524-How to 10x Your Architectural Practice with Enoch Sears

7:46PM Mar 18, 2024

Speakers:

Enoch Sears

Keywords:

architectural

architecture

architects

practice

work

business

happening

clients

selling

grow

firm

good

people

hire

conversations

market

project

world

team members

years

How do you 10x Your architectural practice? Hello, and welcome back architect nation. My name is Enoch Sears. And we are the secret weapon behind some of the world's most influential, impactful and profitable architectural practices. So without further ado, let's get right into today's episode. First off, let me state that if you're actually listening to this with the intent to grow your practice, you are probably one of the 5% Crazy Ones who actually wants to grow a small architectural practice. It's very typical in architecture for architects to want to grow their practice. So just the fact that you're listening to this particular episode shows that you probably have a couple of screws loose. Now, why is this? Well, architectural practices, let's face it are hard to grow. And there's a number of reasons for this actually, I went over this on a previous episode of why it's so difficult to grow and scale in architectural practice. Reason number one is because of the invoicing process. So typically, with the way that architectural practices build their clients, there's a gap between when the work is done to when the money for that work is collected. And let's just think through this for a second, what ends up happening is a severe cash flow problem. The way that our most architectural practices traditionally, invoice their clients is not suitable. And it's actually it's a, it's a, it's an anti growth strategy. Let me explain what I mean. Typically, historically, the way that it works in architecture, of course, you know, this is that you're going to you're going to win the project, win the contract, you're going to end up get started, you might take a retainer or something, but then you're going to get to work on the project. So now you're working working on the project, okay. After you work for about 30 days, you're going to create an invoice, you're going to send that invoice to the client. Now typically, the client is going to wait anywhere from 30 to 60 days to pay that invoice. Now look at what's happened here. From the moment that you put your people onto the project, you've had to wait 3060, possibly 90 days to get the money in your bank account. Now, do you see the problem here, this is a 9090 day stretch in which you're basically financing the operations of your client, because you've already done the work and you're waiting a whole to or maybe just one extra month to actually get paid. So what ends up happening? Well, if you were let's just say that you were able to bring in a ton of work, right? Now, let's just say that you could do that. And you have the team members, well, first of all, you're probably not going to have the team members. But let's say that you bring in a huge project, like okay, we got to staff up, we got to scale up, let's say you were able to find the people to actually do the work, the problem you're gonna have is you're building and you're hiring this, these these new people in your firm, based upon your cash flow that you've had in the past, in other words, your current cash flow. So to simplify this, here's what it looks like. Let's say that, currently your staff, payroll costs, overhead costs, everything combined, let's say it's $50,000 a month. Now you win your dream project. It's a huge project, it's going to bring in $25,000 a month, but you're going to have to hire two more people to do this. Right. So number one, it's going to take time to hire those people. But let's say that you hire those people. So you hire those people. Now you're investing more money into hiring people, you're spending more money for their salaries, you've had to spend time looking for them, maybe hiring a recruiter, there's a lot of costs involved, typically hiring someone can cost anywhere from 40 to $50,000, or even up to that person salary. Now, it's not just an investment of actually hiring that person. There is also the time we often discount or we don't actually calculate is the time and energy and effort that you spend hiring a new team member. So we can see as there's a substantial investment to bring on a new team member. Now what's happened is, you don't even have hopes to get paid until 60 days out. So now you're financing. So what ends up happening is suddenly your firm is being bled of cash. So growing an architecture firm is very cash hungry. If you do it the typical way, if you're billing your clients the way most architectural practices do, which is what we call billing in arrears or doing the work first seeing an invoice and then waiting to get paid. This makes it very, very challenging to grow an architectural practice, which is why I'm going to fast forward a little bit. Your Business of Architecture we teach and we espouse, you always want to get paid in advance. And I'm not going to go into that strategy here. But that's what consulted this cashflow issue for now, the second reason, under this umbrella of why it's difficult to scale, an architectural practice is simply because it's difficult to hire. Meaning that it's going to be difficult to find qualified team members. Typically there's a lengthy interview process. Let's face it, because of the cyclical nature of the industry. When times are really good, it's going to be hard to hire people. And when it's not hard to hire people, there's not a lot of work. So now you're caught in the kind of this catch 22. When you have the ability to hire when there's people on the market, you don't have work. When you have a lot of work. There's no people in the market. This can be extremely frustrating makes it difficult to actually TEDx, an architectural practice. The last reason I'll mention here, why it's difficult to scale and grow an architectural practice is simply because of commoditization of architectural services. Let's face it. architectural services have been commodity highest. What does that mean? It means that the marketplace is trained, taught and educated, that architects compete on price instead of value. Now, of course, there are firms who compete on value. That's what we teach your Business of Architecture. But most small firms out there don't know how to compete on value. And so they find themselves oftentimes competing solely on price, which ends up in being a lot of times a race to the bottom, not a fun place to be at. So let's talk about how to 10x your architectural practice, you've made it this far, you've heard some of the challenges of why it may be difficult to actually grow radically and scale your architectural practice. Well, I'm going to go over four specific mindsets or principles or ways of thinking that you're going to need to adopt if you want to grow and scale your architectural practice. The first one is simply this. If you want to 10x, your architectural practice, it's not going to happen through hope. Look, I've been through this in my own business life. I've seen it with architectural practice owners that we work with, I've seen it with friends in other industries. Oftentimes when we start a practice, and we're going through the motions, and we're growing the practice, somehow we have this Daydream in our mind, that eventually we're going to reach our vision. And we're like, I don't really have a plan to get there. I'm just going to do the work. I'm just I know what's going to get better eventually. Well, if I had $1, for every firm owner that reached out to us here at Business of Architecture, to share with us the stories of how they had this hope mentality for 30 years, and now they have nothing to show for it. Well, I would have a war chest of a lot of dollar bills. So the point is here is that while hope is good, we want to have hope. We want to be optimistic, we want to be faithful, what we don't want to do is let that hope turn into blindness and lack of awareness about the fact that nothing's going to happen by accident, it's just not going to fall in it's not going to fall out of the out of the sky into our lap. Now, when you go back and listen to my interview I did with art Gensler, founder of Gensler, you've probably heard this architectural firm, he did say one thing in that interview, and he said, You know, I never set out, I never had plans to grow this thing to be the largest architecture firm in the world. So in that case, you can see, well, wow, it did just fall in his lap, he kind of it kind of just seems like it fell out of heaven. But when you look at the way he operated, when you look at what he did, which is what I'm going to talk about here in a minute, you can see that was far from happenstance, it was far from just an accident. Although from his life, the way he lived it, he may have seen like everything just happened synchronistically there were very specific things that he did that allowed that growth to happen. First of all, when again, so was founded, the United States was entering into a growth phase, right, there were a lot of new office buildings being built. It was a post post war period, when the economy is doing great corporate offices grow and grow and expand, you had the explosion of new companies coming out with new products as consumers increased their buying power. So it was fueled, they were riding on the wave of a huge growth in the United States economy. That's number one.

Number two, and here's where we're gonna go into principle number two, which is that money actually matters and business matters. If you want a 10 Extra architectural practice, you've got to understand that money matters. And it's one thing to say, Oh, I get it in money matters. Of course, it matters. However, what I know from my own personal life growing up in the United States with parents who were teachers, is we had a lot of negative money mindsets about what money meant. I had a lot of negative thoughts about becoming wealthy or becoming rich, just thinking that people who were wealthy or rich or made a lot of money, that they exploited other people, that they were doing things that were unethical. Well, what ends up happening when we have negative money scripts, in our mind, native scripts about being wealthy, native scripts about charging what we're worth, ultimately, then well, we live a life of poverty, or we live a life of mediocrity, or we never able to break through and bring in the massive amounts of cash and money that are needed to grow a business. Architecture is about architecture, business is about business. So when you bring the two together, architecture and business, both of these things need to be firing on both cylinders, to be able to texture architectural practice, you must care about business, going back to my previous principle, not relying on a hope strategy. Now, you look at Gensler ganzer was able to grow into this amazing 4000 person office doing a billion dollars worth of billable work, like just put your head around that like a billion dollars. That is amazing. That's just incredible what that firm has become. And for every one Gensler there are 1000s of other firms that have tried to use the hope strategy, and they're still one or two people, they're still struggling, they're still not getting paid what they're worth, they're still not getting compensated fairly for their value. And this is the story among many small architectural practices. So principle number two is money matters. And business matters. You need to make business a ruthless focus is not going to be enough to take a couple business courses to read a couple business books you need to become you must become an expert at business are against law. Again, if you go back and listen to the interview we have here on the Business of Architecture podcast. He talks about how in the early years he saw this he saw the although he was an architect, he realized that money and that profit was necessary. to give his firm agency that it impacted their ability to do good work. And so he has an incredible story, he went out and he literally hired a local business professor. And they brought him in every single week to give lectures and teach business principles. So principle number two is money matters. business matters. What does this mean? It means that you must get out and you must train yourself, you must join programs, you must attend seminars, you must do self education. An MBA is not enough, you could go out and sure you go out and get an MBA, but what you'll find in typical MBA programs is that 80% of that is not going to be relevant to running an architectural practice 20% of it may be possibly relevant. We've had a number of people come through the smart practice program that have MBAs and they say, this is this program is amazing. This program goes far beyond what any MBA ever got me this is way beyond what I learned in my MBA. That's the value of finding specific advice, consulting, and help in the architecture niche instead of just general business advice. So along with this principle, the action step is get out there, invest in yourself, invest in your own learning, invest in your education, with the same ruthless energy with the same passion with the same excitement that you put into learning about architecture. Now, not having this is going to hold you back. So there's a lot of firms that ended up, they get held back, because they just can't manufacture the desire, they can't manufacture the passion. They can't manufacture, they can't find within themselves, the fondness of attacking business. To them, it just seems like a huge bore, like a chore seems like something they don't want to do. And so they never end up actually mastering business. Principle number three is this to sell as human. This is a book by Daniel Pink, I highly recommend you read it. But the basic idea is that as architects, a lot of times we have negative stories, and we have opposition to selling. We don't like selling, we're artists, we just want to do the good work and have the work come to us. Wouldn't that be amazing? What Daniel Pink talks about in his book is that selling as human, meaning that in every moment, as if you're running a business, you're selling in every single interaction, you're selling to your employees, you're selling to your consultants, you're selling to your contractors that you work with, you're selling to your clients, you're selling to everyone in your world, you're either selling ideas, you're selling your work, you're selling solutions, but you're constantly selling. So invest in your own training and selling this is principle number three, you need to embrace selling. Principle number four is you need to go beyond seeing yourself as just an architect. If you see yourself as just an architect, then you'll never, you know business will always seem a chore. I learned once at a couple years ago, I went to went to Tony Robbins events, it was UPW it's called Unleash the Power Within. Now if you've never you don't know who Tony Robbins is. Maybe you've heard about him. He's a he's known as a motivational speaker. But in reality, he's a high performance coach. He's someone that helps you unlock your own personal high performance. I've studied a lot with Tony Robbins, great person love his stuff. But let's face it, his particular brand of of expression, some people don't, it rubs people the wrong way. However, he has wisdom to share. And one of the things that Tony talks about is the idea of having an identity. He says one of the things that drives us most in terms of our performance is who we see ourselves to be. So just consider for a second, how do you see yourself to be? Now if you've gone through architecture school, what ends up happening is we identify ourselves as architects. I remember when I was in studying at Cornell University, I remember specifically what's happened I was a freshman. And I was only maybe a month into into classes and we went out to there was a couple of upperclassmen, I think they were juniors, and they invited a number of us freshmen to go eat with them at the dining halls were like, Oh, this is great. You know, we get to hang out with some of the upperclassmen and they seem cool. They seemed like they knew what they were doing. You know, they, they were just like these cool, like they dressed or cool. They had the cool glasses. They weren't black, and we're like, oh, man, I want to find out how to be a cool architecture student like them. So here we are. In a really, really Hall, I believe it's called at Cornell University. We're sitting down around this table, and one of the upperclassmen made this funny comment that I still remember to this day. He said, here's how it's going to go for starters, half you won't even make it to your senior year, you'll go to other other departments, you'll choose other majors, you'll decide that architecture isn't for you. And he said an actual is pretty close to 66%. Well, he was exactly right. He said the other thing is by the time you're in your sophomore year, you'll notice that your your clothing is starting to change. You'll open up your closet and you'll find out that you all you have shades of grey or shades of black you'll have black pants and black shirts. And so the third thing is you'll probably turn into a chain smoker. So now, I was a bit skeptical. But as I watched by the sophomore year, there it was, there it was, we were all starting to wear black. I didn't smoke. But there were a number of my colleagues that did. And you could probably call me a chain smoker because I would hang out in front of Rantala. Anyways, breathing all the secondhand smoke. So it came to pass the idea here. And the point is, is that we slowly began to take on the identity of architects, we slowly slowly began to see ourselves as architecture students. And so we donned the garb, we done the mannerisms, we got the cool glasses, we've done the you know, even the way architects speak, we started speaking like the architects in our in our crits, that we would do, we start using all the fancy terms like phenomenal transparency, and kind of sort of like, well, we position this over here for the the spatial transparency, you know what I'm talking about, right? This is what it looks like when you start to adopt the identity of something. So architecture, university education, has done a great job of indoctrinating us on being architects, we've adopted that identity. If you want to grow your architectural practice, you need to adopt the identity of a business person. And primarily, you need to understand that there's a difference between doing business and actually being a business person. All of the most successful firm owners that I know, have made this mental shift, they see themselves as business people to say, Yeah, you know, I run an architectural practice, but I don't think I don't, I don't really define myself as an architect, they may still do great design, they may still identify as an architect, but they merge the two. They're like, I'm both an architect, and I'm a business person. And when it comes to running my business, this is a business. And I recognize that and I recognize that architecture is our business, is the thing that we provide to the world. So principle number four, is you absolutely must make a shift mentally into not just being an architect who's running a business. But actually seeing yourself as a business person, this will make everything so much easier if you want to 10x your architecture practice.

Alright, so let's get into some very specific, more specific tips, some marching orders, some action steps about what you need to do, if you want to take an extra practice. Number one is focused on 10x and your profit, not your revenue. So oftentimes, we look at the top line revenue, we're like, okay, we did a million dollars in Billings last year, that's awesome. We want to hit 3 million. And so you push you higher, you bring in more team members. And then you look at your balance sheet, and you're like, wow, we're not making that much more profit, we're still doing about $3 million, but we're still bringing in $200,000 in profit. That's the same amount of profit I had back when we were 1.2 million. The idea here is that growth and scale does not necessarily transfer into more money in the bank. I know a lot of business, people who their businesses do 10 million, they do 20 million. I know a guy that had a business doing $50 million in his making less than $100,000 a year. So it's important to understand that as you grow and scale your architecture practice, you need to make sure that you're taxing the profit, you're looking at the bottom line, you're looking at how profitable is our operation. Second market marching step that you need here is you need to believe that you can actually do it. This seems common sense. However, I love the quote by Henry Ford, where he said, whether you think you can do a thing or not, you're right. Whether you think you can do a thing or not. You're right. If you're listening to this episode, you're probably one of the few that actually believes you can do this. But if you haven't made that critical step, you have to believe with 100% certainty that it's possible to grow your architectural practice to 2 million to 10 million to 20 million, whatever target you have, because here's the thing, it's been done before you can do it. Like there's no limits on what you can do as a human being. There's no one with a little checkbox saying you can do this, you can't do this, you need to give yourself permission, you need to say I believe in myself enough. And I believe I can do this. I don't know how I'm gonna get there. But I have unshakable confidence that this is possible. If you don't have that confidence, what'll end up happening is you'll hit the roadblocks along the way, you'll hit the things that are difficult, you'll have some projects that are put on hold, you'll hit a recession have to lay off some team members, you'll have a really bad year that isn't very profitable. You'll try to grow and then you'll find that you're stretched thin, you're having to micromanage. You're having to check up on people, it's causing you more stress and overwhelm. And so then you'll slide back and you'll just say, Well, I guess it's not I guess it's just not doable. I just guess I can't do it. This is what happens. When we get resigned. We give up. We wave the white flag of surrender. We give up our dreams. And David Thoreau said the vast majority of men live lives of quiet desperation. This is what he was talking about. He's talking about giving up on the dreams that we had when we started. So principle number two are this action. Step number two cannot be understated. Believe in yourself. Believe in yourself with rock solid certainty. Because here's the thing, if you don't believe in yourself, who will Action. Step number three should go without saying. But it is simply this do good work. There's probably you know, people who will be listening to this and saying, oh, Enoch, you didn't mention doing good work? Well, in my world, doing good work is just taken as, as it's sort of taken as common sense. So if you're asking the question, why didn't I talk about doing good work? Well, you're probably not a business person, because any rational business person is going to recognize and realize that doing good work is the bare minimum. That's like the starting point. That's the baseline. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time about that is like do good work, make sure you provide good services to your clients, if you can't do that. Forget about 10x in your practice, and one of the dangers here, one of the dangers that I see in firms is that you set such a high standard for yourself about what it means to do good work is that you never give yourself permission to say good enough, is good enough. Now, if you're listening to this, right now, I can imagine you're probably smiling, because you've probably seen this in yourself, or you've seen this your employers that you'll have products linger in the office, and no matter at what stage they're at, you can always put more work in and a lot of times, you end up over delivering you end up putting more time on the project just because you want to make it so good. This is a trap that architectural practice owners fall into all the time. So just be aware of it, it isn't necessary that you bleed from every pore, every project is not going to be the next Taj Mahal, it's not going to be let next falling water is not going to be the next, you know, Lakewood a boozy eight masterpiece. Allow your projects to remain within budget to make project to make profit on them. And don't get so caught up in this idea of doing good work that you take it to a far, far extreme. The fact of the matter is, is that most architectural practices do good work. Where most practices fall down in is they fall down in communication to clients. A lot of times if they don't, if they end up producing substandard drawings, it's because they didn't charge enough on the project. And we hear a lot of horror stories about this happening of architectural offices, you know, getting a bad rap, because the drawings aren't very good, etc. And oftentimes, the reason the core reason this happens is because the firm owner hasn't charged enough money. They've invested in team members that are under experienced, so they don't have the resources to be able to really do good work. As you can see, everything's tied together. Your profit matters and and empowers you to do good work. Action Step number four is to learn how to market. Now, we can summarize this by saying simply identify the right market don't go you don't need to go through 1000 branding exercises, you don't need to hire a really expensive firm to brand to brand your your your firm and come up with the cool tagline. As a matter of fact, that's all marketing for an architectural practice. It doesn't need to be that sophisticated. But you do need to start to spend some time enrolling a marketing program, get some fundamentals of how marketing works, understand the three, the triangle of marketing, message, media and market how all these interact, how all these play around with each other understand what it means to have positioning, understand how that impacts your brand. Understand what it means, you know, what are clients looking for in terms of you being able to charge premium fees, you don't need to go and get an you know, get get a business degree in marketing. You don't need to do any of that, you know, pay $500,000 To have a company do a five year market, study, research study, use your common sense. Pick a market that you think works for you that ticks all the boxes for you. Make sure the market that there's demand, make sure that the market, you know has longevity, ideally has repeat work available for you pick a market maybe where you have some specialty or some advantage in it, and then just go into it just jump into it. What we find is that oftentimes as architects, you will spend too much time trying to plan out the perfect marketing strategy, instead of just kind of guessing and having a good idea of where you should go jumping in the water and just doing it. So, action. Step number four is learn how to market and primarily what that means is spend a bit of time identifying the right market, but don't overthink it. Just go after it, jump into it. Start making conversations which jumps into action. Step number five, learning to sell. In architecture sales is mainly about creating relationships. It's about creating trust, so that people invite you to propose on their projects. It's also about being able to stand clearly defined in your value, not discounting your fees, not competing on price, make sure that you make it very, very clear to clients, hey, we compete based upon value, is that going to work for you? We don't compete based on price. I learned this lesson. years years years ago, I was networking. It was at a time when I was working for an architectural practice. And I was going to a lot of these networking events and I remember talking to a banker for a local bank called Union Bank. They have offices here in California. And I said well, what makes Union Bank special? And what he said kind of took me back, but it caught my eye it was it was intrigued. And he said, we don't we don't compete on price. We compete based upon service and value, we don't try to be the cheapest bank, we don't have the cheapest interest rates, you know, some of our accounts, they carry fees. But what we are is we aim to over deliver when our clients need us. Were there. I thought, wow, that's very smart. They're taking the focus, like right off the bat, he's telling him, we're not the cheapest. So immediately this starts to filter out in someone's mind, whether they're going to be for you or not. So part about learning to sell is number one, understanding what is your value? Let's face it, as an architect or architectural practice practitioner, sometimes it's hard to identify what your value is. A lot of the a lot of the things that are valuable about architecture are so called the intangibles. It's one thing to say yeah, my restaurant made more money because an architect designed to react my house sold for a higher price, because my architect designed it. But what about all the other intangible things that go into architecture, things that you know, and recognize so well, and it's frustrating for us trained architects to see that the general populace or people who hire architects have a difficult time they're blind to these intangibles. So part about learning to sell is your ability to be able to in a conversation, be able to help your clients pair up their desires with your services at a premium price point, making sure that you're not competing on price. This is not going to happen by accident, which is why you need to invest in your own ability to sell particularly regarding selling professional services, you're selling a service, you're selling an invisible item, you're selling something that's intangible, we can say, Oh, I'm selling a design.

I'm selling service. These words will fall like on, you know, on deaf ears. And you've probably had this experience, a lot of times, if you just tune into the energy of a conversation when you're giving your little elevator pitch. Unless you've been taught how to actually convey value, then you'll notice that sometimes these things fall flat. And this is why so many architectural practices are so frustrated that they do their pitches, they do their presentations, and their clients are always talking about the price. Well, that's more than I thought it seems like a lot, it's expensive. This is a terrible place to be as an artist who's just trying to get your message and your art out to the world. So action step number five is learn to sell action. Step number six is learn leadership. Leadership. What is leadership, leadership is a very complex topic, it's easy to say learn leadership. But actually being able to do it is one of these things where it's very, very difficult. So what that means is you're going to have to invest a lot of your time, a lot of your energy, and a lot of your practice a lot of your mindset, a lot of your skills to mastering the conversation of leadership. For instance, leaders have the ability to hold someone to a very high level of account, while at the same time, not demoralizing them. You may have been in an office yourself, where people were yelled at where people were demeaned where there were passive aggressive happening, things happening. Maybe this is an office, this is like this in your current office, maybe you're one of the leaders that does that. And you know, you do that, and you feel like it's a bad pattern, but you just don't know any other way. This is what happens when people who are not trained in leadership aren't natural leaders are trying to run a practice. And the truth is the most of us human beings. We're not, we're not natural leaders, we didn't come out of the womb, knowing how to lead and guide other people. Leading guiding other people is difficult. It's difficult because they're gonna bring their baggage into the office, they have a sick kid at school, they're gonna stay home, they had a fight or argument with their partner. Well, guess what they're gonna bring that energy into the office, you know, even if you're giving them the best compensation package in the world, even if the work that they enjoy doing, is available in your practice. It's human nature for a human to, firstly, when when you when they first started your practice. It's all new. It's exciting. It's fun. And so like this is great. But then the new turns into normal, suddenly it becomes status quo. Yeah, it's kind of like it was yesterday. And then three or four years hidden. And then what was what was once new and exciting, and then became normal has now become numb. So it's challenging. You have people in your office for a long time, there are certain people where they want to be continually challenged, they want to grow. And so this is part of leadership is being able to provide an opportunity for people through culture, through a deep understanding of what they want, where they're headed, to be able to keep them engaged in the practice. So they want to keep working there. So they don't start to enter into mental complaints in their head thinking like, Ah, I don't know, I'm doing a lot of work for a lot of not of money or more of these projects. And we've worked on a lot of these I'm starting to fall asleep at my desk. These are the kinds of conversations and things you don't want to be happening in your practice. To avoid that, learn leadership. Invest in yourself. Join a leadership program, start to understand leadership books. There's lots of them out there so many business books on leadership, but not just reading the books and actually implementing those skills and practicing those practicing those skills in your conversations. Now, here's just a shameless plug for what we do here at Business of Architecture. This is exactly what we do in smart practice, is you'll learn how to sell in a way that works for architecture practices, you'll learn how to present your value, how to sell your value, you'll learn how to market not a deep dive, you don't need to become a marketing expert, but you'll learn the laser focus things that you need as a small practice owner just 10 extra practice, you'll learn leadership, you'll learn how to hire people, you'll learn how to have hold people to account without demoralizing them, you'll learn how to create an amazing culture. And you'll do it rubbing shoulders with other architects who are on the same path. So whether you decide to invest in smart practice a program like ours to grow your practice, or you decide to do it on your own. Mastering this conversation of leadership is going to be absolutely essential. Gary Keller, who is the founder of Keller, Keller Williams, once he summarized it the best way that I've ever heard, he said, the job of a CEO. And as a business owner, as the one running your practice, you have the CEO title, whether or not you see yourself that way or not. He says number one, to recruit, train and coach people to their highest potential to the greatest possibility. And number two, is set the vision. So we can see number one is all about people hire train coach, Coach, people that are possibility. Number two, set the vision for the company. So ideally, that's what it means to be a leader. You do this, you do these, these six things. Focus on your profit, not just revenue. Believe in yourself with confidence, certitude that you can actually do this, that it's possible to 10 extra practice, you do good work to keep those referrals coming, it doesn't mean that every project needs to be perfect or every client needs to be happy. That's very difficult to do, you can have some, you know, some some conflicts, you need to know how to handle those things. But generally, you want to have a good reputation, the marketplace. Number four, you learn how to market. Number five, you learn how to sell. And number six, you learn leadership, you are on your way to 10x. In your architectural practice, it will not be easy, but what I can tell you is it will be one of the most rewarding and one of the most exciting journeys of your life. So with that, if you'd like help TEDx and your architectural practice, well, smart practice may be a great place for you. Smart practice has been developed over the past 10 years through on the ground training, consultation, coaching with small architectural practice owners to help them get what we call the three F's freedom, fulfillment and exceptional financial reward. To find out more about smart practice, you can go to spark practice method.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts, your feedback on today's podcast episode, what did you hear for you, as we talked about and discuss this important topic of TEDx and your architectural practice. And that's a wrap, hey, Enoch Sears here, and really want to thank those of you that have recently left some reviews for the podcast. What we're doing here a Business of Architecture, we feel it goes way beyond just the consulting program that we offer. But this is really about a movement, a movement of architects standing for their value. And we appreciate it when you come and you leave a review because it lets us know that you're part of the conversation. I remember once I was talking with my business partner, Ryan Willard, you know, hear from the podcast and Ryan said something very insightful. He said business is a series of conversations. When we think about this, we can see that this is true business is seriously just a series of conversations. It's conversations you have with your clients. It's conversations you have with your consultants and engineers, it's conversations that you have with your team members. And all of the sum total of these conversations is what ends up creating a business. So with that, I want to give a special thanks to those people who have left a comment and a rating a review for The Business of Architecture podcast. See Siver Rolo Irini with GID. Randy with AEP America click.cc P low dash P Ryan Brown S D. J chemic. 2017. Breck studio architecture hailing from Austin, and Rick Alfond Dre, thank you, each of you for leaving feedback about the podcast. We love what we do here. And this movement is much more than myself than Ryan and our team here at Business of Architecture, this movement is about you. So we appreciate you leaving these reviews because it helps other architects know what we're doing here to raise the banner, a standing for your value in the face of a marketplace, who tries to just go straight to the bottom line. If you haven't already left us a review here on the Business of Architecture podcast. We would love that. You can do that if you have X says to Apple podcasts, just go in there, leave a review. And we'll read your name out right 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 that our 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