BOA - Podcast 480- Enoch and Rion - The Cult of Design Part 2

12:25PM Aug 4, 2023

Speakers:

Enoch Sears

Keywords:

practices

architects

architecture

business

architectural

design

industry

paid

conversation

work

unions

people

paraprofessionals

owner

sacrifice

running

fees

firm

money

ryan

If you don't believe in the value of your services, then you're never going to try to get those skills or be able to implement those strategies. At Work tech nation. This is Enoch Sears. And this is the show where you'll discover tips, strategies and secrets for running an architectural practice that lets you do your best work more often. And if you haven't already gotten access to our 60 minute firm owner masterclass, then we invite you to do that head on over to smart practice method.com, you'll get free instant access to that after you enter your email address, or you can attend one of the webinars that I run on the smart practice method. Today is episode number two, where Ryan and I continue our conversation about the cult of design. So without further ado, we'll jump right into today's episode. So this conversation that I was talking to with this, this firm owner who's been going through the smart practice program, and he's on his he's on Level, Level three is actually a part of the Design Council group right now. And we're having a chat about this. So you know, one thing that I realized last year through my work with you guys, is that I had compartmentalized my business and and I had to the neglect of my relationship with my with my partner with my wife. And, and he said, I was completely blind, I didn't realize that my relationship was at the place it was because I wasn't giving any attention to it. We were like roommates. And it wasn't until working with you guys at Business of Architecture, they started to pay attention to this. But let's let's bring this to a broader context. Right? All of us. If you've worked in the architecture industry, if you listen to this podcast, you may work as an employee, you may be a firm owner. There's your your personal life, your relationships, the time you spend with your family, the time you spend with friends, your personal self satisfaction and fulfillment life, all of that is inseparable from business. Right? It's inseparable from business. A lot of times we like to compare mentalize. And we'd like to say, Well, my relationship is doing better as doing amazing, but work really sucks. This is a half truth because what I found in my experience, is that when, let's say for instance, my Corolla Sam dissatisfied or stressed out at work, it's an it is impossible to come home and be the best version of myself with my wife. If my business quadrant if my, my practice practicing architecture is lacking in some way, it's stealing my power, its sting, my excitement, it's stealing my enthusiasm. And that's going to roll over to every of our life. Right? So this current this conversation about the cult of design, yes, it does impact hugely. It's it's a cancerous mindset. It's a cancerous ideology, at the root of architecture, but what we ignore is the impact that this has not just on architecture on the conversation about it, but our relationships with our children, our significant others, I have a good friend of mine. She's a grown woman right now. And she has literally she has a therapist, she's dealing with severe trauma, because her father was never around when she grew up. He was an architect. And he flew all over the country, building these great, beautiful malls. He was a very successful architect. The company had a private jet. I mean, they were they were like, in terms of success. They were at the pinnacle. Right. But what what suffered as a result was his relationship with his daughter. And she was like, I saw what he was doing. And I knew he was successful, and I appreciated him. But she's like, there's a hole in my heart, that can never be completely replaced. Because my father wasn't around. Right? So it has impacts. It affects everything. Right? It's not just a conversation around architecture. It's not just a conversation around what we do. It's a conversation around our relationships around our health. And we don't even realize how it impacts things. Until we see a better way. Now recently, a couple months ago, there was this blow up is probably six months ago last year, there's the blood at CyArk. Right, that flew up on the internet. And there were there were it was a roundtable of some professors who were given a town hall meeting at CyArk and Southern California, Los Angeles, Architecture School, for those of you who don't know, the infamous school CyArk I mean, sure everyone does. But so these these, these professors, well intentioned as they, as they were, of course, we're having this town hall and one of the students asked, brought up the idea of exploitative, what the student thought was, you know, how can we earn a living wage we see, we see this thing is as as young as young students who are looking to go into the architecture profession, what we're seeing is that firms aren't paying us a living wage, or they're asking us to come on for free or they're using our work. And some of the professors even doing this using students work without compensating them. Or even if they do get compensated, it's at a such small rate that we can't even we can't even live right we can't we can't pay our expenses. Right. And so then one of the professor's responded You And you can go on on the internet and find this clip. But she said, Look, I waited tables. When I was young, in my architectural career, I sacrificed, I put a lot on the line to be able to build the practice that I have today. Right? And this is her invitation was, this is luck, you're gonna have to work for it, you're gonna have to sacrifice you're gonna have to give up something. And look, I get that, right, we understand where she was coming from. Because yeah, you've you have sacrificed a lot to be able to get to where you're at. Right? And in addition to that, the students of today they're not, they're looking for a solution that works even better than that. Right? So let's say that did work to a certain degree. But what did you sacrifice by doing that? You sacrifice your financial well being what kind of relationships Did you sacrifice because that because you were in studio all the time, or working on architecture projects, instead of building connections with other people, right. And so in a way, the upcoming generation is actually you know, we call them the the Generation Z or the millennials, you know, they're actually they have something, they're demanding a higher standard in architecture, because they're seeing the symptoms of this. So to bring this back, the point here, is that we can relate this this blow up that happened at CyArk. Again, it was about financial things, it was about let's put it this way, it was simply about money. It was about architectural practices, not paying young students or people in the industry, what they consider to be a lot of money, right comes down to financial consideration. So it goes back, we can trace the roots of that back to this conversation around the court of design, that we're going to lay everything on the altar, that the most important thing is the design integrity, and that everything else needs to be sacrificed. It's a false dichotomy. We have the false dichotomy between design integrity, and money, design, integrity, financial success, and the fallout from this is cancer. I mean, there's no other way to say it. It's like, it's like gangrene, it's causing, it's like having diabetes, you know, your, your your toe start to turn yellow. Purple. It's a very serious issue.

It's insidious. Yeah. And this, and this is why it's, you know, I appreciate and, you know, a lot of the activism that's happening in architecture at the moment, and there's a lot of unions here in the UK, and I appreciate the sentiment. And, you know, both you and I want architects to be paid well, that's what our whole business exists for. So our whole trajectory in our lives is about making architects be paid well. And that includes employees, you know, the conversations that we have of all of our, our clients is about, you know, you want the talent, then you're gonna, you're gonna have to pay for it, and you're gonna be paying people proper money. And so a lot of the unions that have emerged recently, both in the UK and in the US, which demand higher fees or higher salaries, and then they've gone through a process of sort of naming and shaming architecture practices when they, you know, put a job posting and they've got a below livable wage on it, I get that. And I appreciate and want the same outcome, if you like. But I do think that the kind of the, the, that education and learning and changing this design culture that has emerged, the negative aspects of the design culture, this the cult that we're calling it, this is, this is the thing that needs to we need to be aware of, and we need to give chemo to if you like, it's not something that will be changed with like putting a marketing module into a university program. It's not as simple. It's not as simple as that.

No, no, it's it's like you said, it's it. It is like a cancer. It's its tentacles has gone. It's so deeply embedded right. Now, here's the thing with the architectural unions, because this has been a this has been a conversation recently. Right? It's like, let's unionize. This is the solution here to getting better wages for professionals who are in the architecture into this have unions right? Now. What I've discovered about life, and I'm gonna back up just a second here, right, is that when we're in a level of comfort, it's extremely difficult to want to push ourselves to grow. So just consider the principle. So there's a principle that if I'm comfortable at a certain stage in my life, whether it's the comfort with my health, whether it's comfort with my finances, my natural human pole, is going to be able to want to sort of rest on my laurels. This is just the natural because we don't, we don't really want to have to work super hard if we don't really really have to this is kind of a part of all of us. Now to a greater or lesser degree, some of us overcome that by we want to be high achievers, and we're always growing etc. But just in general, that human nature is there's this universal law of entropy, right? Without continual added energy, a system tends to devolve. And so what I found, Ryan is that when I'm at a certain level of comfort, it really takes something, it takes an enormous amount of energy to push myself to a higher level of performance. Okay? So this might be for instance, in my health and fitness, right? So I consider myself reasonably healthy. I went down to the gym the other day, and recently hired on a personal trainer. And I was planning on working out and just doing my own workouts like I have for the past several years. But that, you know, I haven't had a personal trainer in a while. Why not all Tyler, who used to be my trainer a couple of years ago, texted me, Hey, Nick, I'm back in town, we'd love to chat with you. So I'm like, well, let's give it a try. Right. So I went down this past Friday, went down to the gym. And Tyler gave me his assessment. And what was interesting is his assessment was all based upon mobility. Right? So he, I'm 45 years old now 45 years young. And so he had me do these different mobility kind of stretches and poses and, and, and I was just I was exposed, I was realizing how lacking might because I sit all day. So my, these, these muscles along the front, the hip flexors are extremely tight, my groin is extremely tight. I mean, I'm on the way to a hip replacement, because I sit so much, right? Now, what does this have to do with comfort. So the idea is that like, it would be very easy for me to sit in my office every day, and just I'm very busy. I have six kids, we have a business to run. I'm involved in my church, I mean, I got a lot going on, it'd be very easy for me just to rest on my laurels here. However, there's something inside of me that I'm looking ahead to the future and saying, You know what, I don't want to have a hip replacement when I'm 50. I want to be able to have flexibility, mobility and strength long into my future life, right. Now, what does this have to do with the idea of architectural units, we'll consider that as architectural practice owners, if I'm a practice owner, it's very easy to maintain the status quo, and what's the status quo. It's what we've paid people in the past. It's the business practices that we've paid people in the past. It's the kind of marketing that we've done in the past. It's the way we manage our finances based upon how we did in the past. I mean, I was just talking with a firm owner just today, as a matter of fact, it was a younger guy and his wife took over a firm from the founder, and the way the founder ran the practices, the old school way of running architectural practice. It was just by the sheer force of work, everything was in his head. And he worked long hours, and he was a workaholic. And he probably undercharged a lot, right. But he just pushed forward his practice and had success based upon the pure energy and time that he sacrificed in it. Well, this firm on a couple of document like, we don't want to do it that way. We know it's possible to set up a business, with systems with people with processes, such that you actually firm owner, you actually get freedom, you don't need to sacrifice your life and everything on the altar of that. Alright. So the point is, is that the status quo has a pole, the status quo, its inertia, right? The inertia, that's another one of our laws of physics, there's this inertia of an object at rest wants to stay at rest, and an object of movement wants to stay in movement. Right. So with architectural unions, what they do is architectural unions are actually putting pressure on firms to raise fees. Okay. So the pressure to raise fees, sorry, not to raise fees to raise salaries and compensation for employees, right. The pressure to raise the compensation for employees, it can be internally produced, or it can be externally produced. Going back to my fitness analogy, my desire to actually improve my health and get my my body mobile and functional. Again, it can either come from my initial like my internal drive to do that, even though I'm comfortable now my internal drive to to be healthier, and push myself or it can come because of some tragic health thing that happens in my life, where like, for instance, I pull my back out, and then suddenly, I realize how out of shape I am, or the doctor diagnosed me with type two diabetes. And suddenly I recognize Oh, should I got to make some lifestyle changes here. So if we look at this principle, the fact that we as human beings, we want to stay in the status quo naturally, and to be able to break out of the status quo, two things, usually two things will happen. Number one, something disastrous happens that causes us to want to make a change because it's so painful. Or we're proactive because we see the benefits of where we could head and we want to avoid that pain. The latter is very, it's rare. It's rare, right? The number of practices that actually want to improve and change, to be able to proactively change their business practices is very small compared to the practices that wait until the recession happens. The wait until someone dies that waits until an employee leaves and suddenly they realize Oh, my goodness, I have to make all these changes. Okay. So the way I see the architectural unions is that their response to The fact that architectural practice owners have not of their own initiative embraced better business practices to become more profitable to become more financially abundant. So they can afford to invest in their employees, they can afford to create the best culture so they can afford to be highly paid. Right? There's this there's this false narrative in the architecture industry, like you mentioned, right at the beginning this podcast, that as an architect, we don't get highly paid, we can't get highly paid. And so it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And so what unions are doing is they're coming in, they're saying, Okay, we're gonna apply some outside force, that's now going to force architects to actually have better business practices. And that's fine. If as an architect, if that's what you need, if you need to sit and wait until a union comes along your employees band together and demand higher wages, well, that's something you're going to have to it's going to have to happen to you, right? However, it doesn't need to be that way. Right? The unions are a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. If we were more aware of the way that we're running our businesses, our practices and the impact, that are poorly managed in a poorly run or a practice that isn't using best practices, the impact that it's having on our lives, on her family's on our health, on our well being. Architecture would be a very different profession. But we get a bit of, as you mentioned, it goes back to the cult of design, we get a certain amount of self righteousness, don't we, Ryan? About design, right? So instead of making the money, because we find ourselves incapable to be to make a lot of money financially, or we have stories about the morality, the ethics of money, well, we need to feel justified somehow, in what we're doing. Every human being wants to feel justified, wants to feel righteous wants to feel like they're right. And so we rest our laurels. On this idea of design, which has become, as Ryan mentioned, a religion it's become a cult, the cult of design. And this cult of design, if it's left unchecked, we're seeing the symptoms, because 20 years ago, when I was first starting out in architecture, even at that time, we were having the architectural profession, what architects do, began to be eroded by other paraprofessionals coming in. Now, what's interesting, if you look at some of the other industries, like for instance, I'm thinking about law. In law, they have paraprofessionals, right? So you have professionals and you have paraprofessionals, in in medicine, you have professionals and paraprofessionals, a professional would be the doctor, the paraprofessionals, would be the physician's assistants, the nurses, that the medical technicians like everyone else that doesn't need to have the doctoral degree. In, in, in law, we have the attorney that has a law degree and the licensing, and then under them, we have a paraprofessional, which would be a paralegal, right? So ultimately, it's it's these are these are industries that have responded to market forces, by making the business itself more efficient, right, because we know if you have a highly paid architect, doing something that an intern could do, that's an inefficient use of resources, right? However, an architecture just to put to put forth another point here is that architecture has no route, there's no there's no proof. There's no pair of professional route in architecture, for better for worse. So the conversation needs to happen. Because the way that architects become trained, is they go through internship, they go through their their licensing exam, then you become a licensed architect, right? So it's almost like you have a hospital where everyone's a doctor. Even the janitors are like on the track to become doctors.

So where's the place for the paraprofessionals? In the architectural industry? Right. So this is just pointing out that there's, there's so many lessons that we could learn about the way to operate an architectural practice, from other industries, that we however, we blame the fact that we're not profitable. We blame this on the industry at large. We blame this on our clients. We blame this on people who don't get the value of architecture, which is all certainly true to an extent. But at the end of the day, we do it to ourselves. We're the ones that don't value what we do enough to be able to, let's, let's say just make it rain. Right? So here a business like can we is it possible to marry the money conversation of having a highly profitable practice with the conversation of having good design? Because historically, there's this, this divide that we've seen in architecture, we have the design centered practices on one side, and then you have the commercial focuses practices on the other side. Now, you do have some that bridge the gap, and there are some practices that have actually started and we're seeing a trend. We're seeing a trend of architects and practices starting to wise up and simply because If they're being forced to, they don't have a choice.

I think it's I think you're spot on, I think there's a lot of practices that that are bridging that gap of being design of retaining a design sentiment, or design focus, if you like, but underpinning it with really healthy business practices. And I think there is, when, you know, we've interviewed a number of these practices on our on the podcast and practices like, but just carvers and partners where I used to work springs to mind or Olson kundig, another one, which the kind of quality of the work that's coming out of these practices is astonishing. And it's underpinned by really good business practices. Be arcane goes be another one. And then there's other practices, what are much more kind of smaller, boutique scale that are retaining and managing good business practices. And, you know, going against that idea that good design and good business don't go together?

And let's, let's go, let's go back to the right, let's go back to the flight of these mid career professionals out of architecture, because this is one of the problems that firm owners are suffering the industry suffering right now, because of this, not only the industry, but our clients. And the crazy part is, is that actually this is actually impacting the built environment. Like think about that for a second. So let's let's take this problem back. So we have the lack of mid career professionals, which means that architects can't take on as much work. Right, so go ahead. This is, yeah, well, let's talk about that. More, I think I'm one of them. You're one of them. We're a couple of we're right here. Well, here's here's a conversation. Remember the conversation we're having with Chris, the other week? Remember,

we need to get back in the field, Nick,

I know just go start doing architecture again. Does anyone want to hire me unhearable. By now, no one wants to hire us. Right? There's no chance. Right? Do you remember the conversation we were having last week with Chris. So Chris, Chris runs a very, very, very successful residential architectural practice, they do work for some of the, you know, the top individuals in the world and, and recently, they had someone on their team who left the practice, because he could get paid more he was more on he was on the visualization side, he could get he could pay get paid almost double or triple what he was earning in architecture, moving into the special effects and like film industry. Yep, like think about that for a second. So you're you you kind of mentioned earlier in the conversation. You know, this idea in your manifesto as well, that architects can get paid more highly with their skills outside of architecture oftentimes, than they can on the on the inside of if they stay within architecture. This is an example. And so how do we as architects, how what's the impact on the industry, when we're losing people to other renowned now we're not just competing with other architectural practices? We're actually losing people to other fields. And it's hard to compete with that.

Right, yeah. And wild?

And what's the root cause of that? Well, it's the money conversation, it comes down to lack of money. And why does lack of money exists? In a practice, it comes down to the fees that the architects are able to charge? And why can architects not charge higher fees? Well, we can blame clients that clients just aren't willing to pay for it. But the end of the day, here's the thing. Were the architects were the ones charging?

Yeah, I mean, you know it at the end of the day, our fees are a direct correlation to US business skills, marketing and sales primarily. Yeah. Right. And we're not in in the architecture industry is a mature industry. So it's, it's gone through that phase of being a brand new entrepreneurial field, or, you know, like on the, on the, it's like a it's not a frontier industry anymore, where it's unregulated. And you can make it, you can make it big, you know, like how Manhattan would have been 400 years ago, where you were all you got to do is just go and buy, just put your stamp on a piece of land and then you're gonna make a load of money out of doing it.

400 years ago, Ryan, there were just Native Americans running around Manhattan just to let you the United States isn't a 200 years old man. I mean, we're not we're not like the UK or you guys have been around for 1000 years.

If you hadn't if you hadn't, if you hadn't landed in 400 years ago. What the Americans They didn't know, they were swindled

they were they were living they were living in, they were living in peace without without fences Ryan.

In the early days, then of the upstate New York and the set in the settlements, right, it didn't take much to kind of lay claim to land rights, right, you know, that land would then become extraordinarily valuable. Now, okay, but there's a whole nother, there's a whole other part of that as well of the frontier and kind of having the, the courage or whatever it was to leave Europe and then come and settle in a new land that takes something because well, which is very similar to kind of, you know, being an entrepreneur, if you learn a lot on the other, the other bad stuff those guys did, as well, which isn't about being an entrepreneur. But the the idea, that piece of land in New York many years ago, was much easier to come by, and was much easier to make money out of. Whereas now today, of course, you can still make massive big money in New York, as a real estate developer, but you got to be well, you've got to be so much more sophisticated. And you've got to, you've got to have your skills really, really dialed in. And you've got to be able to be really good, like commercially focused. So same thing in architecture, that the industry has matured, and it's highly competitive. And we're competing against all these other kinds of industry industries as well. So our business acumen is now more important than it's ever been. But on the on the flip side of this, is that actually having business acumen as an architect and financial literacy, as an architect, that's a massive differentiator. Because of the because of the color of design,

exactly. It's an and this is great, Ryan, it's an opportunity for certain architectural practices. And we're seeing this, especially with some younger practices that are recognizing the gap in the market. So what what I what it sounds like you just described was brilliant, which is that the architectural industry has matured and evolved, but architects skills in the areas of marketing, selling business development, practice, management has not kept pace with the maturity of the industry. And so as we're saying, as, like I mentioned previously, we've seen an erosion of architects responsibilities from, I guess, I opened a loop and I didn't even finish that thought. But back when I was talking about paraprofessionals, you know, over time, in the 20 years that I've been practicing, what I've seen is I've seen an erosion of architects responsibilities, and any architects has been around for a while has seen this as well, that 4050 years ago, architectural practices largely did most of the things involved with building and design, and then they would the contractors would build it, right, the builders would build it. Nowadays, with the project, you're going to have an assorted cast of characters, you're going to have an owner's representative, you're going to have a construction manager, you're going to have low voltage designers, you're going to have security consultants, like all these people are things that used to be done in house. So as as buildings have gotten more complex, there's been a greater demand for other people to come in and fill these needs. I mean, I know for a fact that construction managers, and I have a friend, she runs a very successful construction management firm here in my local area. And she didn't even have a background. She was an entrepreneur, she just saw an opportunity, started to go into school board meetings, and launched a construction management company. And she has a private plane. She knows she takes a couple a couple of weekends a month to fly to the coast. I mean, the company is rep massively profitable, right? They're making tons of money. While architects are like feeling guilty. They're having this shame, this proposal shame, right? It's like the we all know the proposal, you know, the proposal shave, right? Sort of like that dream where you like, you're, you're dreaming that you wake up, you're dreaming you go to school without underwear on. It's like that same feeling like everyone. It's like when you send that proposal, you just have this feeling of dread inside like you're naked. The proposal shame, right? Well, these other people, they don't have proposal shame, they're willing to charge what they're worth. They're willing to charge because they value themselves they value themselves

now. So now this is this is really deep. Sorry, continue. No, please go ahead. This this idea and again, you touched on it earlier about you know, one of the root causes here is that we're talking this big game of architecture, and the cult of design, you know, and the power of design if you like, but then clearly we are we're undervaluing ourselves if we're not, if we're not willing to put the fee on it. Mm hmm. And we're not willing to learn the skills to be able to put the fee on it

well, and to make that stick right to be able, so here's the thing, right, is that we have to be able to have take the responsibility for the fees that we're charging. And I don't think most architects do, I don't think that really enters our mind. I think that we believe there's this belief that the fees we charge are limited by the marketplace, they're limited by what people are willing to pay. When what we're ignoring is the great now to a certain degree, yes, people are willing to pay a certain amount, right? You can't go to a residential client and they want to do a million dollar house, you're like my fuse will be $10 million. But even even when even with that, if even with that ignore honestly ridiculous example, I could see a scenario in which that might actually happen. Because the thing with marketing is sales, marketing and sales are simply tools to be able to help you build demand for your services. That's what marketing and sales are. And if you don't believe if you don't believe in the value of your services, then you're never going to try to get those skills, or be able to implement those strategies. Hey, in a clear, and I hope you enjoyed this conversation that Ryan and I had about the cult of design a very, very important topic. Be sure to tune in next week for part three, and the final segment of our conversation about the cult of design. And that's a wrap. 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 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. Carpe Diem