582: Don't WORRY About a Recession - Do THIS Instead with Enoch Sears

Enoch Sears28min

Enoch Sears

00:00

You've doubled down on the one thing that you have the most control over, and that is you. This is the Business of Architecture. Hello and welcome back, architect nation. My name's Enoch Sears, and I'm one of your hosts here on the Business of Architecture podcast. Back in the day, I got a comment from one of our listeners saying, Enoch, why did you always say architect nation? There's more countries in the world than just the United States. And I had to chuckle, because the reason why I use architect nation is specifically for that reason, the idea that as an architect, you are part of a collective that spans borders, that spans nations. This is not a American centric movement. This is not a United Kingdom centric movement, although Ryan, of course, is British national and myself an American, this is about a movement that spans all nations and countries to move you forward in your career and in your given talents and gifts that you've been given as an architect, as and as a designer, as a builder of this world. But here's one of the most challenging things about being an architect today, and this is that your business is at risk of the larger economic forces in a major way. And one of these forces is the concept of a recession. 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 or 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. Hello, listeners.

Rion Willard

02:02

We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support at Business of architecture.com, so

Enoch Sears

02:25

what is a recession? A recession is a decline in gross demetric product. It's basically when the economy of a country or a market starts to slow down enough that it actually begins to decline. In my professional career, I've seen a number of different recessions. The first one was the.com bust back in 2001 that was right about when I was graduated from school. And I remember at the time that the year before I graduated in 2000 that we had up to 20 recruiters coming to Cornell University to recruit architectural students. It was like, amazing. Was like, wow, we're getting people here to school to recruit us, and a lot of my friends who are going into the baking world as well. There was like, McKinsey was there, all the big KPMG was there, the big consulting firms, they were there hiring people. Because it was like, the economy was hot. Things were happening. Money was flowing. Business opportunity was ripe. And then within a matter of months, something happened that should have given me a bit of foreshadowing for something that would happen later in my career, due to inflated valuations for a lot of the internet companies that had come around at the time. One of them, for instance, is pets.com you can read about that big story these internet companies were being valued at such high margins that eventually the kind of it was just a balloon. It got over inflated. It popped with that. Equity evaporated. Stock shares evaporated. People started pulling out of the market, and the entire world economy went into a contractive period of fear. So when I graduated in, you know, 2000 after this, right after that, right after that, bus had happened. It was 2002 during it was right in December, and I remember there was, there were no recruiters at school. And as a matter of fact, there were, there were, there were very few positions, very few jobs that were available. So that was one recession that I went through. Now maybe you've been through several recessions, and you can remember recessions in the late 70s and the early 80s and the 90s. And this is one of the facts that we need to understand about architecture, is that we're tied to a cyclical industry. We're tied to we're tied to the finance markets, because we're tied to how easy it is for people or how hard it is for people to get financing for their projects. We're tied to the governmental markets, because a lot of architecture and infrastructure projects are sponsored by governments. And so we can see that our livelihood is very, very closely tied into what happens at a macroeconomic scale. So the topic that we're going to be talking. About today. This is a solo episode that I'll be sharing with you what to do instead of worrying about a recession. Because, let's face it, it's very easy to worry about a recession, and we sort of, we have a lot of fear and anxiety and worry in the collective consciousness of architects and designers about recessions. Let's face it, I mean, especially if you're running a business, if you're running a business, you would have to be foolhardy not to have a bit of apprehension about the prospect of a recession coming up. So here's number here's the first problem that we're going to talk about today. Number one, the fact that recessions happen, and that as an architect running an architectural practice, you are in a cyclical market. Tell you a quick story. A couple years ago, I was talking with a couple of firm owners who were contemplating coming and joining the smart practice program because they'd just been eking by and just overworking themselves for months and months and months and even years. Found the Business of Architecture, found what we've been talking about, found that there might be a possible way for them to be able to run their practice differently. Ended up joining the program, but in our initial conversations, as they were, you know, kind of telling me about their story, about their practice, about the challenges they were dealing with, this idea came up. They're like, you know, what we have, we have what we would call architectural PTSD. Now, PTSD stands for post traumatic stress disorder, and it is literally a psychological condition that oftentimes soldiers will get or people who are in trauma situations, car accidents, victims of abuse, they will have PTSD. Because what ends up happening is the subconscious mind the body, gets trained and gets programmed into this very massive fear response. So what happens in the future is anything can trigger off that fear response. And so they told me, they're like, Hey, we realize that we haven't ever even recovered from the Great Recession that happened in 2007 2008 2009 and beyond like and this was impacting their ability to make business decisions. It was holding them back from hiring because they were worried about growing a team, worried that if they did grow the team, that eventually they would have to let these people go or they'd be on the hook for higher salaries. They held back on investing in moving to a larger office, because, again, they didn't want to take on the additional overhead. And so when I met them and they started and they came into our program, they were at a point where scarcity in this PTSD from recession was basically running the future of their practice. Now there's a reason why we have PTSD, because during a recession, here's a few of the problems that can happen. Canceled projects, clients send you an email. You've you've closed this big project. You counting on these fees. You're feeling comfortable, like, yeah, we got work for six months. We have work for 12 months. We have work for the next 18 months, and then you get that dreaded email from someone, one of your clients, that says, Hey, by the way, we need to put this project on pause, or we're not going to be doing this project. And just like that, $100,000 $500,000 a million dollars of fees, evaporates. This can put you in a position of having to lay off staff, and this is one of the business owners greatest fears, because you spend so much time, energy and effort getting the right team members, having to let them go is disastrous. It's disastrous. It's a nuclear holocaust. To an architectural practice to have to let go of team members, because then it puts you on your back foot. Then that means that you need to rehire, you need to retrain the staff. You need to relook at your processes, all of this just amounts to you working a lot harder for a lot less, and the other another one of the challenges, of course, in difficulties and during a recession, is you having to cut personal expenses. Let's face it, if you're currently living at a certain level, you're currently enjoying certain niceties of life, it's really going to hurt to have to give up those things. It's going to hurt to have to maybe sell your car. It's going to hurt to be stretched on how you pay your mortgage. It's going to be hurt maybe to stop going out to eat some so often, like whatever ways there are for you these recessions and impacts, they can impact, obviously, your your personal life, because it impacts your ability to pay for things like personal training, some of the niceties of life, like maybe going on vacations or massages or whatever the things are in your life that bring a really nice quality of life to you when the money goes down, these things are the first to get cut. And this is very painful, because when we've gotten used to those things, it hurts more when we have them taken away. Psychology, psychologists have a word for this. It's called loss aversion. I remember back in 2008 2000 early 2009 when I got laid off during the great recession. And this is what initiated this journey of the Business of Architecture, was my own personal pain, my own personal feeling of feeling lost. And I remember trying to start an architectural practice looking for work at the time because I had these big, you know, grandiose ideas, I thought, well, have running a practice is the way to freedom. This is how you can have more flexibility around your schedule. You can pick and choose your hours. You don't have to report to another person. And there was something that was really appealing about that for me, what ended up happening. Is because I didn't know how to get work, and it was in the middle of a recession, I just ended up feeling so lost. I just remember just feeling lost, like not knowing what was going to happen in the future. I had moved home to a smaller city where we had family nearby. I was like, should I move to a big city? Should I go work for a large firm? Should I should I start my practice here? What kind of work do I want to be doing? What's the best way to grow my practice? What I did know is I wanted to do something impactful, but I had no clue about how to get there. And so ultimately, I felt lost. I felt adrift. And what was most frustrating of all for me was not having a clear future, having my my future be clouded, having my future be foggy, that left me adrift and feeling very lost in the moment. Now, problem number two is the worry about a recession. Now consider that a recession is one thing and and that's nothing we we don't want to wish that on anyone, but what we can make matters worse or even exacerbate this is when we worry about a recession, when a recession isn't even here. I remember being introduced one time to the work of a wonderful lady. Her name's Byron Katie, and actually the work is called the work, and she helps people. She has this really beautiful framework for helping people process difficult things in their lives. So she go around and give seminars and and help people with this framework that she developed to help them go from worried and anxious to having more peace of mind in their lives. And it was wonderful book. And in the book, she tells a story about how there was a man who lived in Germany during World War Two, and as a young child, his house was bombed, and so this was traumatic for him, and it scarred him for the rest of his life, because as a child, he remembers the bombs, the loud sound of the bombs outside that are the shock waves of those explosives, and the actual the building he was in collapsing on top of him, him having to be rescued from the rubble. And as a young child, you can imagine, this is terrifying, and so he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. He would get into cold sweats when he's sitting in a business meeting. And Byron Kate, I

Enoch Sears

12:13

remember what she said to him. She said something very, very profound that shifted the way that I looked at the world. She's all you know, being bombed and experiencing the devastation of the explosives that happened one time in your life, but ever since that time, you've been mentally recreating that you have a war in your own mind. So consider that a lot of times, this is what we do to ourselves when we worry about a recession, is we're creating the worry in our own mind worrying about something we're fixated on something that isn't actually here. You see, there's a difference between a healthy awareness and an unhealthy preoccupation. So what we want to have as it comes to recessions, we don't want to put our heads in the San Jose. Oh, recession is not going to happen. I don't need to worry about it. No, that's another recipe for disaster, right? We don't want to be worried and anxious about it and making fear based. Fear based decisions when it comes to how to powerfully hold ourselves through economic challenges. And we also don't want to put our heads in the sand and pretend like everything is going to be prosperous in the future and we can just rest on our laurels. Both of these are recipes for disaster. Both of these involve a certain amount of unawareness. So what we want to have, and what I want to encourage you to have, is what I call a healthy awareness, meaning we understand that recessions are going to happen, and in the rest of this episode, we're going to talk about the steps and things that we can do to make sure that we're not worrying about a recession, that we feel confident. Now, number three problem is, when a recession happens, or there's economic tremors, or projects get put on hold. The problem or the challenge that we can fall into is freezing. This goes along with the front the freezer, flee, fight kind of response that we have. It's a fear response. So imagine that a car is, you know, you step into the road on a car's rushing down at you, you're going to have one of several responses. You're probably going to jump out of the way, hopefully you might freeze, which is a terrible thing to do, because in that case, you're going to be the victim of an accident. So this is what happens when we're faced with difficult challenges. We can our nervous and our nervous systems our body can go into these automatic responses. Now, these responses are automatic. They're things that we don't consciously have control over but when we are aware of them, we can then begin to impact them. So one of the challenges during a recession is freezing, and I'll explain what I mean by this. When I was when I was laid off from my for the practice where I was working in Houston, Texas, back in late 2008 moved to California and was working side jobs, you know, earning, literally $5 an hour throwing newspapers, and then I would go and I would earn, you know, $20 an hour working as a sub school, school teacher. And then in the evenings and sometimes days that I had off, I was networking, hustling, architectural services. I. Yeah, and I remember at that time that because I didn't have the skill set, I didn't know actually what to do to build a pipeline. I had no clue about how to let people know about my services. I had no clue about how to vet clients. I had no clue about how to qualify clients and make sure that I was working with the right people. I didn't know anything about this. I remember there were many times when I would just freeze. I would be there at home, and I would be in front of my computer, and I would just have this feeling of anxiety that would come over me, and just this feeling of helplessness, like complete helplessness, not knowing what to do, and just basically freezing and hoping that the phone would ring. If you can't guess, this is a horrible strategy for building a business. The fourth problem that I'm going to mention here as it comes to recessions, is, as an architect and as a firm owner, making drastic slashes to your operations, pulling back and trying to save money by cutting things that give your firm life. For instance, maybe you have a marketing expense, you're like, Oh, we're going to cut that. That's superfluous. Maybe you have some other expenses. You cut those. What we don't want to do during a recession is cut the things that give us life. This is one of the mistakes that so many architecture firm owners and business owners make, which is cutting the very things that are keeping their business alive. So what's the possibility here, in the face of recession? Have you considered that the possibility for you as an architecture firm owner, a design firm owner, a landscape architect, is to move into the face of recession, the face of economic uncertainty with per your personal certainty intact, having peace of mind, knowing that you are well suited to be able to not only just survive, but actually thrive during recession, actually, knowing that The recession is going to be your day, that you thrive in winter, that you're a gladiator, that you know that when the winter comes, you will be ready. That instead of waiting for things to happen to you, instead of getting frozen in a fear response, you're proactive. You're out there ahead of the eight ball, you're taking action. So what should you do instead of worry about a recession? What have you considered that the principle here is number one, focus on what you can control. If you're the average person, business owner, you probably have little control over macroeconomic economic policies. You don't have the ability to influence the United States government, the UK Government, the Asian countries, any of these countries around the world that are powerhouses and make making things happen in the world. You and I, we don't have a lot of agency with that, right? We're existing in the greater milieu of economic forces that are outside of our control. So what can we do? We can focus on the things we can control. Now I'll tell you another quick story. As you may have heard, I talked about on the podcast, two years ago, I started training jiu jitsu just for fun with my boys, something to do, and it's been great with my boys. We go down to Jiu Jitsu. It's fun. We train two times a week. As a matter of fact, there is an architect there who had been following the podcast, who approached me, aren't you Enoch Sears? I'm like, yeah. He's like, I I went to SCI arc, and I'm working for this firm now, and he kicked my butt in Jiu Jitsu. So it was, it was quite fun and quite humbling at the same time. But one thing that I love about jiu jitsu is I'm not very good at it, so it's a new skill set that I'm learning, that I'm developing. And, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to get disappointed, get frustrated and get upset when I get beaten, I feel like I'm not good. I feel like this is never going to work out, and I'm focusing on the things that are outside of my control, right? Like I can't control what my opponent's going to do. I can't control the next move my opponent is going to make. I can't control how aggressively my opponent engages with me, if I worry about those things, or I try to focus on those things, I'm just kidding myself. What can I control? I can control how much I practice. I can control how hard I practice. I can control whether I reach out to the leader of our of our studio, and I ask him to give me private lessons. I can control how diligent I am during practice. I can control if I do any conditioning outside of practice. So as you see, there's a lot of things that I can do to make myself better at Jiu Jitsu. So principle number two here is, instead of focusing on the recession, just get better. When we focus on the things that scare us or the things that could impact our business negatively, this is where we get caught into the worry, the fear, the anxiety. So the challenge I want to have for you today is Don't, don't worry about the recession. Yes, be aware that recessions happen, but get better, acquire the skill sets that will help you thrive while other practices are struggling. When I was in high school, I tried out for the soccer team. This is the story of my life, trying out for things. And as I was trying out for the SOC team, I was a junior at the time, and they were doing a scrimmage. So scrimmage is where they put you on the field, and they want you to run back and forth, and you're competing in a game. And they're trying to see who the best players are, because they're going to figure out who's going to be on the team. So there was, I was basically competing to be on the junior varsity team at the time, and I did the stupidest thing. You've probably heard of this story before, if you've listened to the podcast, but I'm sitting there, the game's halfway over, and our offense is great. They're keeping the ball down at the other end of the field. So I'm a defender. I'm just getting bored, and it sounds stupid now when I say it, but I literally crouched down on the field. Now, in my defense, this was, this was almost like an automatic pattern or habit that I had gained from wrestling. So in high school and even in junior high as a wrestler, I wrestled USA, wrestling, and wrestling a lot of times you'll crouch down because you're listening to the coach or you're waiting for your opponent. It's like an, it's like, just a thing, you know, in practice, when our coach would talk to us, he would be, he would be in the middle, kneeling on his knees, and we would crouch around him. So it's just like, you know, as a wrestler, you're kind of in this crouching position, so whatever. So I'm here crouching on the field. That's, can

Enoch Sears

20:55

you imagine that like? And I look over and the teacher, who is our Spanish teacher. He's also the soccer coach. I see him look at me and the him and the assistant coach, they write something out on the notebook, and, you guessed it, I got cut from the team. No surprise there, right? But here's the thing, right? I could walk off that field and I could blame the coach. I could say, why did he do that? It's not fair. You know, I should be on the team. I should be given the opportunity, right? That's all complaining, that's all focusing on things that are outside of my control. These are disempowering patterns. Or I could say, You know what? I got cut from the team because I sat down on the field. Number one. Number two, I wasn't very good. If I really care about this thing that I need to get better, just get better. So the path here that I'm going to leave you with in this episode today is simply this, when we're talking about what are the core skills that are going to help you thrive and help you have certainty, even in the face of a recession, even when projects are getting paused, even when your pipeline is disappearing before your eyes, you can have a playful and a fun attitude looking at this because you know you have the four following skills. These are the four savage skills of an architecture firm owner. Number one, how to market learning, how to spread the visibility of what you do and seduce people to want to reach out to you and engage with you in conversation. Number two, how to close, how to take the interest and the people who engage with conversations and how to move them to an outcome, either a clear yes or a clear No. Number three, your ability to recruit. I'm not talking about just putting an ad on Indeed, or monster.com or the AIA website or the Riba job listings or the art the the Royal Canadian Institute of Architects page where you can advertise. No, I'm talking about you actually learning how to recruit people. This is a skill set. It's a mindset, it's a discipline. And number four, learning how to coach people to their possibilities. Master these four essential skills, and you can move into any economic adversity, any economic constriction, with certainty, because you know that you've done the work you've invested in yourself, you've doubled down on the one thing that you have the most control over, and that is you learn how to market, learn how to close, learn how to recruit, learn how to coach. Now there's a number of ways you could learn how to do these things. You could just try to figure them out. You could read books, you could watch YouTube shorts, and all of these things will be valuable. But ultimately, the most valuable way you're going to embed these skill sets is with a mentor, someone that can give you direct feedback on what you're doing, and with the repetition of practice, getting reps. So as you know, here at Business of Architecture, we have a solution for this. It's called Smart practice. In Smart practice, we teach you these four cap savage skills as a firm owner, and because of that, we have many firm owners who are liberated. They are free architects. They have teams that are self managed and self directed. They are earning great compensation for what they do, and they're bringing forth their best creative work because they're able to focus on the architecture. So whether you choose something like smart practice or some of the other many resources that are out there for these particular skill sets, what I would encourage you to do and invite you to do, as I sum up today's episode, is remember that, yes, recessions will happen. Yes, economic adversities will happen. You may have a personal recession. You may have a sickness that that you come down with. You may have a sickness in your family. You may have something that pulls you away from your firm. Or we may have an industry wide recession that impacts the industry financially. How will you feel knowing that you didn't take the steps ahead of time to learn the skills that I talked about on this podcast episode. How will you feel knowing that there are things that you could have done, that you worked on, low priority tasks, that you focused on just putting out fires in the things in front of you, instead of doubling down on investing in yourself, increasing your certainty, making sure that you become who cares what everyone else does, but that you yourself? Pursue the path of the liberated architect. This is Enoch Sears, as always. We'd love to get your feedback on the podcast. You can email us at support@businessofarchitecture.com, hit us up on any of our social media channels. Ryan and I are both active on Instagram as well as YouTube. I look forward to seeing you on the other side, as always. Carpe Diem and goodbye for now, and that's a wrap. Hey, Enoch Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of, to bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer. One thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast, simply because it helps other architects stand for more of their value spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together, so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, it 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 review, send an email to support@businessofarchitecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training, you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wished they would have known 20 years ago, and the other 1% well, they just didn't even know that they didn't know. Head over to iTunes and leave us a review. Now 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 or 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. Hello,

Rion Willard

27:50

listeners, we hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience. We'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessofarchitecture.com.

Enoch Sears

28:14

The views expressed on the show by my guest 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. Carpe Diem.

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