Number four, to make more money in your practice, just simply spend more bloomin time marketing and selling and doing high value operation or work. Okay. So as a partner, as an owner in your business, there's going to be three areas that you need to be relatively skilled in one is winning the work one is doing the work and one is supporting the work. Okay. And most architects are very good at doing the work, don't really think about the supporting the work. So that means the finance, the HR, admin, all the things that go around it, but we can get people there to help us the other one is winning the work. Okay, that is usually ignored. And then I hear the most useless piece of advice from architects all over the world telling me this, that the best way to win work is just to do good work. Okay, that's really unhelpful and is basically the baseline that every business should be operating at. Okay, I'm going to do that as a given you do bloody good work. Okay, do good work. You're an architect. That's what we do. We do good work. And a lot of the time because you're not marketing, you're not selling you don't you can't do good work, because you're saying yes to crap clients. Okay, so, no, doing good work is not the whole picture. And the reality of it is as well is that if you're working with a client and you don't, okay, you don't make a mess. You don't make a complete balls up, then it's likely that the client won't want to go for the discomfort of trying to find another architect. Okay, so just hold on a minute. It's not it's not like we're up doing being absolutely amazing. Okay. It's rather the client, the process of the client, finding another architect is more painful. All right, so what this highlights too is that in a lot of business says that the winning of work is totally reactive, totally, totally reactive, if you're working in a sector that you love, and you're winning more work that you and you've got great work and you're winning more of the great kind of work, then okay, you've had a little bit of you've earned something there, or you've tapped in and got lucky. But even those practices are still looking to enter into new sectors and progress and to grow. So they keep the conversation running. Alright. But in general, we're very reactive as a species of professionals. And we're not spending enough time marketing and selling, learning about marketing and selling, we deeply misunderstand these two things, we think they're just add on skills that you can learn in a weekend, they are not, they are as complex and as take the time and energy to master as the craft of architecture itself. Does that you've chosen to wear the hat of a business owner? So you've got to master them? Okay, that is the that is what business is about. It's about marketing. It's about selling, and it's about the finance. All right, the technic, the technical aspect of it, that's going to be for the craftspeople who you're playing you're paying for. So you've got to, you've got to get engaged with the high value activities in your business. There's high value activities and design. We'll talk about that another time. But the high value activities in marketing and selling, you got to be spending at least 25% of your time doing this. Okay, if you're doing less, it's irresponsible. So and if you're struggling with any of the things we've spoken about before low fees, low salaries, cashflow problems, you're not spending enough of your time marketing and selling, okay, so one day a week, get off your and pick up the phone and start networking. If you hate it, if you hate it so much, then you're going to have to find someone else to do it. You're going to have to either employ somebody, enroll someone identify someone who your office's is good at it, but you've got to be able to do it. Okay, you've got to be able to do it if you're I've met many, many introverts who don't like being in public spaces or talking to people who have become quite masterful negotiators and salespeople. All right, that is just a reality of running a business. Either you got to do it, or you've got to find someone else do it. I don't care if you like it, or enjoy it. But it needs to be done. Because you've taken the responsibility of running a business and your career, livelihood. financial well being your mental well being depends on your ability to go out and do these things. And guess what, it's actually quite fun. Okay, it's actually quite fun. And there's loads of resources and loads of people who can help you. There's loads of brilliant consultants, like here at Business of Architecture, we help train practices in what we call the rainmaking flow, which is a process for positioning yourself for marketing, for the copy for your messaging, and then the fundamentals of actually conversational negotiation, and how to put together agreements and negotiate the proposal less proposal. Number five, create a growth plan. Alright, what does growth look like for you? We often call this a vision framework. And a vision framework will include core values and beliefs. It will include things like a purpose statement, and a mission. Okay, a clear mission. Where are you going? What do you want the business to look like? And then another part of this is a five year business plan, which we call a summit map, which is a one page graphical version of a five year business plan. 10 years is a little bit nebulous, it's very difficult to imagine that far. And so many things can change. Five years is a little bit more tangible. But having a growth plan, having a vision, writing it down, sharing it, sharing it with your team, this is really, really important. And it's okay to grow. It's okay to make a shit ton of money. It's okay to make loads and loads of cash. You can define what growth means for you. You can define success on your own terms. It doesn't necessarily mean having a massive practice, but it should mean creating financial targets and generating money and creating purpose and meaning around why those targets are an absolute must. Okay, an absolute must. It's so important that when you create your vision for what you want the business to look like that you've got clear financial objectives and targets and you've got a why behind them. I can't hear any more people telling me that they're not in it for the money. I get it. I get it. I Get it. Okay. But this is a very superficial statement that is were using it as a safety blanket to pretend and to justify our own financial mediocrity, okay, we're using it as a defense mechanism, it's not helpful. It's not useful. It's just living in denial. Okay, it's time for us as an industry to wake up, wake up. Okay, I want everybody to be setting ambitious financial goals and targets and that we start to talk about them, that we start to share them, we share them with our teams, we share our, you know, the people in our business, this is where we want to go that you're starting to think about your architecture practice, as a mechanism for creating wealth, creating wealth for you. And for the people that are working in signing it and creating wealth for the people who you're engaging with and who you're selling services to. The final one got I'll kind of wrap up with on here is get help hire a coach, hire consultants to help you do the last five things that I've spoken about, obviously, I'm going to suggest getting in contact with us here at Business of Architecture, Inc, and myself, and Nicole and our team for the last, you know, three years and you know, Enix been refining this for more than a decade, I've been consulting for the best part of five, six years now. And we brought our minds together and have created the smart practice program and the journey, the six phase journey to becoming a free architect. And we've distilled everything that we know. And, and there's still more to go. Okay, but this practice this this pathway, we have seen create enormous benefit, profitable practices, we've seen businesses stop themselves from bleeding out profit to making very healthy profit margins of 20%. And above. We've seen businesses turn themselves around, we've seen good businesses go to flipping great businesses. And you I mean, you need to actually see some of the financial reports from some of the clients that we have, I can't share those with you, unfortunately. But it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary some of the results that these people are producing. And what's often the case is that the highest performers will hire coaches and consultants and experts and outside eyes just think of any great sports person, they will have a team of coaches around them nutritionists you know, weight specialists, performance or techniques, specialists, or, you know, they'll be working on every aspect of their particular athletic ability. With a specialist coach. Architects,