616: Winning Clients Without Lowering Your Fees: Positioning Yourself for Premium Clients with Enoch Sears & Rion Willard

1:37PM Feb 10, 2025

Speakers:

Enoch Sears

Rion Willard

Keywords:

Differentiation

architectural practices

marketing strategy

client perception

architectural technologists

competition

website design

inbound inquiries

fee competition

value proposition

collaboration

professional development

remote teams

business growth

client relationships.

There is a perception that architects not only make things look pretty, but they make things expensive. Hello

and welcome to today's episode of The Business of Architecture. I'm your co host today, Ryan Willard, and I'm joined here with the CEO of Business of Architecture, Mr. Enoch. Sears. Enoch, welcome. Hello, Ryan. Good to see you. Always pleasure for us sitting down and doing a bit of a deep dive on a conversation. So this week, we're going to be talking about something which we often talk quite a lot about with our clients here at Business of Architecture, and in the architecture industry, where, you know, it's a mature industry, I would say it's a pretty mature industry. There's a lot of architects out there. There's a lot of architects competing for the same kind of work in pretty much majority of sectors that you look at. And the question often arises is, how do I differentiate myself? How do I be perceived differently from my peers and contemporaries, and I think probably from, you know, even my from my perspective, I look at architecture practices a lot. We speak to literally hundreds, if not 1000s. Over the last decade or so, we've spoken to many firms, we've looked at too many architectural websites that I care to think about. And even with, I would say, my trained eye as an architect, I find it difficult to tell the difference between architecture practices. I find it difficult to tell the difference between the different type, particularly in terms of design work. Right now, we can kind of see the nuances in particular architects, signature, signature pieces, okay, but those are the those are more rare. Okay, that's certainly the rarity, and it's very difficult to tell apart one architect from another. It's very difficult to tell apart an architect from, say, an architectural technologist. And we've had clients here at VOA who are both architects and architectural technologists, and we've had some amazing architectural technologists come through who just produce a stellar, you know, product, and they do amazing buildings. And I know in the UK, certainly, there's a lot of, you know, there can be a bit of tension between the two professions, and it's a bit, it's a bit silly. And I appreciate there are a lot of kind of unregulated people who are using the word architecture in their title, as there are in the in the US, and they can often, you know, it's difficult to even for for the public to tell the difference between that caliber of talent versus like an architect or a really skilled architectural technologist. So we're going to discuss this. And Enoch and I will kind of give a few ideas of things that we've seen that have worked, common, common pitfalls, and now

a word from today's sponsor. A while ago, I began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company world teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. I was intrigued by another business that addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World teams is built to address these issues. World teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high performing remote teams quickly and efficiently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing under qualified candidates. World teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts, so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration and world teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that is so important to a practice. To download a free guide for building a remote team for small architectural practice. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. As a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams, 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. Lesson 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. I think it would make sense if we let's just outline the problem that most practices face with differentiation. And I think the first one is, you're in a mature, oversaturated market, and there's four other super talented firms all going after the same, right? But before

we do that, would it? Would it be a bad idea to just define what differentiation is, so we can be very clear about what we mean by it. Go for it. It is, you know, it is a term that's used in marketing oftentimes. And I mean, probably it. We see it everywhere. But here's why it's important, is because differentiation is crucial for making a decision. And oftentimes people have difficulty making a decision if there's not enough differentiation. So for instance, like when you go, I'm just going to bring up a very common example. You're eating out at a restaurant, and let's say you're looking at the various sandwiches that are available, and you find there's a buffalo bison burger. There is a grilled chicken sandwich. There is a BLT, right? As you're reading the list, these things are very, very different. You understand mentally that if you order the barbecue bison burger, you're gonna get something very different than the California burger that maybe has avocado at it, and pickles and some different condiments. So the same thing happens when someone is out there looking to hire an architectural practice. Is what they're looking for. What they're thinking in their mind is okay. How are these things different? Just like I'm looking on a menu and deciding, you know, how is this going to taste for me right now, what's the difference between this sandwich and this sandwich and this sandwich? Clients to make decisions, they're looking for differences between the firms, because then they're going to rank and scale these things in these firms in their mind. Okay? So differentiation is simply the idea of really being able to look at something and being able to to experience contrast with these two things, right? So another example would be, let's say that you're looking at fabric samples or paint colors. If you get two paint colors that are very, very similar, they're just shades are almost indistinguishable, it's gonna be very hard to differentiate those. On the other hand, if you have two different like a very dark hued and a very light paint, it's going to be there's going to be an obvious difference. So it's going to be easier to say, Hey, this is what this one represents. This is what this one represents. And so this is kind of the idea of differentiation, of what we're talking about is being able to look at something and say, Okay, this is clearly different than the other one. And what makes it so difficult and architectural, particularly, or engineering, goes back to the reason why firms oftentimes feel commoditized, because a commodity is almost the inverse of differentiation. So if you're looking at a commodity on one hand, a differentiation on the other, these things would be polar opposites. So lack of differentiation means you're a commodity, right? Having differentiation means you're not a commodity. So in the quest for your firm to get better commissions, to charge higher fees to attract people, differentiation is essential. And Like Ryan said, before I so brutally interrupted him, he was gonna outline some of the problems about you know, why is differentiation even a thing? Why are we talking about it? So Ryan, I didn't even Google it on Merriam Webster. Do you think that definition was acceptable? I

think that was a very good definition. And I did Google it whilst you were whilst you were talking and I was comparing your give us the official. Give us the official. There's an AI overview here which says differentiation marketing is, marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to make a product or service stand out from its competitors. It involves creating different marketing campaigns to appeal to specific customer segments.

Okay, that's a good, interesting, different angle on it. So

I think, yeah, I think what you. Know, if we talk about it from the perspective of problems that architects face is that a client has difficulty in making a choice because there's too much choices. There's too much sameness. It's very difficult to have your firm stand out from another firm and the common strategies that architects employ to stand out from one another tend to be the same strategies that their competitors or their colleagues are employing as well. So now everybody does the same, and classic architect differentiators are awards. You ain't different for having an award. In fact, having no awards is a difference.

That's an interesting one. We are the we are the least awarded architects

if we do not have any awards, things like perhaps lead specialization, that becomes very common lead or kind of sustainability consultant. Again, I'm not saying that these are bad things and that we shouldn't pursue these things. They're just not as unique differentiators as we might like them to be. And they're quite sort of technical kind of ways of positioning. They're very rarely in the world of the client very, very rarely. And I think this is, well, kind of talk about this a little bit later as what makes more effective differentiation strategies is when we've got a when we've got a good ear for what the client is actually dealing with, listening to, worrying about the problems that they're facing. So yeah, yeah. Many practices, we're all trying to differentiate ourselves in exactly the same ways as our competitors. And then the other thing that kind of compounds this is you're an architect, you've got your architecture website set up. You want to get some ideas for an architecture website. So what do

you do? You Well, I'm going to go look at all my competitors and see which ones I like exactly,

so that we end up modeling ourselves on other architects who are doing the same thing. So we become a, we're a very we're a very insular breed of of people, I think, as an architecture profession, I know we don't like to hear that. And I've had, I've done live talks before in the past, where many years ago, maybe about 10 years ago, I did a live talk and I had and it was all about collaboration. And I had different professionals. I had an architectural photographer, an architect, a graphic designer, and some other people come in and talk about collaborating and the art of collaborating. And there was a graphic designer who stood up in front of a room that was predominantly architects, I must admit. And he said, architects are not as good a collaborators as they like to think and the room. And he said

this, this guy had some serious courage to get up in front of the architects and say this. He

meant it. It was, it was quite, it was quite a rallying cry. It landed like that for a few people, but it pissed some other people off, and later, with their pencils and scales, he ended up leaving after the event because he got into an argument with one of like, an architect, a practice owner from a from a very big practice, who was like, you're talking out of your ass. We're the best collaborators. Don't appreciate that kind of conversation. And it was like, hmm, Wow, interesting, interesting. So I've totally forgotten why. Why did I go off on that to answer? What was I talking

about? But did he make it out alive? I mean, was he? He did,

he did? We met him in the pub later on, and he told us the whole, the whole games that had happened, and he was, he was, he was chased out.

Well, I think you were, may I be so bold as to suggest that the idea of like, We're great collaborators is not necessarily a great differentiator. Now, if in actuality, that's true, it is a great differentiator. But let's face it, how many architects claim to be great collaborators, everybody, or great listeners, or, you know, very sensitive to the client's needs, or we'd like to give the client the best outcome. See, that's the problem and challenge with why differentiation is hard. So one thing we definitely want to acknowledge in this episode is, you know, Ryan, I are going to talk about some strategies for differentiation. We're going to talk about some some problems that differentiation can help solve. And you know, on one hand, it's very easy to hear be the talking heads around the podcast and spat out these ideas, but it is difficult to actually pull it off. Yeah, right. But the gain or the possible, what? Benefits they pull it off? Well, yeah, unparalleled.

And the level of like, execution of it now needs to be higher than ever before, exactly, I think, well, I was going with that kind of tangential story that I just told about COVID. Wasn't just to

entertain us because I was entertained, right? It was a good story. It was,

in part, entertaining, I hope, but it was, it was also making a point that, as a profession, we don't look outside of ourselves as much as we like to think we do. And so when, when we were kind of being called out as not being as great collaborators as we like to think, I thought it was quite interesting, because, you know, that was somebody from the outside saying it's really hard to work with architects. And we, we do, we tend to look around what's okay and permissible for us to do. Now I would, I would preface this with the fact that we're a profession, right? There's something about being a profession where, you know, we're supposed to be doing things like how our peers are doing, like, that's the point of the profession. And I do think that there's an interesting there's a lot of there's a lot of pros to being in a profession. There's a lot, there's a lot of sort of brand equity in the idea of being an architect. And perhaps the idea of being an architect is, you know, it's kind of in the in the public consciousness has deteriorated a little bit, but there's also a lot of obstacles when we think like we're inside of the profession, and we we kind of get a bit afraid of stepping outside and looking at other businesses and how other businesses are marketing themselves, for example, or looking at a website that's that's really good at converting traffic and sales. Look at those sorts of websites, they don't look they often aren't beautiful in a design sense that they work. And often what works in terms of converting sales, traffic or marketing or appealing to your target market may not always be the might not have the same architectural design or graphic design thing that we're accustomed to. There's clearly a, you know, happy medium to them, but we've just got to be aware of aware of that. And are you making a case for Ugly websites? Here, right? I am making a case for taking a stand for Ugly websites. I'm making a stand for Ugly websites. I once heard, I think it was Evan pagan, or somebody who was talking about Evan pagan is a kind of E commerce guru and digital product guru. And he was talking about, and one of his seminars I was listening to, he was talking about his arguments that he would have with graphic designers about, you know, I've made X amount of websites that have brought in over $100 million worth of of cash and sales. And what convert the sale doesn't always look pretty in terms of the graphic design. And so he would, he would, he was kind of recounting, you know, arguments that he might have of a graphic designer who was trying to get him to do something else. And he was like, Yeah, but that's for you, your that's for you and your kind of what you want it to look like. We've done this with websites. We've broken down websites, and we've split test every last component of it, from the colors of what the buttons are to the text size to the thing and and he was coming at it from a very sort of marketeers point, which was, you know, kind of consumer driven decision making and what the consumer responds best to, and that's where his design had come from, and his sort of design expert, which was different from the design sensibilities of the graphic designer that they might been working with. And I

think that points to the great depth that there is in this area of marketing, right oftentimes, when we're looking at marketing from an architectural perspective, really, we're just scratching the surface of the top of the deep, vast fissures and abysses of knowledge that go down when it comes to marketing itself. Now the other thing regarding websites, Ryan is like, what's interesting is, I'm going to make an assertion and maybe tell me if you think it's off, and we can have a vicious debate here.

Okay, let's do it.

So the assertion is that an e commerce website, like even pagans doing our information product website, the purpose of that website is to get sales, to get customers, to make money. I'm going to assert that typically, the the purpose of a graphic designer's website or an architect's website is to not look bad. Mm, hmm. What do you think about my assertion? I

would agree with you and I. Most architects websites are designed for and again, this is not a bad thing, but they're designed for confidence in the practice, and they're often kind of they're sitting in part of a sales process where there's already a relationship with that client, or the client's been referred to them, and they're checking a website to make sure that this person is real. So it's rare that it's rare that we ever see an architectural website designed to drive traffic to it, or to convert sales, or to, you know, to have that kind of, that kind of language in it. So again, but that's part of the marketing strategy, right? That a practice owner should be looking at when they're designing their website. Well, what's the point of this website? Is it to be? You know, do we have, like, a really solid prospecting discipline where the website is literally just going to be a kind of add on, an enhancement to that, and people look at it and it's got beautiful pictures on it, and great, they just tick the box. Is the website serving a function, more for the team. And this is also a legitimate thing. I know, when I was at rshp, they were very, they were very interested in the internal marketing that happens. So a larger practice, they might have a website which is for their own, for, you know, for their own team, is the website being designed. I mean, there's, there is certainly value as well, for a website to be appealing to an architect because of hiring and team building. Okay, so if you're looking at, if you're if you're a student or a young, talented architect who's got a keen design eye, and then you land on a website which just looks like trashy sales. You're probably going to be repulsed by that and not want to have anything to do with it. So there's a there's a kind of balance where all these things need to sort of coexist with each other, and each practice needs to kind of get their get in mind what their priorities, what their priorities are. And these days, you know you can have a you can have a trashy looking sales funnel which is completely independent to your website, and your website is now doing something totally different. Your website is more like a sort of portfolio. And then you've got a an independent sales funnel which doesn't, doesn't tie back to a website. And you can have the the sales language and a pain funnel, if you like, when people are going down that and you know, it's designed in a particular way, which is very specific to that target market, which, again, just kind of, it's just starting to point to the the wealth of stuff and strategy that exists when we're looking at kind of marketing ourselves.

Yeah, I think another problem Ryan would be that I'm not getting as many inbound inquiries as I would like to get, and the ones I do get are referrals from people who already know me. In other words, I'm not getting new exposure out there in the marketplace from people that are finding us, that are finding our work, and that are approaching us about working with us. That could be another pain point or problem that our listeners made, that you may be experiencing or dealing with and wanting to know how to crack that nut. Yep,

absolutely the competition on fees. So the race to the race to the bottom on fees, and this one, obviously always breaks our heart, and particularly when you see kind of three talented architects or lowering their fees, or being squeezed by the client, and the client is kind of dangling a opportunity in front of all of them, and that's again, they kind of feel like they're being commoditized. Another thing I think that a lot of architects struggle with is that people simply don't know what an architect does, or they have a very fixed idea of what an architect does. They only, they only know that the architect does drawings and they make things look pretty, and that's it. And when we're inside of that form, they make them expensive. Yeah, they make it expensive, and they make it expensive but pretty, and they might help us get planning permission sometimes.

And let me jump in there with a quick story. I was Ryan this, this is certainly a tangent, but I was, look, let's face it, we got lots of time here, so we have plenty of time for tangents. Go on tangents all day go. Let's have a tangent episode. This is the tangent episode I was talking with the. Instruction manager, who was working with a lot of very high end projects. He was working on these multi family high end projects in Los Angeles that there's not a lot of but he was working with one that was done by a rather prominent architecture practice, and there had been a mistake or an oversight in terms of this, this tower, this residential tower had these balconies extending out from a lot of the rooms. And the design intent for the architects was to have a recessed light in the balcony above you, so that you have this nice look. Not only does it light at the building, but also it's, it's the nice indiscreet light, and it's kind of happening, you know, down below, like you, you go out on your Balcon and you have some nice overhead light. Architects designed it well, right? So somehow it got lost in translation, and as they're going through the Value Engineering, they discovered that for whatever reason, these recessed lights were going to be very expensive, quote unquote expensive, right now, as an architect, I don't know exactly why they were so abnormally expensive. Obviously, a recessed is going to be more expensive than a service mounted fixture. It can get into fireproofing issues. Sometimes, if you're trying to depending on where the fire membrane is that separates the floors, that could be an issue if you're trying to put a recessed light up there. So I didn't have enough information to know why this was the case. But this, this construction manager, for him, it was all about the architects just doing things the expensive way. He was, like, these architects, they just always, if there's an expensive way to do it, they're thinking about how to do it that way. And he was like, he was like, we could save so much money. Why didn't they just put some surface, like, like, sort of surface mounted fixtures on the other side of these balconies? And, I mean, in my head, I'm thinking, Oh, that, who knows where that would go, right? So a couple things came up out of that conversation. Number one is there, there's a perception that architects not only make things look pretty, but they make things expensive, right? This is a, this is a perception like, oh damn, the architects are gonna make this more expensive. And then there's also the, there's also maybe an underestimation or an under, under appreciation, I guess, might be the right word for the little, small details that architects do put into projects that almost go unnoticed, but that as taken as a whole, makes it a beautiful project that really is flow seamlessly and has good appeal to it and everything. And that would be an example like these recessed mount lights, like for the average lay person or a construction manager or someone walking by them, I think, oh, what's the big difference between having a surf mounted fixture or a recessed fixture. But as architects, we know that oftentimes it's those things that make a massive difference, and then we get understandably annoyed when now we're trying to argue with the contract and explain why, saving all this money now we're now we're faced with the kind you can tell the owner why, you know why we should stick with the original fixtures, even though it's going to cost $500,000 more, whatever the cost is to do it the way we originally designed it. And now the owners are looking at the architects saying, Damn, why do they? You know, these architects are just expensive, so there's a gap. And how does this relate to differentiation? Well, when you have more differentiation in your practice, when you have a solid, more solid standing in terms of being differentiated and being picked for a particular reason, these conversations are going to flow more smoothly. You're going to have more authority. You're going to have more gravitas.

Can I can I go ahead? I was going. I might pull it off on another tangent, I wanted to, I wanted to share some more upsetting stories in the same vein as the one that you just shared there,

and other upsetting stories the spice of life. Yeah,

upsetting. And I think from our the listeners on this episode, we'd like to hear your upsetting stories where people have misunderstood what you do or undervalued you. We'd love to hear those stories, and perhaps we'll read some of them out, and it will prompt another conversation. But I've got two, two examples here. Once was, I used to attend and still do sometimes, these property investing seminars, and I was at one of these from a very well known property investing group in the UK, and they had one of their investors talking about hiring architects. And I was like, Ah, this is going to be good. And the investor basically got up there and said, Now with architects, they're all pretty much the same. They're very agreeable, and it's well worth you shopping around, because some of them just try and rip you off of the price, but they're very easy to kind of squeeze, and you can always find someone who's going to do it cheap. Oh, oh. And stings, and it was pretty painful. And it was like, oh, man, this guy hasn't spoken at all to any of the value that a good architect brings, or how they can maximize the value in the property. And it was literally just, you know, they're a nuisance. They're a kind of a necessary evil scum of the earth, they might help you with a bit of planning. The other upsetting story was, this was when I was working at Grimshaw, and I was a young maybe I was newly qualified, or I was just doing my exams. I don't remember which, but I was working on the Eden Project up at in Cornwall. And there was a kind of, you know, Grimshaw had done the Eden Project maybe 20 years prior, 10 years prior, or something like that. And, you know, it's a big series of these big geodosic domes covered in E, F, T, E, or whatever it was. Anyway, the new project that we had was to design this kind of hanging platform from the center of one of these domes. Really cool, exciting, interesting project. And I don't really remember how the project got back to Grimshaw, but someone at Grimshaw had kind of made sure that we were involved and that the kind of client didn't just put any old kind of staircase up and just, you know, made it look horrible. So we'd done a lot of work on this, this beautiful suspended platform, and myself and the project architect. So there's just two of us. We traveled all the way down to Cornwall. Beautiful train ride. We got there, and we met with the client and a contractor and some and some other maybe, if there was the engineer that was there about the project, and we kind of presented our ideas, and everyone was like, great. Looks lovely. And there was a point in the conversation where it might have been the it might have been the contractor, but he he was joking, but it was also like a dagger in the heart. He said, right now the big boys are going to have a conversation about the real stuff, about what happens in a project. So you guys, you guys can you guys are free to leave, and we packed up our back.

Okay, so condescending, and

we left. And, I mean, the product architect was furious. I seem to remember he was like, that was, that was so rude, but it, but it, it was like they were talking money, they were talking contract. They were talking whatever other legal considerations they might have been talking a bigger picture business plan for what the what the project was about. I don't, I don't know, but there was clearly a sort of condescending nature where, you know, the architect was put into a little pigeon hole. We were we were there as the the people that were just looking making sure it looked pretty. And obviously it was a lot more than that. And there was a very thoughtful strategy of how it was working. Oh, it

makes me mad. Now, Enoch, that guy just sounds like a narcissist. Ryan makes me he's probably just, he probably makes me mad. Probably is pathological, honestly. So it reminds me. It reminds me of a marriage where your marriage partner knows how to push your buttons. It's like hell hath no fury. Fury like an architect scorch. You know, I mean, if you could say something to piss off an architect even more, be calling him a little boy, or like saying, hey, the big boys are going to have the conversation now, and whether you're a man or a woman, that's gonna piss you off. If you're a woman that'll really piss you off, yeah, she's probably used to hearing that a lot. Not

very nice, not very nice. But again, you know, obviously there's a, there's a kind of Dick factor in that, I don't mean like in, you know, just him being a dick. Well, both ways, both ways, right? He has a dick and he is a dick and he is being a dick. But there is, you know, there's, there's that aspect of the of, whatever the misunderstandings that people have about architects, and it kind of just reinforces this idea of, it's, it's really important to be clear about what it is that the architect what's the value that, what's the value proposition that the architect is is providing. How do we stand out in this kind of sea of other firms? How do we there are preconceptions about what the architect does.

Yeah, these are all. These are all conversations that that exist, that we can be aware of, and that as we're aware of them, we can be a conscious participant in how we present ourselves and how we interact. With clients in meetings, and how we lead our teams in this in this greater context. So Ryan, I was thinking that right now, it'd be a great point to just pause, because we have set up talked a little about differentiation, what it is, given some examples of why it's important, talking about the problems that cause this to actually happen. What do you say? We break this episode right here. Let's cut it. Let's hop back in. Part two of this we'll be looking at like, what are some strategies for differentiation? I think we've made the case that differentiation is needed. Could be a valuable tool in the tool belt. Sounds good, Ryan, anything else you want to say to be complete for this episode? No,

I think that's all for now, beautiful, and that's a wrap. Hey, Enoch

Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here, for 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 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 a 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 will discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wished they would have known 20 years ago, and now a word from today's sponsor. A while ago, I began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company world teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified, I was intrigued by another business that addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World teams is built to address these issues. World teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high performing remote teams quickly and efficiently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing under qualified candidates. World teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members, they have flexible contracts, so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration and world teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that is so important to a practice. To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word. Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams, as a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to Business of architecture.com, forward slash world teams, the

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