an architect and a client and a GC and make sure you don't get value engineered out of the project and so on. So no matter what you're doing, there's a high level of service involved in it, and in service based businesses, typically, 60% or more of the business that comes through the door is driven by referrals. And I think we all kind of intuitively know that referrals are essential part of our business, but we also intuitively know, how do I get them? Like, where do they come from? They come from colleagues and friends and you know, okay, but how do I get more of them? How do I really leverage them, and so on. And so we're actually pretty interested in referrals and relationships and relationship dynamics, and we're looking into which is sort of in the early stages of developing a digital product that helps people with relationship and referral management. You think of a traditional CRM that's like, you know, you've got a funnel that you're navigating people down the funnel to opportunities and deals and then close deals and things that get qualified out. You need something kind of different when referrals are the thing that drives the business and drives growth. And so we're really interested in exploring that and doing some work on a digital product that will kind of help people with that, and then we'll be able to use the community as a sort of testing place to really find people who are like, Okay, I'll give that a try and see if it helps me with my

Rion Willard

36:40

so, so a tool that helps people track their own referrals, or, or, or is it something that inside of the community where you're you're now kind of monitoring who's giving what referrals to you, who to who, and kind of keeping it like a scoreboard, almost, and there's kind of credits available for people who are good referrers? Or some? Is it something more

Speaker 1

37:00

the former? I think more the format. Yeah, we, you know, we, we do keep a track of, we try to keep a track of like, what we think of as like a success stories or collaboration stories. We call them we, we like to know when members have done projects together, so that we can celebrate collaboration. I think a huge focus for us, a huge kind of theme that runs through everything we do has to do with collaboration. I think the Hudson Woods project that started the community was one where collaboration played such a key role to the sort of success of it and the dynamics of collaboration. Collaboration, people always think of like, oh, it's when everything goes well, you know, and it's like, well, it's often actually real collaboration happens when it's going badly. You know where things going wrong, but you've got to all get through it together. So collaboration is something we're really interested in, and I think it has the tools we're interested in building. Has more to do with helping people manage a set of information that they have in relation to their business that's kind of difficult to like, track, keep track of in the same way that a CRM helps you manage a pipeline, I think you know the referrals that you make to other people, the referrals you receive from other people, the introductions you make that aren't necessarily to do with referrals, the introductions that you receive that aren't necessarily to do with the referrals, the people in your network that you want to really focus on building deeper relationships with, right? There's people who you kind of like, know, a bit, and don't you don't have a strong relationship with them. How do you define who do you want to have a stronger relationship with? And how do you pursue getting there, you know? And actually, I think a lot of that has to do with giving people kind of the inspiration to find different ways to extend value to colleagues in their community. It's not just about, okay, how can I, let's say I'm an architect and I want to meet developers. How do I meet more developers and tell them about how great I am? And as an architect, it's really flipping that on its head and saying, Well, how can I offer them something that's valuable, that opens the door to a conversation we can get to, like why I'm good at what I do and how great my portfolio is, later, but we need to start the conversation with something that doesn't feel salesy. So I think a lot of what we're interested in, in this digital product is inspiring people about different ways to extend value, to connect, us to start new relationships and deepen existing relationships. I

Rion Willard

39:23

think that's quite interesting as well. That the the challenge that a lot of people have with, how do we nurture relationships that is more than just a, you know, hi, you know, little email that says, Hi, I'm just checking in see how you are. Got any projects and yes, and actually, to make it meaningful and and valuable what, what sorts of things do you see within the within the community that works well, of of kind of reciprocal value exchange. What sorts of things do you see businesses doing with each other, like, kind of prior to actually working with each other in terms of just nurturing those relationships?

Speaker 1

39:58

Yeah, um. Well, I think one of the ways I talk about what brick and wonder offers is sort of like a context for discovering and developing new relationships, right? So you can maybe break it up into two halves where there's a sort of discovery, like meeting people. Meeting people is hard, right? It's, I think immediately people go to, oh, I'm networking. Networking is miserable everyone you know, and no one likes going into a room full of people they don't know with a sticky label on their chest and a glass of wine in the hand, and away you go. You're networking. That's a real, like sinking feeling for most people, including myself. So how do you actually like maybe get something else out of being in the room, maybe it's you learn something, or you're challenged in a certain way. Or, you know, I think of actually kind of a lunch and learn is maybe an example of this. I feel like it's a slightly sort of stale thing, but like, at least the idea is product company comes in and tells you about a product, and then you get lunch, which is nice, but also maybe you get bit of learning. You get a continuing education, education unit, so something like that, where there's like a little bit of an exchange of something to start the relationship. So I think it's about, like, sort of being in the right room. It's about spending your time smartly. I think it's about being pretty open, you know, like I think you you might think if you're an architect that needs to meet developers, or you're an interior designer that needs to meet architects, or you're a GC that needs to meet those two, those are the people I need to meet. Well, they are, but they're not the only people you need to meet. And actually, if you meet the other people that work with them as well, you're sort of still getting closer to the sort of people that you do want to meet. And actually that that's time well spent. So there's needs to be a sort of openness about that discovery side and then the development side of relationships. You know, I think a lot of the things, it feels like stating the obvious, but it's it's true that spending time with people makes a difference. It's true that if you're thoughtful about who someone is and what they're interested in, and you find an event that you're interested in going to, that they might be interested in going to, and you invite them to come with you. If you're thoughtful about that and specific about it, there's a good chance that that person will say yes. And then you can spend some time with them, and really, you know, get to know them at a deeper level, and you can share an experience together. You can host people. You can say, Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna do an open studio. I think this is something that really anyone can do, right? It's like you, if you, I mean, if you have an office, and even if you don't have an office, there's ways to be creative about this. You can do a happy hour in a bar, right? But like, we're gonna be there, we're gonna buy a few drinks, we're gonna gather people that we like, and we're just going to spend time together, right? Or you can co host an event that someone else has. The Mercer gallery Tory mentioned four brick and wonder members teamed up to do that together so they were able to pool their resources a little bit do something a bit more kind of high production, high high touch, than they might have been able to do alone. That's great. You can send people a gift. You can leave them a nice, you know, review on LinkedIn or on Google Maps for their business address. There's, I think, a lot of ways that you can extend value to people in small ways that that just sort of, you know, keep the conversation going connect. And to go back to your point of, like, hey, just checking in. Like, do you have any projects for me? No one's gonna that's just doesn't work. Like no one's interested. It's not, you're not leading with value. And when you lead with value, when you say, I read this article and I immediately thought of you, because I know that you did that project, and it just, it was just really made me think of you. So just sending it to you for your interest, even that's like a nice, like, thoughtful gesture. It's nothing to do with like, Do you have a project for me? It's just I was thinking of you because of this. So there it is. I don't expect anything in return. There's something. I think people intuitively know how to do this stuff. It's just hard to do it when you're thinking of growth and sales and transactions, because that's what you kind of need to be thinking of. You're thinking of. You're thinking you're sort of in survival mode, like, got to get the next project, you know? And from that mindset, it's very difficult to be in the kind of value extending mode, yeah,

Rion Willard

44:11

no, exactly. And it's kind of like more of a reactive way of doing business development, as opposed to proactive, where you're kind of creating an environment where relationships are naturally going to be cultivated and sustained and just like what you're what you're saying. And that's a lovely, a very simple, you know, kind of, I've often advised clients in the past, you know, to build up a vault of articles and magazine cuttings and digital obviously, but imagining

Unknown Speaker

44:45

cutting

Rion Willard

44:48

out these magazine articles and then posting them to people. But yeah, like having, having, like, a folder where you've got loads of links to magazine articles and resource. And then strategically start sending those out, because those, you know, you don't have to produce loads of content to be able to do it. I mean, that's the next level, and that becomes even better. But, you know, just thoughtful articles that are useful value, value LED. And then you've got your kind of Google alerts that are set up. So anything that comes up that's newly written, great, and you just forward it onto somebody with a thoughtful message far more useful than the kind of pleading, desperate looking emails that nobody likes sending as well as as well as receiving. So Right?

Speaker 1

45:31

I think another thing, another thing that people under value, maybe or underestimate, is just the the power of being present with other people, and it can be in a zoom, it's not ideal. But like, you know, going to an event, people often think of like, well, I'm too busy to go to an event. I'm too busy. My time's too valuable. I have to defend my time from all these other things that are kind of encroaching on the work I need to do. But actually, you you going to an event and you speaking with people, and you sharing your time with other people is a way of extending value to other people that opens the door to a new relationship. I mean, if you stand in the corner and look at your phone, no one's going to want to have a conversation with you. So you've got to do the hard bit of like looking up and looking around and going over and going up to a group of people and saying, Hi, I'm Ed. And that feels crappy, but as soon as you've done that, as soon as that beds over, you've opened the door for the possibility of connection. And that, I think people kind of under underestimate the value of that. You sharing your time with other people in that way, because you sort of think when you go off to do some networking, like I'm doing this for me, I'm doing this because I need to build my network. But actually, when you go and share your time with other people and reframe that, it's valuable to them too. You know, you made the effort, you showed up, you have something to say. So you can just, you can just kind of participate in that way.

Rion Willard

47:00

I love it. And if people want to get in contact and become part of brick and wonder, What's the best way for them to to do this? Sure,

Speaker 1

47:07

yeah, brick and wonder.com. Is the website, and we're on Instagram at brick and wonder. And you know, you can find us from there. We're around, we're in we're in London, New York, Austin, San Francisco. I'll be in London later this year in May for the Design Week. Yeah, pretty easy to reach. Love

Rion Willard

47:24

it brilliant. Ed, well, thank you so much for your time this morning. A pleasure and delight to be chatting with you. So thank

Speaker 1

47:32

you likewise. Thank you very much for having us on the show. I appreciate it, and that's a wrap. Hey, Enoch

Enoch Sears

47:37

Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of. To bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer, one thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast simply because it helps other architects stand for more of their value spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, whatever that looks like for each individual. And so here my my simple ask is for you to join us and be part of our community by doing the following, heading over to iTunes and leaving a review of the podcast. And as an expression of our sincere thanks, we would like to give you a free CEU course that can get you one professional development unit. But more importantly, we'll give you a very solid and firm foundation on your journey to becoming a profitable and thriving architect. So here's the process for that. After you leave us review, send an email to support at Business of architecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training, you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wish they would have known 20 years ago. Hello, listeners.

Rion Willard

49:11

We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessfarchitecture.com the views expressed on this show by my guests do not represent those of the host and I make no representation. Promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you be unstoppable. I.

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