Poverty has never been a path to prosperity. This is the Business of Architecture. Hello, and welcome back architect Nation. I'm Enoch Sears. And this is the show where you'll discover tips, strategies and secrets for building and managing an architectural practice that lets you do your best work more often. I'm joined today by my co host and our Director of Client fulfillment here at Business of Architecture. Mr. Ryan Willard mine. How are you today?
I'm fantabulous Thank you, Nick.
That is so great to hear. Back in London, you had a stint in in in Manhattan. You were over here for a while actually, we're in California for a bit traveling with me. So one thing that our podcast listeners may not know is that Ryan runs most of our client facing programs. So if you join one of our programs here at Business of Architecture, you will likely be working with Ryan directly. He is a magician and our clients absolutely love him. They love the insights he brings. They're challenged, they're stretched, and certainly they get excellent results under his wise counsel and tutelage. So he's been doing quite a bit of traveling. Ryan, you were out here in California for a bit, which is awesome. We got to hang out, drive my convertible up to the up to the giant redwood trees and had a grand old time didn't
we? Absolutely did. I
loved it. And along the way, you got to visit a lot of be away clients Business of Architecture clients, who are member firms that we work with in our programs. And, and then of course, in in Manhattan, we had Andre Soleri, who organized this wonderful roundtable, about the idea of architect developer and we were able to hold that special event. Now speaking of events, you had the opportunity recently to participate in. So the title of the topic today for today's episode is justifying financial mediocrity in architecture. And we're going to describe what we mean by this. When we talk about justifying mediocrity and architecture. We're not talking about design mediocrity. We're not talking about mediocrity and sustainability. We're not talking about mediocrity in any of these other categories, although certainly these things might exist in architecture, and certainly they do. Ryan recently was asked to come give a presentation as part of an event put on by Rebbe, the Royal Institute of British architects, called guerrilla tactics, which is their, their their initiative aimed at smaller, smaller practices, small firms, which I think is great that they even have this. So, Ryan, when you got there, tell us about your experience, because it was it was very interesting to see the overall narratives and things that are happening at this event, your perspective, what you shared at that event, the reactions that you got, and really was a bit as kind of an opportunity for you to kind of take the pulse of the architectural narrative, particularly regarding finances and the Business of Architecture over there in London, the UK? Is it primarily London based practices? Or do you have other practices that traveled to go to event like that, that
there would have been practices from all over the country that would have come but the architecture scene in London is very London centric, I mean, in the UK is very London centric. So it would have been a lot easier for practices who are based in London to us to come down. But there certainly would have been a handful of practices that came from further afield. Again, it's not like the US where it takes 18 hours to get somewhere by car. It's it's a lot easier to trust a lot easier to travel around or come down from another city on the train.
Now what did red ruby ask you to come in and speak on? And what did you end up speaking on?
So the way that this particular event works is that it's it is curated by a kind of guest, if you like who's another architect and the rebirth, kind of facilitate it and sell tickets and, and have have it, have it on if you'd like they do this thing initiative vary every year. And so I was invited to give the keynote to kind of open it up and I was asked to inspire the audience. So when I was first asked to come I was I read the the RBA team. Part of the brief if you like, was to inspire and to kind of prep the audience for the wonderful speakers that were going to be participating throughout the rest of the event. I was there was a discussion at the very beginning where I was asked to make it okay, and I'm paraphrasing here, so I apologize if I don't get the accuracy, but this is my interpretation of what was said. Okay. Was was that it was it's okay not to grow. That was the message. Okay, to
validate barking up the wrong tree.
Validating it's okay not to grow. So
that it's like telling Elon Musk that it's okay. Not to launch rockets to the moon.
Exactly. Exactly. And at the time, I said, when you say it's okay not to grow. Do you mean that we can redefine growth for ourselves as individual practices and understand what success looks like in an individual practice? Yes, yes. Yes, that's what you need. Okay, fine. Now, my, the event was was very well curated, there was some great speakers and some good insights of practices of what they're actually doing. And, you know, there was some good details and good practical resources and examples, I think that's what I liked the most about this particular event is that it's real practices, talking about what they're actually doing in their business, and how it works, and kind of opening up the hood of the car, if you like, and showing a bit of the inner workings. Fantastic, great. The thing that I would be critical of it and what I wanted to talk about, and how I kind of opened the event was very simple, was that architects need to be focusing on money. That's it. We need to focus on money, we need to focus on making profit that needs to become a priority in every single person who dares to open an architecture practice.
And I'm going to pause you there, Ryan? Here's, here's my suspicion. And you tell me if this is correct or incorrect, but my suspicion is? Well, first of all, there's always the unsaid that's behind the said. In other words, whenever someone says something, there's always something that someone else is thinking about. My suspicion is, is that when you if you said that even right now, in the podcast, when you said the architects need to be focused on money, there may be some people who their mind instantly goes to, that means they shouldn't be focused on the architecture, they shouldn't be focused on delivering good quality for their clients. So let's make a distinction there. Is that what you're saying? Right? Are you saying that we should focus exclusively on the money and forget the clients and forget the architecture?
Not until? Not until what what do you mean? So? I'm what I mean,
let me ask you this, have you? What do you say? Can you confirm or deny that this is a narrative that people generally pick up? When you say this? Because you said this at the event? What's your opinion on on how people took that or take this statement?
In general, when I say this statement, or when I talk about focusing on profit, people often look at me as if I'm some kind of greedy capitalist who's looking to make a quick buck at the expense of everybody else, or law,
those interns who are working late into the night. Oh, wait, wait, that already happens. And it's industry standard. Oh, interesting.
Yeah, exactly. All that I'm advocating that architects do terrible work and pursue projects that are of poor design quality, or that you focus solely on serving the rich, and the high net worth individuals of the world and do and again, and by proxy, when people say that they assume that all work that's done for wealthy people is disgusting, outlandish. in poor taste. Gordy. And it's not what the world needs. So that's an I mean, I've even had people architects I admire who have written to me or DM me on Instagram who have said, You really shouldn't be talking about architecture, you should be talking more about beauty and form or go back to conversations about architecture and design. I've had
once you really shouldn't be talking about money, or what what do they mean? You
shouldn't be talking about money shouldn't be talking about business. Yeah, okay. I've had in a Instagram post a little while ago, when I was talking about this very topic of how architects need to be focused on profit or how we can make more profit in our businesses. There was an accusation that I was somehow promoting the architects getting involved with projects, like I think it's called Bibi, Stockholm. Okay, and then Bibi, Stockholm, I don't know if you know this. It's a it's a basic, like a giant floating Porter cabin, for immigrants and refugees. Okay, so when people try and come into the UK, and they're stopped at the borders, they're getting put they get a temporary housed in one of these big floating barges. And it's pretty bleak environment. And I was, I mean, again, I was quite offended that somebody would even assume I don't, I don't know probably
kill you probably killed puppies, and you probably used to saw the heads off of Barbies when you were a child. It was
so ludicrous. It was such an absolute ludicrous statement that with that particular person who wrote me that and they accused me of a whole load of other types of, you know, prison types of projects or just projects that had a little moral compass to them. That that's what I that's what I was insinuating that architects should be doing. And I'm ready
for medieval torture dungeons, things like that. I mean, it's world in this phase, that's where all the money is.
I was just I was Just I was advocating just setting fire to stuff. And it was it was it was ludicrous. It was a ludicrous set of, you know, accusations. And I was very firm with my responses. And, again, this could be the topic of another podcast. But I would, I would say that the number one project like stalking, baby Stockholm probably doesn't even have architects involved in it. It was designed by engineers for very functional purpose. And if an architect had been involved, or should have been involved in it would have been a much more humanistic approach. And it's exactly why architects should be, you know, focusing on profit so that they've got profits, they can direct their attentions to designing proper carefully thought out projects, we look again, they were the accusation there was that, you know, profit hungry architects are responsible for a appalling housing that exists. What are you talking about? A pooling housing exists now, and most architects are not focused on profit. Yeah, exactly. Because they're not focused on profit, guess what developers don't like hire the hiring them to do the architecture. So they don't, and they just do cut and paste, repeat, and we get vast swathes of terrible housing across the planet. You know, architects who have completely impotent financially, were completely illiterate, financially, for the most part. And it cuts us out of all these conversations, these important high level strategic financial conversations. Plus, it stops us from earning any money so that we can't actually have any agency for all these things that we're waving banners for at the moment. It's really, really, you know, it's ridiculous. And so we have all these, we have all these conversations about diversity and inclusion in the profession. And these are, you know, they're important topics. But underpinning them all, is economics and money, ranking
positive or positive anyways. Because you mentioned this, we've had this conversation offline. So it's very interesting, like, and we've had a conversation we had lightcycle on the podcast a while ago, but talking about this diverse diversity and inclusion. You and I have discussed how one of the one of the best ways to get more diversity inclusion into the architecture profession, isn't by mandating policies, although certainly that can help ultimately, what would it look like if architecture actually became a highly profitable profession? And and I pointed, we pointed a camera if it was on a video that I posted or something, but had a number of people who were foreigners or people who were non native US citizens, or people who were of color, and they reached out, and they said, Thank you, thank you. That's exactly it. Like I came from an environment where I didn't have money. And certainly, I want to do good architecture, and I'm drawn to the profession, but at the same time, to me, making money is important. So now here at Business of Architecture, you know, Ryan, and I have decided to take a very, very, very controversial stance, and we're probably going to get a lot of backlash because of this controversial stand. Very controversial. I mean, Brian, we're really putting ourselves out here on a limb. And the controversial stand is this. Architects can be wealthy. And not only can they be, but they deserve to be. Now I say that tongue in cheek. But isn't that interesting that that would be such a controversial position. Like where are we at as an industry when the concept of making money becomes so inflammatory and controversial that Ryan and I become iconoclasts of the architecture industry simply because we say architects deserve to be paid handsomely for the work that they do? It's
bonkers. It is. It's absolute. It's absolutely bonkers, that this is the state. So we do need to hold the mirror up and be very honest and truthful about what we're doing as an industry. And individually, look, the RBA, the AIA, they're going to do their their bid, but they've got a different function to play, quite honestly. And it's us as individual architects and practice owners to get intelligent about making money in the profession. And that is one of the most active things I think you can do. If you want to make a stand on these on these types of topics, then make your profession wealthy, make yourself wealthy, you don't have to do it at the expense of other people. Okay, and if that is a belief that you have that you can only get wealthy through exploitation on the expense of other people, then there's some work to do. Right? There's a whole mental mess there of a false beliefs that are probably not even your own, that you've inherited from somebody else. Maybe your family, maybe other architects, okay, but they're massively unhelpful, and the chronic financial position that the industry finds itself in right now, where it is the one of it's one of the most easily exploited professionals on a job site. You know, you often see these kind of headlines that are talking about, you know, in the UK with a little while back, there was a headline that was the architects, the least paid person on the construction site. Okay. And, yeah, we've allowed that to happen because we haven't focused on money. We haven't focused on money. And it is not a problem to focus on money or to make the profession a profit with purpose centric profession. Okay, exactly. So Ryan, like you're getting money focus profession.
So you walk in there. Okay. So what did you end up speaking about when you walked into this event? With real estate six,
precisely this. And the call, if you like, was number one, for us to focus on profit and money. And there was I started off the conversation by discussing all the current problems that we've got in the industry in terms of lack of agency and just using some of the statistics that come from the RFA themselves, beautifully compiled and curated, and very thoughtfully laid out and diagnostically, you know, pulled apart if you like, presented statistics on the state of the profession, okay, the companies that put those together, they're very amazing. They're absolutely amazing. But they make for very sad reading. Right, when you've got a situation in the UK, where you've got sole practitioners, on average, taking home 25,000 pounds. Wow, what on earth?
20 pounds is a king's ransom, though in, in the UK, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can live like you have lived like a royalty.
Exactly, exactly. You can just beautiful, beautiful. Yes, it is incredibly hard to live on 25,000 pounds in the UK, and certainly in a city like London, it is just above livable wage. That is dire. But that is unacceptable. That is unacceptable.
Well, I mean, let's let's face it, I mean, it doesn't take much to become an architect. So I think the wage reflects the skills and experience of the architect right? I mean, just a couple of months in a in a trade school and you can have an architectural stamp and go out there and start designing skyscrapers. Right?
You can you can buy them online, exactly for next to nothing or do so it's no wonder there are there are video playlists on YouTube that help you become an architect. Exactly. Apps Absolutely. Right. It's it's, it's an enormous amount of energy. Everyone listening to this knows and appreciates the huge resource that goes into becoming an architect huge results and the love, the love, the sweat, the tears, the pain, the money that either you put in or you borrow or your parents put in the time, you know, these are the formative years of your life, you were you could have been out actually earning money in whatever career you chose. And you're not, you're still studying at university, which is kind of warping our minds in a certain direction, sometimes for the good. Sometimes it's making us even more detached from economic reality. At the end of it, you come out of this huge, you've invested this huge amount of resource into and then what then look at the reality of it. That is why people do not join the profession. That is why women leave when they want to raise families or, or, you know, this is this is just one of the biggest challenges to the profession. And we're all responsible for it. Because if you're not tracking your profit, if you're not setting yourself, stretch, stretching financial goals, okay, goals that make you you know, if if you'll set yourself a financial goal, and you are having all this kind of mental resistance to it, like oh, that's, that's a terrible goal. That's evil, that's not great. You're on the right, you're on the right track here. Okay, because then then you can start, then at least you can start to become an observer of all of the mental friction and resistance and start under pick on picking it because it's lies.
Spot. I mean, on on one of our client calls earlier today with our Design Council group, which is our highest level of architectural practice owners that we work with, when I say highest level, I mean, most financially successful, they have large teams, doing quite impressive projects, but doing great work as well. And one of these owners shared his kind of short term financial goal, which was to hit a million dollars. And there are people on this call that are bringing home a million dollars. The previous part, one of the previous podcast episodes, Ryan that I did recently was with an architect and I asked him how he told me that he makes five he brings home half a million dollars. And he's like, but he says, I'm not gonna say that on the podcast. I just I can't it's like, you know, I'm actually embarrassed to reveal it to other people because it's just It's it makes for awkward conversation. Right? So, okay, so you're there, you're at this event, how many people showed up to the event? Was it a group of 3040 60 was about 200 people, Oh, quite large than 200 people. So you get in, you get them riled up talking about this idea that architects deserve to be wealthy and that wealth and good design are not contradictory. They're not. They're not on opposite sides of the spectrum.
Absolutely.
I highly compensated, I
walked them through the evolution of an architect, the free architect journey, from beautiful from becoming the artists all the way to the investor. And one of the things I introduced was a new benchmark. Okay, now, this is something that we're so used to talking about, we've had podcasts on it. But when we introduce the idea of a new benchmark, and that perhaps the benchmarking systems that we've been using, in the past that the Riba producing the AAA produced, well, we're actually benchmarking ourselves against a low performing industry. Like a poor performing industry, we started to benchmark ourselves against lawyers, what do you think is going to happen? You know, we benchmark ourselves against any other kind of profession, or, you know, maybe if we benchmark ourselves against academics, I don't know, then you might be might have one
up on them and, and wedding photographers, as well. Academics and wedding photographers. Alright, Ryan. So the now you saw something interesting there, which was, and you mentioned this earlier, which was like this defending the mediocrity defending my fight, justifying financial mediocrity and architecture. Tell me about that. How'd that come up? What does that mean?
So first of all, just gonna go back to that the benchmarking, okay, because there was interesting after I'd given the talk, and there was a lot of people that were intrigued by it, they were like, wow, we've never seen anything like that. And then there was other practices that were saying. How, how is that even possible? So both of those reactions of totally expect and I think a great, at least someone is looking at it and going well, I've never seen anything like that. How is that possible? Wait a minute, this isn't what the RBA or the AIA has been telling us before. We've been we've been looking at what other underperforming practices are doing. Okay, so fine. Great. I'm glad that that was a bit of a surprise and a different a different metric benchmark. Likewise, with the idea of making 30% profit, where the industry is very much become resigned with oh, you know, seven or 8% profit on 1011 12. If we're doing well. Okay, that's all too common. Something that's just accepted as normal. Now, that justifying the mediocrity, there was some very good q&a sessions that were that came up afterwards. I wasn't. I wasn't invited to speak on the q&a sessions. I don't I don't know if I won't. I don't know. I don't know. I like to think it was because I was a troublemaker, but I don't think it was I think it was just kind of overlooked. overlooked? I don't know. I don't know. But I did find myself in the audience listening to some of the the answers that were the practice owners were giving, and having a very visceral reaction of No, no, no, no, no, no, that is not how I would answer that question. There's a different way of looking at this. And one of the questions was about was about can can profit and growth or being focused on profit and growth? Can that cause can that cause problems? Or can it or doing it too much? Can it? Can it, you know, become a really bad thing for practice? And everyone said, Absolutely, absolutely. You got to be careful when focusing on profit. And
those those bags of gold become quite heavy. You gotta work as strain yourself.
You don't want to make too much money. And
what are some of the other negative out I mean, paper cuts of counting all those dollar bills, or all those pound notes. I mean, this is all
the it's just when you look at your phone, and there's too many zeros on on this. It's quite
stressful. Strangely, stressful. Yeah, I get it. I get it. 100%. Lester far, far clearer from any sort of profit. Yeah,
I mean, a more honest answer would be would be, it's difficult to deal with the, you know, you might have to deal with the guilt of being wealthy when loads of your contemporaries are not making money. Okay. That might be something that that that might have been a bit more of an honest response. But I found that not not a very good answer. And if I was there, I would have said no, like, we got to grow up here. Nobody in this room. Nobody who's running any kind of architecture practice except maybe a calm or Gensler? Okay, you're
gonna throw grenzer under the bus. Okay. Are you against the listeners? Are you calm?
But these these guys, those guys are at the level of kind of corporate, of being a corporation, they're big, big organizations, Oh,
I see what you're saying, I want a different direction at that you're about to call out the giant, greedy behemoth of the industry.
Right. So the idea that, you know, the profit often gets a bad name, when we look at large corporate organizations that have been operating in a very short term set of cycles, trying to please stakeholders, and they've got themselves into, you know, they haven't been aware of what their relentless profit making, and it just makes poor business sense. You know, I've heard of many organizations who the only way that they can maintain their promises to stakeholders and to shareholders of continued growth is to is to acquire more businesses. And they go on this rampage of acquiring businesses that they've got no idea how to run and organize. And whilst for the first year, the profits increase and growth increases, give it two, three years later. And it's very irresponsible. And it's long term very dangerous and difficult, and it causes a big mess and businesses and then 1000s of people lose their jobs. And the repercussions are far, far worse. And so we see those kinds of narratives coming out and, and seeing but we're not talking about unrelentless profit making like that, in architecture, where small businesses, even the biggest businesses like the Kansas and the acorn, they're still small organizations, when we compare them to Fortune 500 companies or corporate world. You know, a small business usually is defined as anything under about $30 million pounds in in turnover, which would include pretty much every single architecture practice that you can imagine. We're a small business. So we don't have this worry about unrelenting profits. We don't we have a problem of not focusing on on profit making. What's
so funny about that, Ryan is it almost seems ludicrous, because the practices in architecture that gets such a bad rap that we know, are exploitative, in other words, low wages for early young professionals, people working overtime and not being paid things that we hear about happening and maybe the starchitects office where it's just a sweatshop. I mean, a lot of people who've gone out have very highly prominent offices talk about how it's a complete sweatshop. It's like, well, like you mentioned, these products, these practices that are not that profitable. Yeah, some are, some aren't.
So it's not making that much money. Yeah.
So it's not like not having profit makes everything suddenly equitable. And, and I'm wonderful.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And if we were to look at the the kind of benchmarking ratio to some of these companies that are making people work, insane hours, and we did it as a full time equivalent employee statistic, not bums on seats, then we'd see a very different picture of how poorly performing a lot of them are. And we've done this exercise before, and we've looked at top firms, you know, top firms, and normally, that means, how many bums on seats they've got and the money that they're making. And you can often see quite a poor ratio, like poor performance, because people are working huge amount of hours, they are paying people quite, quite lonely. And maybe there are there are big numbers coming out of individual projects. But then it will probably be a little bit distorted between who actually gets any access to that cash anyway. And maybe you might have one or two people who get paid well, and then the rest of the rest of the organization doesn't really profit from it. It doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere. I look at a practice where I was at like RSA HP, where it was very different type of culture. And I remember once there was, there was a disc, I remember someone telling me whether this is true or not, I'd have to do a bit of research on it. But I remember somebody talking about in the past, there was a AJ top 100 table and fosters and Rogers, they made the same amount of profit, like numerical value. Okay, they both made 2 million pounds profit or whatever it was. And it was interesting, because one practice had 1500 people and the other one had 150 people. And you're like, huh, amazing, amazing which one I'd like to work for.
So if any of you want to fact check that feel free. The as always on this podcast, we say don't believe anything we say now for published reports and things like that. Absolutely. Those of you who listen to podcasts, you know, we're much more about experience here. general ideas, philosophies and things that we see. Absolutely, disclaimer, was that good rain? That was that was good to keep us out of trouble in case that that story was a little off.
Exactly, exactly. That's why I was I was being deliberately broad with The details about it. But I have heard that on numerous occasions and people that I've never actually gone and done the research myself on to what the exact numbers were, though I have downloaded Companies House reports from Foster's before and had a good look through those, which makes very interesting reading. So kind of come back to this idea, then that there's a justification of mediocrity or justification of financial mediocrity. This is what begins to happen is that these sorts of benchmarks like a, like a high performance benchmark that like we have here, this is for architecture with the 200 Club. immediately, as soon as a practice sees a number like that, there is a justification for why they are not at it. And usually that justification is things that are out of their control.
Exactly, everything but us, Ryan, I got an email and I got an email from a practice down. And she may be even listening to this podcast. So this isn't meant as a personal attack, take this with a grain of salt. But she had reached out and she was wanting to get some of our consulting services. And I said at the at the moment, we don't work with practices based in Australia, just because the timezone, because everything we do is very personal. And so in our team is based in the UK and in the United States. And she kind of explained some of the challenges that she's facing. The similar challenges that small practices face a general sense of overwhelm sense of not having enough time to do everything needs to be done, poor profit margins, and stability in the pipeline. And, and so after I told her that, you know, we weren't gonna be able to work together, but I did have someone I could refer her to. She wrote back and she said, Well, I just heard that I just heard the podcast episode where he talked about the 200. Club. And she said, we're at I can't read the number. She said, I think she said, like, we're at 120, or something like that. We're at 120. So we're doing great, or said we're doing good. And I was kind of scratching my head there for a second.
Us, obviously, dollars. Interesting.
Well, you know, I think the exchange rate, I'm not sure what it is. But in any case, look it up. What is it? Right. I forget, it's been a while. I think the US dollars worth more than the Aussie dollar. But I think I was I was I was quite surprised that that she felt like $120,000 Whether it's Australian, which I'm sure is what she was using, which is fine. Because it's, you know, it's by country by country, you know, it's the exchange rate doesn't come into it. What I mean by that is like, even in Australia, if they're making 200,000 Australian dollars, and that's probably a very sufficient benchmark. But I thought I thought how interesting that instead of focusing on the gap of like, Oh, my goodness, like, Wow, there's so much more we could achieve here. It was it felt like and perhaps I'm wrong, but it felt like a bit of complacency like, oh, well, we're not that far off.
On attorney Ozzie dollars is 77,000. US dollars.
Oh, so that's even? That's half? Yeah, of US dollars. So in other words, the $200,000 benchmark us benchmark would probably need to be in I know, the cost of living isn't that much less expensive in Australia? Not so which means that the benchmark would need to go up? Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Like,
I mean, no, normally, the way I phrased it yesterday in the UK was, you know, I stick with the 200,200. Club, but it's 200,000 US dollars, and which equates to 160,000 pounds in the UK. But 100, the 160 Club doesn't have the same doesn't have the same ring. It doesn't seem like it's 200 clubs. So we came up with the 200. Club. But we it is 200,000 US dollars, but then converted to your local currency. Yeah,
your Business of Architecture, we talked about something foundational, which is called the code. And the code is simply this stop lying. That's the code, stop lying. Stop lying to yourself. Stop lying about your business performance. Stop lying about what's really happening. There's a lot of lying happening. So for instance, it's easy and it's natural as a human being to ignore the signs that were underperforming. It's uncomfortable. It's not good news. We don't want to hear if I look in the mirror. I may tell myself the story. Well, my my weights not that bad. You know, I mean, I have a friend who's a foot doctor, you'd be surprised at when people finally decide to see the doctor. Like literally toes are already falling off their entire foot as gangrenous. And he just he tells me he's not enough. I don't get it. How could they not come in sooner when they start to show the first signs that their feet are lit basically starting to slough off? Well, that's quite a that's quite a gory analogy. But is it really isn't that what we do financially in our practices? And what we've done so long in our Architecture. Ryan, I was having a sales conversation earlier this week with a couple of gentlemen who reached out to me about, about working with us. They'll remain nameless. But it was interesting because there was there was an owner who was older, and then there was someone who was younger. And the older gentleman every time he talked about something that wasn't really working well, in the practice, in the past, maybe extended hours, they had to work, maybe inconsistent pipeline, maybe taking a loss some months, or having a gap in the projects that came in. He very quickly followed it up with some sort of statement along the lines of, but it always came back, or that's just what to be expected. Or you know how the industry is, or it was a lot of justifying mediocrity, which is exactly what you're talking about. So I thought it was so interesting. And so as we as we talk about this concept with you, our listeners here, we just want to kind of put out a bit of a question to you have you think about it right now? Which is, have you seen this, either in yourself? Or what's your opinion on this? Is this something that you think architects have now I have a brother in law, who's in the cryptocurrency industry, before that he worked for a large stock exchange, and in the sales department, and it was he has a great saying he talks about he calls, he talks about the idea that human beings have what he calls mind viruses. And I love that idea, a mind virus. So Ryan, you mentioned that in architecture, we have a lot of financial beliefs that we haven't even necessarily created, that we've just taken on without assumption. This is what we mean by mind viruses, we've taken on the belief that was handed down to us without questioning it. And I find that a lot of architects who have been in the industry a long time, don't even question that things could be different. They don't question that perhaps, it's not necessary to work overtime, that perhaps it's not necessary to undersell our services, and compete on price alone. So maybe we didn't create this issue. You listening, perhaps you haven't, you haven't directly undervalued your services, maybe you're not part of the problem. But all of us need to be we need to take ownership by the fact that we are in the architecture industry, that as a part of this, we have ownership for these group narratives. And right now, the group narrative of one is, generally that money is making money takes away the focus from doing good architecture. And they don't go hand in hand, that they're antithetical, and that the way to do your best work is to try to be as efficient as possible. Because then we can just do more architecture? Well, there's a better way, the better way is, what if you could charge substantially more fees? And you could do less work? Because you were less financially pressed? What would happen in the architecture industry, if suddenly it became a highly profitable profession? Like what if some of the best and brightest minds of the world started looking to become architects because it was so highly lucrative?
What might happen then? Absolutely. Yeah.
I mean, you look at the medical industry. It's great. I mean, unfortunately, medical industry has been under its own pressure recently of, you know, insurance rates and practitioners, and especially family doctors now certainly don't make what they used to. But by and large, people who emigrate to America from other countries, it's not uncommon for them, their children, they want to be doctors, they want to be lawyers, for a reason. Yeah. Because they know that they want financial stability. I
think that's what's interesting, as well as that, you know, the other, we compare ourselves to the other professions, accountancy, lawyers, doctors thing about a profession is that there's a structure to get somewhere. And the structure by and large leaves you it's not an easy, it's not easy to follow it necessarily. It's not without its challenges, but it's a clear structure. And if you follow the clear structure, then there's some predictable results that happen. And by and large, if you become a lawyer, if you become a doctor, there is some predictable half decent wages that you can, you can get from them. And at the higher echelons of each of those careers, you can make some serious, serious money. And the industry. By and large, certainly with lawyers are a good example. They're, you know, they are, they're focused, they're focused on money. And there's different areas of law like corporate law, or corporate commercial mergers and acquisitions and things like that, where you can be part of incredibly large deals, and you can serve very serious money. Likewise, in medicine, becoming a cardiologist or a specialist or a brain surgeon, or something like that, or going into your own private practice than there's, there's you can make some serious cash out of doing it. And architecture needs to be able to offer the same sort sort of levels have been abundance and wealth because guess what we're dealing with people, majority of our clients are either very wealthy, or when we're working with development, or developers, they're making lots of money. We're creating financial instruments, or we're working with all sorts of caliber of different professions and businesses that can be massively profitable. And then we're helping their businesses become more profitable with the, with the architecture that we're providing. And there needs to be an economic balance with doing that. And being able to do the other sorts of work that might be more community based, for example, or that you want to have agency and
poverty has never been a path to prosperity. So one of the beautiful things about the world and human society is that we're continually evolving, we're continually learning the things that don't work. So it's not, you know, the old guard of architects, it's not necessarily their fault that the industry is, we don't need to blame them or throw them under the bus for where the industry is today. Certainly, they made improvements on the industry based upon where their predecessors were at architectures evolved a lot over the past 100 years. It's a very different profession today than it was before. So as humanity, you know, we're learning, we can look at things like wars and Holocaust, and we can say, You know what, I think those things don't work very well. Because, you know, I think I think we tried that one. I think we, as humanity tried that, and it wasn't very good. Same thing goes for poverty, there have been a lot of social experiments was like, Hey, let's go to poverty to prosper. We've seen it happen. Since it happened in the Soviet Union. We've seen it with Marxism, Marxism. We've seen it with communism. Now we look at China, they're becoming very wealthy. It's very interesting what China is doing. Because they're they've invented a flavor of communism. That includes capitalism mixed in as well, which basically capitalism the idea that capital is used as a resource for production,
state capitalism, isn't it really, indeed.
And I'm certainly not holding it up as a bright, shining example of what to do, because in terms of their civil liberties and things that happen over there, from what I hear about human liberties, that's a whole nother question. But the question we're asking here is that we'd like to question is, is this narrative true? Is it true, that architects must shun wealth that architects must askew profit, to be able to be morally aligned and ethically aligned with their values? Or is there a space for profitable and purposeful architecture? Can we stop justifying the mediocrity and let it flow into the bridge is something that we learned about and it's in the past now. And we're moving on to a brighter possibility for the wealthy architect and the impact that they can have in the world. 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
