Editor’s Pick: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur with Roger and Gus Zogolovitch
Welcome to Editor’s Picks, where we feature our favorite interviews, must-watch videos and innovative news from the architectural, design and building communities’ movers and shakers. This week, we want to share with you a talk with Roger and Gus Zogolovitch titled “How to Think Like an Entrepreneur”.
An architect’s average median salary is very low, despite it taking over nine years to qualify. This is “totally utterly absurd” says Roger Zogolovitch, creative director of Solidspace, and comes down to the fact that architects don’t monetize their services.
Architects need to understand and prove the services they provide can be value and not only costs for the client. Clients are interested in added value. The job of an architect is to communicate that value as persuasively as possible.
But if adding value is not solely just based on design skills, what’s the market knowledge that architects need to survive? In other businesses, these include a relentless focus on the customer, understanding the importance of increasing sales and profits, and building brands.
Though architects might initially suffer from a lack of business knowledge necessary for entrepreneurship, the architectural discipline does at least prepare architects as problem-solvers. In being creative, architects have already fought half the battle. Creativity is a hard thing to teach and learn; business is not.
Architect’s widely held distrust of being “commercial” is having serious consequences for the profession argues developer Roger Zogolovitch and his son Gus, chairman of Inhabit Homes.
In their talk, held on 8 January 2015, they argue that architects need to put as much emphasis on sales and marketing as design in order to grow a successful business. And they advise architects “to get their hands dirty” by expanding into other areas such as property development, in order to understand their own “creative commercial mode” and understand the decisions that have a tangible financial impact.
See for yourself in the video of the talk by archiboo:
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To learn more about how you can embrace the business behind designing buildings check out Archipreneur’s book on new business models for architects, “The Archipreneur Concept”. There is a whole chapter on Architect as Developers where we explore funding options and practical examples of exactly how successful archipreneurs have used bank loans, partnering and venture capital to develop their own buildings.
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