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.