spending two days going through a systematic process to plan in your business is going to be one of the most valuable things that you can possibly do in your business. Hello, and welcome back architect Nation. I'm Enoch Sears. And this is the show where you'll discover tips, strategies and secrets for running an architectural practice that let you do your best work more often. Today, I'm joined by Business of Architecture principal, Ryan Willard Ryan, welcome.
Thank you very much, Nick, pleasure to be here as always. So today, we're going
to talk about something that is sort of a deadly cancer in the architecture industry, which is this idea of overwhelm, but more specifically, time what we call time scarcity, time scarcity. So the feeling that time is a scarce resource, which indeed, time is a limited resource that our bounds on our time, but how we approach it, and the stories we have around it, then begins to inform some things. So today, on today's episode, you'll discover a powerful framework for being able to triple or even quadruple or 10x your effectiveness, without having to do more architecture without having to do crazy time blocking or without having to carry around the Franklin day planner, or the the electronic equivalent of that we're gonna get to the core of the matter here, of what people generally call time management, which is actually a myth. The idea of time management, there's no such thing as time management. Right, right. Absolutely. Why is there no such thing as time management,
and we're not really managing time. That's right. It's ourselves that we need to manage time management. Time management is really self leadership, it's self leadership. And if we are managing anything, it's our energy.
Beautiful, very well said well said. Now, to put the context for this episode, we're going to share something that just happened, we're just turning into the new year here at Business of Architecture. And one of the powerful parts of smart practice is, is planning and tracking your business. So this is a part of the program where architects learn the skill set of planning and tracking in their business to be able to achieve 10x results. This year, like us personally, I usually spend in the past, I spent two days every single month planning, updating my plans, my goals, my chart, like everything, just kind of two days on, in kind of that high level business planning. And so we thought this would be a great opportunity to bring this to the members of smart practice. But what exactly happened, which is probably we didn't do a good, I didn't do a good enough job of communicating this to our clients, and maybe enrolling them in the idea of how powerful this is for them. But typically, if you can imagine you're an architect, and someone tells you, hey, you have an opportunity to plan two days, every single month, you're gonna be like, Heck, no, I barely have enough time to plan two hours every single month. Sounds like way too much. So we started getting just some random feedback like this, like, oh, you know, it wasn't, it's not a requirement, or like, Oh, two days who can afford to take two days off for their business? Right? And then Ryan, you had a powerful call with them with with certain of our clients, and tell us how that discussion went and kind of insights that came out about this, because it's gonna be applicable to whether you're an employee, whether you're running a firm right now, you know, we as you as an architect, you you trade in time, so like you trade meaning you you sell you buy time, this is this is a core of business, right?
So, again, it was very interesting, that maybe a little bit of context. So we normally every quarter spend at least one day with our clients planning. And, you know, refining what their plans are, what their priorities are, for the for the quarter at the end of the year. Last year, we did a two day planning session. And from my experience, and from, and from, you know, from the view in working with Nicole and other people on the team, we often find that even the two days is simply not enough. Yeah,
and we also use a special framework called fact mapping. So during the session, it's not like a normal planning session, you might have customers who for reason, this process of fact mapping continue, right? Yeah.
So it's a very, it's a very structured kind of two days or a period of time, and everyone's planning together. And there's a set of questions and prompts that are given. And, you know, we go into actually, you know, defining, you know, doing an audit of the time, that's just past how well we achieved on previous goals and targets, then we start to look at, you know, what worked, what didn't work, then we'll look at, you know, what kinds of what areas of the business need to be focusing on. And then we start setting meaningful goals and targets around that and developing tactics. And then we start scheduling it into calendars and diaries and whatnot, so that it's actually there was a planned out process and you know, that's easier to follow up on. The problem with it is even doing it once a quarter very thoroughly like that, and having maybe even a weekly, a weekly check in, that's only that's very short, is that often people leave or ignore those that disappear and the goals have a tendency just to disperse. And there is a lot of value of just doing it. once a quarter, there's a lot of value, doing it once a quarter and perhaps doing a little small check in once a month. But the goals change so much. And people are particularly architects. So in the weeds of doing the work, and are so reactive, that the slightest little fire in a business can totally disrupt derail a plan to an enormous amount, and then they end up end up having to restart or pick up these plans or pick up these goals, quarter after quarter after quarter. So that was the kind of intention here of spending two days every month doing it now. My I had a concern of it being two days, not that two days was too much. But I knew that we were going to get pushed back from our directly with our clients because they were going to they're in time scarcity.
So what do you mean time scarcity? What does that mean?
I haven't got enough time, I've got enough time, I haven't got enough time. There isn't another thing
to do. At a time, where
we've there's no way that I can afford to take the time off to do this. Okay, that was the the third reaction. Okay, that and so when we launched the initiative, and we were telling people, it's gonna be two days, we had a lot of feedback where people just saying, there's absolutely no way I can afford to take two days out of out of my week, out of my month. To do this. Some practices, were saying that's two thirds of our workforce out for two whole days. Other people were just like, there's, like, I can't make that work right now, you know, we've got other things that we need to do, we need to do this, this and this, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So there was a lot of there was a lot of push, push back. And this afternoon, I had to address it in a in a large group that we had, but it was a lot of people together. And it was very interesting, because, you know, we had to have a little look at what was the complaint. And underlying it now, we've responded, and we've kind of actually reduced the time to meet our clients where they're at more, and you know, don't worry, we'll get we'll get up to two out of the two days, in a in a period of time, once everyone's once one day is become normal, then we can increase it. And I appreciate perhaps, you know, from a few hours, once a month, or a day or two, a quarter to doing it every month is quite a big jump. Right? So we've learned from our you know, of kind of making sure we're meeting people where they're at. But it was very insightful to put the question back onto all of our clients. Why were you freaking out? Let's have a look. Okay, so there was a group of about 20 of us this afternoon. The invitation was that sitting right down? Why did why did I freak out about the two dates, right? When everyone had ever pretty much admitted when I saw, you know, who put your hand up if, if you freaked out, when you saw the two day invitation every month, pretty much of them put their hand up. But let's look at why was I freaking out. And we had people saying things like, well, you know, I've got billable work to do. I can't, I can't spend someone said, We're doers. And doing this kind of introverted activity is a bit of a waste of time. Someone else said, you know, right now, I really don't have the time to be able to, to be to be spending on on planning. There's other things I need to be doing, like changing title blocks on spreadsheets, I'm being silly, but it was it was it was more like they were so in the production of the work that that those are the kinds of blockages that were coming up. So everyone kind of wrote down on a piece of paper, what their freak outs were about, and then they shared them. And we shared them by typing them into one of those kind of chat boxes, you get on Zoom. And everyone read everyone else's things. And the next question was like, Okay, well, what are the trends that we're all starting to see, from where everybody else's complaints were? And that was when it was started to become quite insightful. And it was like, Ah, well, number one, nobody values planning. And that was the first question. Okay, so nobody values planning. Can you number one, be responsible for how ineffective your planning has been in the past? Okay, so often people have this relationship to planning where they make plans, or they make annual goals or they make quarterly goals, and they don't accomplish them. And what do they do? They the reaction is, well, then planning doesn't work. It's a waste of time. Yeah, it's
not a good distinction.
It's not useful, as opposed to, I didn't plan very well. Or there was something missing in between the points where I planned for why it was ineffective, which is exactly you know, what we've done as coaches and as business mentors, is that we're recognizing okay, there's There's a there's a piece missing here, it's good, but it could be a lot better. And we want to have, we want to hold people's feet to the fire much more consistently, and have this kind of discipline of planning really deeply. You know, part and parcel is this is this is the high value activity in your business. Okay, so planning was dealt with the first thing was planning was clearly devalued. Because the evidence would be that most people were ineffective with their planning, or it wasn't producing the results that perhaps they had wanted it to, or they were planning for goals. And they didn't appreciate how much planning and replanting and adapting plans and strategizing and high level thought and thinking was needed for them to execute on those plans. Okay, so that would be the first thing and everyone started to sort of realize, okay, well, that's, that's one thing that we've been doing. A kind of ancillary to that conversation was, you realize, as a business owner, that part of your roles and responsibilities is to plan for strategic growth and profit in the business. Okay, you've started a business, you have a responsibility to ensure its growth trajectory, and that you are thinking about it, and you're bringing a high level and a high caliber of thinking to the future of the business. And you're developing plans, and you're speculating about them, in the same way, that you bring that high caliber thinking to the design of a project, and you reiterate the project in an architectural project, an architect won't won't have a problem with planning it out, and then re planning it, and then re planning it, and then redrawing it, and then going to bed and thinking about it and then waking up again, and re planning it and replay before any brick or piece of metal or concrete is put anywhere near the ground. This thing has gone through this iteration of planning again, and again and again. But it seems it's amazes me actually, how much of an alien concept this happens to be when we're thinking about planning and designing our own businesses. Even for architects, the master planner, we still have this aversion to the art of of planning. So that was the first thing that I'm planning was was grotesquely undervalued. And we've just looked at some of the reasons why it might have been undervalued because of it because of its perceived effectiveness. Because we're not doing very well or not enough of it. The second thing that everyone started to realize was that everybody was in complaint about time. Right. So the two are related here is that the most valuable, the most valuable thing I can be doing with my time is not planning, but doing work, being busy in the business. Now, I know from experience, if we do any extensive, detailed audit of what someone's doing with their time, it becomes very amusing because we literally go through all right, let's have a look what you've done in the last week. And let's start putting $1 amount to how you know how much you could have paid someone to do that thing. We'll see CEOs or we'll see practice owners who are doing things like photoshopping fire hydrants out of photographs, or they've been changing title blocks, or they've weighed
in with rain, which goes into the idea of the $20 an hour work $200 An hour work etc. Right. And this is something that very early on in my entrepreneurial journey that I learned from a mentor. And it just a light bulb went off in my head boom. And when I understood this, my personal income doubled year over year, just because I got this one concept. And I was so just to tell you a story. There was recently I was meeting with a hook firm owner that reached out. And this person she wanted, she was interested in joining smart practice because of many testimonials and listened to the podcast and and we were tapping to look at her business. And in her business. She's earning about $90,000 a year, which for a sole practitioner in the US is certainly not a lot but you know, it's kind of par for the course. And just looking at that, like Why wasn't she able to break through it kind of hovered around there. And she'd been doing this for a while, eight years or so. And now seven, eight years. And, and but this is common. It wasn't it was not an uncommon situation. And as as I'm talking with her kind of understanding what her mindset is, she explained well, you know, when I'm working in the business, I always want to I always default to doing the architectural work because my mind saying this is the billable work. This is the you know, I've got to invoice. This is what pays the bills is doing this kind of work. And so then I asked her I said Well, have you ever heard the concept of $20 an hour work? $200 An hour work. $2,000 An hour work and $20,000 an hour work actually even said $200,000 An hour work in her eyes just like almost exploded out of her head. She's like, I have no idea. What are you talking about this is I have no idea what you're talking about and it sounds I'm very skeptical. All of what you're saying. I said, Well, understandably, I said, these are just buckets, we can look at, you know, $20 an hour work would be what kind of work, it would be things like taking out the trash, like Ryan was mentioning, you know, touching up Photoshop files, I mean, you could hire someone off the street to kind of do that teach them how to use Photoshop, and like do that kind of stuff. But filing papers, you know, busy work, cleaning the office, things like this, that you might pay someone 20 bucks an hour to be able to do here in the US. Now, there's $200 An hour work, which would be the kind of work that an architect would do. It would be everything along with the profession. And and that's kind of where as architects, our minds, kind of, they kind of stopped. They're like, this is the this is the most money, this the most valuable use of my time is doing the architectural work. And then I asked her well, what do you think could be what do you think is as to what do you think could be a $2,000 an hour work? And she's just like, I have no idea. I said, Well, what if you're spending time closing a proposal? How much could that work be worth for you? What if you're spending time starting to build a business network? And she's like, the light started go off. And I said, How about $20,000 An hour work? How much would it be worth it to you to have a lunch meeting with someone, and that person turns into a referral partner, that refers you $4 million of work over the next 10 years? And let's say that your profit on that? Let's see, let's say you just get, you know, $400,000 worth of profit on that over the 10 years? Well, potentially, that meeting was a $400,000 lunch meeting in pure profit, not to mention the money that went into running the firm and things like that. Now, when she understood this, boom, her mind just exploded. Because then suddenly, she realized, like, oh, I can see one of the reasons why I'm stuck here. And one of the reasons why I don't have any money, and one of the reasons why the finances are difficult for me, and one of the reasons why I am working so much. And one of the reasons why I can't have more leisure in my business, is because my time and the way I value my time, caps out at my $200 An hour type of work. And so then we go back to planning oftentimes, as architects, we don't really, here's the thing, no, none of us went to business school. So none of us learned about the roles in a business that go above and beyond what an architect does, things like planning using something like the fact mapping process. So back to you, right. So like, when she understood that she was like, alright, this sounds good. Sign me up, I can see that we're so so what we're talking about here is getting getting architects and our clients eventually to the point where they can see that spending two days, going through a systematic process to plan in your business is going to be one of the most valuable things that you can possibly do in your business. Absolutely.
And I think what's, you know, there is this addiction, if you like in the industry, of it, people find it very difficult to let go of work, very difficult to enroll or delegate things. Architects, particularly, you know, we're trained as specialists and technicians. And, you know, we kind of say most people set up a business because they want to become, you know, a well known architect, if you like, all they really want to do the best caliber kind of work. And usually, that idea of doing the best kind of work means well, I've got to have my hand on everything, because I know how good I am. And I need to make sure that it's got my my stamp on it. And, and also the kind of lumped in with that is that architecture for many people is incredibly satisfying. And they can get a little bit confused with, you know, the being satisfied with with something and then also getting in the way of, of the project and then making the whole business not very fulfilling. And so, I'll see a lot of architects really wrestling with not wanting to let go of work, because they believe either in the moment, it's quicker if I just do it now, rather than giving it to somebody else to do it, nobody else can do it as well as I can. So it makes more sense for me to do it. But that also that's really interesting, because this is where we see people end up, you know, photoshopping fire hydrants out of photographs or tweaking something that really doesn't need to be tweaked by you. I mean, I know I've done this before myself with photographs, where I just let me just because no one else can crop it the way I can crop it and they won't get it quite right. And if I see it just done a little bit wrong, it's gonna kill me or irritate me. Okay, but that's the that's the kind of compulsive nature of like, of architecture that gets in the way of us actually running it as a as a business and empowering somebody else to do it. And so I invite everybody isn't who as an architect to consider that Part of your architectural journey or evolution is to learn how to design and execute through other people.
And this is the Yeah, so the promise we made at the beginning of the podcast was, you'll learn how to double, triple or quadruple or even 10x, your effectiveness, it's not by you working harder, which is a great news. It's actually not by you working harder, it's actually by you're working less, but overcoming this challenge of actually being able to delegate, and then really valuing the importance of the very high high value activities in your business, like marketing, sales and planning. Yeah.
So, you know, we often say, you know, for a partner in a business, there's three domains that they've got to be competent in. One is winning work, the other is doing the work, which is normally don't have to worry about worry about that one. And the third is supporting the work. And the winning the work is what we're talking about as the marketing and the sales negotiating, building up a network of people. And that can be enormously profitable. But even within that domain, there is high value work and there's low value work, high value work would be prospecting, reaching out to somebody having that lunch, negotiating a contract, low value work might be you posting something on Instagram, or writing a kind of the back page of the brochure that you've just done or photoshopping, the height, fire hydrants or the, you know, the fire hydrants out of the photographs, okay?
So with that with that with, like, for instance, like with negotiating, like, like just understanding that if an architect were to negotiate an extra $20,000 on the job, or let's say, an extra $5,000, on a job, that negotiation might take all of 10 minutes, that's $5,000, made in those 10 minutes. Okay, and once your mind begins to think this way, once your mind thinks not in terms of architectural billing rates, and just doing the work, but actually thinks in terms of the value of your time, everything begins to change, isn't this a lot easier and faster, it's extraordinary.
I remember, I was negotiating. So when I first learned this, the sales method that we teach here at Business of Architecture, you know, I wasn't using a proposal wasn't sitting down and writing something out, I was going into a meeting, and I had an idea in my head where I was going to charge somebody. And I remember in the conversation, you know, we do a thing called pit to peak, where we're finding a lot of pains with somebody bringing them into what we call the pit, and then helping them establish a vision for the future, which is the peak, you do that? Well, you can really sense a tension. And I remember in this particular conversation, I had an idea in my head of what I was going to charge them for the project. And maybe it was 10 10,000 pounds, let's just say for the purposes of this conversation. And I remember finding a lot of pain, and they were getting quite emotional about it. And you know, and they were also trusting me, and they were sharing a lot of intimate details about this project. And the scope wasn't to say the scope of the project, but the importance of what this project meant to them. And I was like, ah, there's like, there's, there's more money here on the on the table, more value, there's more value, right? There's more directions. Yeah, there's, there's, there's, like, you know, this is going to need more attention. And it's more important to them. So the figure that I had in my head went up. And there was more it was more value. And of course at that time, and I remember thinking that and I and I, you know, negotiated the price and they were like happy with it. And we shook hands and I was like wow, that little bit of just because we had that effective an effective conversation there. That I just made a few you know, however many 1000 pounds I added on to the to the value of the investment.
Yeah, let's face it, you're happier architect now you're making more money, you're more likely to, you know, feel good and not resentful for the services you're providing.
Yeah. So it was literally so that you know, learning to negotiate and the kind of negotiation skills when you're able to help and identify more deeply problems can make us a lot of money.
Exactly. And the weird thing about negotiation is like usually we're negotiating answer self which is what happened in that situation with you wasn't right. Or the actual negotiation was all between your ears. Absolutely. And how many of us know that we've been in that situation before and Oh, should I charge this but they won't accept it should I charge this but we're the ones who are in charge of bringing home the buffalo so to speak the bacon for for the for the team members for the firm, to make that value exchange happen. Alright, so there we go. There's our episode today we talked about time scarcity, which if you're an architect is definitely not not uncommon, it's a very, it's easy to feel very overwhelmed. And like there's a lack of time. But one of the critical shifts is to actually reframe our minds, and actually really have a true and correct understanding of the value of time. Only when we do that can then our results start to dramatically improve. Fantastic. And that's a wrap. Oh, yeah, one more thing. If you haven't already, head on over to iTunes and leave a review, we'd love to read your name out here on the show. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, the world's leading step by step business training program that's helped more than 103 architecture firm owners structure their existing practice. So the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of their architecture, because you see, it's not your architecture design skills that's holding you back. It's the complexity of running a business, managing projects and people dealing with clients, contractors and money. So if you're ready to simplify the running of your practice, go to business of architecture.com forward slash smart to discover the proven simple and easy to implement smart practice method for running a practice that doesn't get in the way of doing exceptional architecture. The views expressed on the show by my guests do not represent those of the hosts and I make no representation, promise guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world. QRP DM
