622: How to Charge More Without Losing Clients (And Why They’ll Thank You for It) with Enoch Sears & Rion Willard

7:51PM Feb 25, 2025

Speakers:

Enoch Sears

Rion Willard

Keywords:

Architecture of value

non-verbal communication

client experience

sales process

customer service

energy behind words

scope guilt

timeline guilt

client perception

innovative practices

architectural archetypes

business of architecture

smart practice

leadership program

client engagement.

80% of communication is non verbal. Hello, architect nation, and welcome back to the second part of our conversation around the architecture of value. In the last episode, Ryan shared with us an entertaining and not uncommon story of when his electrical contractor was suggesting a solution that would apparently save Ryan a lot of money, but completely missed the design intent of this design. So this launched us into a conversation about about value, about how sometimes we as service professionals, you as an architect, designer, sometimes we project, it's not uncommon to project our perceptions of what value is and the things that we value upon our clients. And how can we turn these, these challenges of communicating architecture into actual opportunities? So today we continue that. We're going to add a couple more stories into the mix to illustrate some different angles and principles about how to meet your clients where they're at to number one, give you the best opportunity to influence them. Get your designs out there, get your stuff built the way you want it. Add those special moments that you know that you can bring to projects to help get those things approved and embraced by your clients, and at the same time, create an experience for your clients where they enjoy going through the process with you of making these decisions around value. So with that, I'm going to continue my conversation here with my co host and principal of Business of Architecture, Ryan Willard, so with that, here we go. Here's the second part of our conversation on the value of architecture, or the architecture of value. Now before we do that, I did want to remind all of you listeners that here at Business of Architecture, we have a fine gem of an experience waiting for you. If you're sick and tired of having your business run, your life of the constant stress and chaos, feeling reactive, feeling like your heart rate is racing from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night. It's not uncommon for, you know, younger architects are starting their practices to reach out to us here at Business of Architecture, after experiencing three or four years of complete, utter hustle and grind. And you know, there is something to say for slogging through the late nights, for you know, trying to scrape together enough finances to make your practice work. But what I would say is it doesn't have to be that way. One of the best things you can do is surround yourself with the people that have the kind of results that you want to get. So whether you've been in practice for 30 years, or you have a startup practice, it might be a fit for you to come join us here at Smart practice. Now, as we mentioned before, we don't take every practice. This program isn't a fit for everyone, but your next step to find out is to head over to smart practice method.com. So with that, let's jump into my continuation of my conversation with Ryan Willard here about the architecture of value. 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, lessons, 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.

Well, yeah. And I want our listeners to think about Brian, think about how, because oftentimes we think about charging more as being an obstacle or being something that is potentially harmful to the other party. It scares us a little bit. But what if charging more actually made the whole process actually added value, in and of itself, made it more enjoyable for the other person to conduct the transaction because they're paying more money, not simply because we charge more, but because of the process that we have around that.

Yeah, it's the people pay for that. Yeah, it's the it's making people feel special. 100% Yeah, making people feel special. That's part and parcel of the, you know, the scarcity makes people feel special. And the the kind of attending to, you know, there's, there's not many of these things around. So just having it is making me feel special. Whether it's illusionary or not, it's to it's part of the the fun of the of the game. Yeah, it's interesting. Because with the watch, the other side of the story was, I made this purchase, I had all the security checks, something, some. Think went wrong. My transaction was declined, or the transaction wasn't declined, but the camp the the order was canceled. Okay? So they ended up taking my money, they took my money, and then they canceled the order. And I was like, Hey, why would you do that to me? So annoying, so annoying. So there I was. I was writing all these emails to their customer service, and I was asking lots of questions. What's happened? Why? What? What are the unforeseen circumstances? They sent me more questionnaires. I filled them up, and then, and then I was passed on to a third party security company that they worked with for their online sales, and they were asking questions, and I couldn't tell the difference between my talking to the watch company, am I talking to the security company? And you know now you're telling me that I should I need to reorder the watch and pay another four or 500 bucks, whatever it was, and you haven't refunded my initial purchase amount. And so all that was starting to piss me off. So now, of course,

you're approaching with the proper British decorum, polite, empathetic, understanding, my very serious, courteous

Yvonne read one of the emails I wrote, and she she said, Oh my god, that is the most British complaint I've ever

dear kind sir, we can remedy this as soon as possible. I

asked, I asked, Is there anything you can do for all of the you know, is there any kind of goodwill gesture you can make for all of the Inca Vince and the kerfuffle that has been created

that's, that's great, but, but it was interesting because that experience of the kind of, the kind of, kind of confusion, the the annoyance of, like, I didn't really want to have to be out of pocket by, uh, you know, it would have been nearly a grand but at this point, and not have a watch, I wanted to have the money back. I didn't feel quite safe with the website, the security thing. I didn't know whether their, their third party security thing, was real, so I was starting to question, have I? Have I just been scammed? It had all that sort of, not very nice, pleasant, absolutely, yeah, experience you're wearing of my as my data been shared, etc, etc, yeah. Anyway, I made a list of complaints, and they ended up they said it was going to take 10 business days to refund the money. Blah, blah, blah. I made more complaints in a nice, British kind of manner, and then on Monday, they sent the money back. And I was like, Okay, fine. I'm I don't want the watch anymore because I didn't enjoy all that.

Who would I mean, come on. You're like, oh, that's the kerfuffle, not worth it. Yeah, anyway, anyway,

so I was at peace with that. I was like, Okay, I'll choose another watch somewhere else, and I'll put the money aside, and we'll get a do something else to increase the anticipation. Anyway, yesterday, the watch then shows up at the door. Wonder of wonders, it just shows up. And I'm like, Okay, now, now you fools have sent me a watch, which effectively I haven't paid for because I've got my refunds.

You have the money

so the watch, so I messaged them and told them what happened. And again, I had to, I had to, I had to put in a lot of effort to pay for the watch. Yeah. So again, anyway, they were very gracious about it, and they they dealt with it very nicely, and they appreciated my honesty, and they ended up giving me a 30% discount. So it's

a nice so it goes well, that ends well in this case, in this case, there's the

story about the watch that my that Yvonne didn't want to hear. And now I've told now I've made a podcast about it. So it's all

Yes, yes, all, all, 1 million of our listeners.

Okay, enjoy. But go and check out brew watches. They're very cool. But again, I think some of the lessons here are about the kind of buying experience that we put people through. The there are things that are counter intuitive, that can actually be quite advantageous. And, you know, create a an experience of anticipation. We can make the actual buying experience fun. People like to shop. Don't forget this. People love shopping. Yeah, I love that. I love that this is like, you know, how many of us have spent money on things that we couldn't really afford at some point in our lives. There's, there's

a wonderful saying Ryan that I like that that goes one of my mentors said this once. He said, People love buying, but they hate being sold, right? Like we like spending money for. Something. We want to be seduced in the process. We want to have that dance of of desire, intrigue and finally, conquest. But we hate being sold. In other words, if we feel like we're being sold, like someone's pulling one over on us, trying to convince us to do something, cajoling us, manipulating us. I mean that terrible, terrible process, right? But there is, there is a beautiful art and science to doing this so that you are, you're playing the seduction game, and it's also tasteful and enjoyable for the person going through the process, which in Ryan's case, we saw a less than desirable I mean, with the watch, let's face it, you're annoyed, you're agitated. Sounds like a lot of that was probably because their customer service was following a script. They had certain things they could and couldn't do, right? Maybe miscommunication between the different departments. Well, like we don't know how to tell shipping that to don't ship it, and because we're the refund department, and blah, blah, blah,

yeah, exactly. And, and again, those sorts of mess ups, if you like, if a singular person had kind of dealt with it, and, you know, had taken care and said, I mean, again, you know, credits to the company, because they ended up resolving it in the end, but it just like a singular point of somebody dealing with that transaction. And we've got this so sorry, one to one communication, not kind of pre canned responses or AI bot, though, I wouldn't be surprised if an AI bot would have been better. That was,

sir. Let us resolve this for you as quickly as possible. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. This must be extremely frustrating. Yeah,

exactly, just kind of like under just understanding you know that this is annoying, and that part of their their anticipation that the enjoyment of the buying process has now been dissipated. I want to mention another story as well. I love stories. One of our clients was sharing with us, and this was we have a program called the associate leadership program as part of the smart practice, and this is where we have business owners who are preparing the next level of leadership to emerge in their firms. They might be preparing for succession planning. They want to empower team members to step up into finding their leadership, finding their voice, taking charge of the teams, becoming proactive, becoming quite powerful communicators, being able to bring in work. So we have a part of our smart practice that specifically deals with with those people who are doing that now that one does have a quite a strict qualification process. I'm not just saying that because we've been talking about the marketing, but we do have because it's not a fit for everybody, and not everyone is ready to become a partner of a business. But the guys that we've got in the moment, guys and gals, are amazing, and one of them was sharing some insights from a sales experience that they had. And the founder of the practice is very seasoned architect, very, very knowledgeable. You know, he's a good sales person. He's been working with us for a number of years as well. And and this younger leader of the firm was accompanying the kind of senior founder or owner of the practice in the sales conversation with a client. And they deal with these ultra high net worth individuals, kind of ultra luxury, and it's big numbers. And, you know, they don't do any work that's under sort of $5 million for a new build kind of thing. And they've got a nice healthy percentage on the construction, on that for their fees, okay? And I asked the this guy, you know, our client, what was the one key takeaway that you got from this sales experience, watching the principle in action, what did you What did you see? What was really impressive for you that you took away? And he said it was really amazing, actually, to see at the very end of the conversation, without batting an eyelid, the principal of the firm sat there and asked the client for the deposit, okay, to get started on the work. And it was a for a large amount of money. It was about $160,000 okay? And he was saying $160,000 He's like, That's so much money. Um, the client's going to freak out about this. There's going to be a drama. And he was saying that that was for him to have asked, that that would have been because I know there was it. He had his challenges around what a large amount. Money that was and for a lot of us, we could imagine, you know, that's a, surely there's gonna be pushback to drop 160k who has 160k just sitting in a bank, who's gonna give it to the architect as a as a starting commencement fee, just like that. Surely we gotta do some work. Surely we gotta do something for it. And he said he was so impressed at how, how much of a non issue that was for either the principal who was asking for it. So the architect who, who said, This is how we work. We take $160,000 to get started, put that into this bank account, you can get and we can get going right away. And then what was more surprising was the client's reaction, which was, yeah, no pops, no pushback. And I thought that was interesting again, kind of it, you know, when we're selling as well our own mindset or feeling around money, we can unintentionally project onto other people and what might be a large amount of money for us, or we might have a discomfort around talking about it, or a discomfort around asking for it, it's more. It's more that, you know, the discomfort about asking for it, the other person you're you're talking to may have no it's like 160 grand. Okay, sure. It's like them. Yeah. They spend that on them. They spend it on a watch. There we go.

Their toilet paper is made of dollar bills, $100 bills.

They got. They got no problems with it. But it's, again, kind of useful for us to think about the way that we project our own concerns onto money, and then how that ends up influencing our sales conversation, and how we can unintentionally diminish the purchasing experience for the other person with our own concern around money.

Yeah, yeah, hey. The other thing I wanted to mention here, Ryan is that, like this associate of this firm keyed into something that is very important but oftentimes overlooked, and that is in these conversations when you're presenting proposals or making a case for your fees, or in a conversation with A client about a commission and doing a project for them. The most important thing is the energy behind the words. So if you're a nervous Nelly and you're just expecting the client to resist the fee that you're going to be telling them about, it's very likely that that person will pick up on that, and it will make them uneasy, right? And this is, yeah, this is right. So same thing happens with like, I love the I love the um, one of my, one of my fun shows to watch about psychology is that show with Cesar Millan. Remember, the dog whisper was it called? Do you remember the name of that? It's called the dog whisper isn't it? Is it called the dog whisperer? Yeah. So the beautiful thing about it is, like, he says, there's never a bad dog. There's only, like, I don't train dogs, I train owners. And his whole philosophy, and you can see this play out. It's so brilliant, because you're like, wow, like, this is true. Like, the reason why the animals are freaking out and they're chaotic and they're, they're, they're, they're, they're not regulated, and they're acting out, they're maybe being aggressive and things like that is because they and they're just reflecting the energy of the owner, which is crazy. And you see him do this, and you see him walk in there, and he has this calm, kind of tranquil presence, this commanding authority, and he's able to go in there with these very aggressive animals. And they basically, they sense his energy, and so they become compliant, they become docile, they become controlled, right? So this this same thing. We're, let's face it, we're still mammals, right? We still have, we still have nervous systems. And as a matter of fact, 80% of communication is non verbal. So what does that tell you about communicating to another person? If you're saying the right words with your mouth, but internally, your your butterflies, your palms are sweating, you're thinking, this is never going to happen. They're never going to go for this? Well, the other person is going to pick up on all the visual cues that are happening behind the language that we're actually saying. And so I love that you brought up this example of this younger executive in the small architectural practice where what he noticed was that the principle was embodying a calm, confident energy,

yes, yeah. And it's that that statistic about the 80% of communication be little bit of expand upon that because, please, there's just some. Fact checking? Well, yeah, because it's because if that was necessarily the case, then written text would be incomprehensible. But it typically is. Applies to cases where one's verbal and non verbal gestures are incongruent. That's often where the studies are coming from so people can pick up on something's not quite right, because then, because the verbal, the non verbal gestures, are not congruent with what's being said, so something's not making sense, and people pick up on that, and then it can undermine what the message is, which, in this case, is quite is really important. Because, again, if you're being exactly what you're saying. If you're sketchy and uncomfortable, and then you're acting out in a bizarre way,

then you're not, you're then you're then the non verbal communication is going to undermine what you're actually talking about and communicate something totally, totally different. Yeah,

you'll make the client uneasy. They won't even know why they feel uneasy. Yeah,

yeah. Like, exactly, so. So, yeah, it's really, it's really important that that kind of, there's congruency there, and that we've got a, you know, and there is definitely a kind of a practicing of these sorts of conversations or or just even reminding yourself that you know, when you first started business, you were charging 300 bucks for something, and now you charge $15,000 for it, for the same sort of thing, and that at one point, the idea that you were charging 15 grand for for, for something would be incomprehensible. And then the same, we've used the charge 15 grand for that, and now you're charging 150 for it. And so that there's these kind of levels of of of comfort, and bringing that to our awareness is very useful.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when I first started out in practice, and, oh man, I used to sweat bullets, you know? And it's normal too. It's normal to as you increase your fees, as you start to ask for more money, it's normal to be uncomfortable with that. It's just normal, right? Like, I remember sitting in front of a client, like, tell them the fee, and everything in my mind was thinking like they're gonna reject this. It's too much money, you know, they won't accept it. They're gonna get angry, they're gonna get upset. And then they would just, they would be like, Oh yeah, that sounds fine. And

I'd be like, Wow,

maybe, maybe I'm leaving something on the table here.

I mean, it's such a good exercise to get comfortable talking about money. You know, we see, if we look at the most free work that architects give away, it's not in their marketing endeavors or doing free work for a developer, it's usually they're doing free work because they're under charging or they don't take care of any kind of ad services. So

along the way, yeah, yeah. So along the way, little, little the the death of 1000 cuts, yeah?

And when we look at people's realization rates, you know, we see that very clearly that they're not billing for all of the hours that they're working, yeah, on those projects. And at the core of it is often this discomfort about asking, asking for money, and if we haven't, again, running it back to what we were saying at the beginning, of understanding what the values are of the client, and also taking a frame that actually purchasing from you might be fun, and how can and what's The experience I want the client to have, then there's ways to start to make a shift around it. Yeah, that

opens up a whole nother conversation about scope guilt or timeline guilt. I'm not sure we got to come up with a phrase for that, but like you, know, as a firm owner like you feel guilty that your team members have taken so long on a task that you know, you could have done with less time. Yeah, right. So, like, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, shoot, if I would have done that, would have taken has the time they spent way too much time on this. Now you're feeling guilty. So then you write down the actual invoice, which means that that comes straight out of your profit. You take a loss on, you know, you lose those hours because you're basically subsidizing that by writing off that time. You're going to have to pay the employee, you're paying them to sit there in the seat and do that work, right? And so that is I also want to, I want to challenge that kind of idea that you need to stomach or write off, or you need to absorb those costs like that's not necessarily the case. If your employee takes longer, then charge the client more. There's there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Now, if you know that you're mismanaging the project, that's another that's another issue. And a lot of times I know architects, we do, we do feel like that. You might feel. Like that. You're like, well, you know, shoot, if I had more time, if I was more on top of this, I would have stopped that. So I feel like I'm to blame. Then it gets really, really messy. So it all goes back to having that's, that's why we have something called Smart practice, right? That's why we have frameworks, we have systems, we have modalities, we have protocols for keeping you out of these situations where you're having to write off. You know, recently, I did a webinar last week, and this wonderful architect lady, I mean, Heart of Gold. But we did some math, and we figured out that she was like, I think it was like, she was writing off. She was like, the way she was operating her practice, there was about $40,000 a month that she was leaving on the table through in a finished inefficiencies, mismanagement under charging. That's now, I don't know about you, Ryan, but in my world, $40,000 is still a lot of money. Get

some nice watches with that. Yeah, very nice. Goodbye,

goodbye, and a couple of very nice watches with $40,000 side note, for some entertainment, if you want to go, check out an interesting article about watches. Neil Patel, who is a SAS entrepreneur, started Crazy Egg and a couple other software companies. He wrote this brilliant article talking about how, like, how $100,000 watch got him a million dollars worth of deals or something like that. It's very fascinating. It talks about how he would invest in these very, very expensive watches go to restaurants in Silicon Valley, and people would comment on them because they, you know, they, they, why is that right? Just

give me more excuses. I know you're gonna

be like, I can justify it as a purchase. You're sitting down over dinner. She's like, it's $180,000 you're like, Honey, this is an investment. This is only going to open up more opportunities for me say,

if my my accountant allow me to write it off as a business investment, there

you go. This is advertising, marketing, marketing. So Ryan, we've had a long, I mean, we've talked we've talked about value today from a bunch of, you know, kind of some different perspectives, right? Because this is going to be a never ending question and challenge for architectural practitioners is, how do we capture the value, what is the value that we have? What is the value that we offer? How do we then translate our services into capturing that value so we can run businesses that allow us emotional reward, that allow us financial reward, that allow us a good lifestyle? So this conversation is never going to be ending. We could have gone on for a couple hours talking about this from different angles, but I think like today, we kind of touched on it in some different ways that we typically think about this, right? And you started off with the conversation about your electrical contractor and how he was projecting his perception of what's valuable on you. And there was a mismatch there. There was just a mismatch, and he was oblivious to it, which is not uncommon,

and I'd be interested to hear from the listeners on kind of innovations that they've implemented with either their kind of client experience, or how they've made it fun to buy services from them, or how they've enhanced the their selling process or marketing process, that it's like, it's an enjoyable engagement with the with the architect. You know, we've, we've spoken about practices who have hired hospitality consultants so that they train everyone in the office they know how to pick up the phone, like a five star hotel. You know, I'm, I'm interested in hearing architects who have been really inventive with how they make the client feel special. Okay, above and beyond just doing the design, I get it, great design. Love it. And above the sort of standard answer of like, we listen, the great architects can live a listen, okay, yeah, yeah, we all listen very good. Okay, but I'm really interested in people who have innovated, or they've crafted something unique or or special, or they have some sort of, you know, I know anything from a gift hamper that you send out to a new a new client, to taking them out for, I don't know, a Safari, or whatever it might Be. We want to hear, we want to hear about, I want to

know if someone's taken people on Safaris. That sounds awesome. I watched. You're not a big game hunter. I don't, don't be that guy that goes and kills the elephants in Africa. Come on. This

is a topic for another podcast. Is the film The brutalist. Have you seen it yet?

The brutalist? Does it have to do with brutalist architecture? It does.

It's a new it's a new film with Adrian Brody in it really, really and and it's about an architect. It's about an Eastern European, an architect from Budapest, who comes to the US as a as an immigrant, and escapes the the kind of Jewish person. Execution in Europe after the war. So kind of, you know, lots of the architects like Louis Kahn and and Marcel Brewer and that sort of vein of people that were kind of Eastern European heritage or Jewish heritage, and came over and were kind of forerunners of modernism in the US. It's it's kind of based on that sort of plight. It's a three and a half hour epic movie, wow, about an architect. And there's a number of of experiences that that architect goes through that we can relate to. There's some experiences he goes to that we cannot relate to, I'm sure. But it'd be good for you to watch it, and then we could do a podcast about it, because there's a, sounds very cool. Oh yeah. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. In it, there was a, there was a particular piece where he does, he has a kind of very unique experience with the client that ends up turning out very bad in the end for him. But, you know, he's, he's kind of, he's going to the Carrera marble mountains to choose the marble with the client. And, you know, it's interesting

to see these architectural archetypes. You know how they forecast? Sounds like a more sophisticated portrayal of architecture? Sort

of architects, sort of, Okay, again, there's, there's a few things on that, like the the architect, the architect as an archetype in a narrative, and why it's useful for a filmmaker to use an architect as a character and then as a business perspective. There's a lot of interesting questions that come up about that architect as the archetype, or the architect, architect and what it means about how we're kind of perceived generally in the in the public, and what's useful about it, and what actually might be getting in the way. And again, beautiful reiterates the importance of of what we're talking about here, of getting really curious about our clients, value set.

Reach us by emailing support at Business of architecture.com or you can go to Business of architecture.com there's a contact page on the website where you can submit a form with the answers to Ryan's questions, if you have if you want to be on the podcast, if you have done something in your practice that you think is innovative and interesting along these lines of conveying value, ways that you add those little, small touches that clients appreciate, we'd love to hear about

it. Yeah, and we'd we're as There's an application process, of course, to be on the podcast. And again, we are. We're very keen as well, for people to bring some transparency, you know, talk money, talk about success, talk about challenges, and to say something above and beyond. You know, just focus on doing good work. Yeah,

yeah. We don't. We don't want, we don't want any architectural fluff here. We don't need anyone telling we don't want to put out more podcast episodes about how great the architects are. This is a place for real conversations. We're going to talk about the real challenges, what really happens behind the scene, and at the same time, understanding that there's nothing wrong with you for struggling or having challenges. As a matter of fact, this is a difficult industry, but it's a fun industry at the same time. How are you? 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 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 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 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'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wish to. Would have known 20 years ago, 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. Carpe Diem, you.