Learn to sell something, anything. You’ll never learn more about what it takes to run a business than when you put yourself out there and make an offering.

– Michael Kilkelly, Founder of ArchSmarter

***

Be persistent and don’t give up on your dreams. Find the best team members to build your business with and, most importantly, – don’t be afraid to dare and enjoy what you do.

– Adi Biran & Lihi Gerstner, Founders of Splacer.co

***

It’s all about surrounding yourself with the most talented people who can help you realize your vision and stay most true to your ideas.

– Natasha Case, Founder of Coolhaus

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Studying architecture is just the greatest thing there is. The skills learned are actually quite good for management. You learn to form a vision, present this vision or break it down to smaller tasks.

– Kaspar Helfrich, Co-Founder of Archilogic

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I hope that if architects and design minded people are impacting development and urbanism in a greater way, our buildings and our communities will only get better.

– Ari S. Heckman, Founder of ASH NYC

***

Architects have a huge contribution to make to the world in the 21st century – particularly in shaping how we can live sustainably and happily within ever-denser cities and within the Earth’s resources.

– Will Hunter, Founder & Director LSA

***

Just get started, and don’t be afraid because the people who are successful are willing to fail and so you should be too.

– David Belt, Founder of Macro Sea

***

I would like to see architects be less passive in their roles and with their profession. For me that means real estate development. But it could mean any number of other variations on the trade. Architects are holistic thinkers. I am at my best when I use my right brain and my left brain equally. Architecture school hones both of these hemispheres in a way that’s not common in other professions.

– Kevin Cavenaugh, Founder of Guerrilla Development

***

Start today…! I suffered from analysis paralysis for a long time, fearing I’d never be able to save enough working capital to make a run at starting a business. I was determined to spend as little as possible to make it work.

– Eric Reinhold, Founder of 30×40 Design Workshop

***

In the architectural profession we mainly think about solutions, and we constantly challenge how things are normally done. I think that’s a rare quality.

– Jakob Lange, Partner at BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) and Head of the BIG Ideas project unit

***

I see a profession that is completely different from the one we know today. Traditional practice is broken – I yearn to see solutions that we can’t even imagine today.

– Marc Kushner, Founder of Architizer & HWKN Architects

***

I think that the most important step is to just do it. It sounds bold but in the end you need to think about your business idea and how customers will use and pay for it. Finally, you need to implement it. Do not wait too long; make it a reality.

– Antje Kunze, Founder of SmartBetterCities

***

My advice to architects who want to start their own business is to put creativity at the heart of their activity, and to try to invent new things that can be really useful for other people.

– Filippo Schiano di Pepe, Founder of CoContest

***

As architects, we like to think that successful projects come because we have a great idea. But a project’s success is actually down to risk management by a practicing and experienced developer.

– Roger Zogolovitch, Founder of Solidspace

***

Go for it. I think you just have to start small, and start with what you can do with your own hands and feet, and find a way to be innovative. I think the biggest trap that you can get into is borrowing a lot of money and then finding out that it doesn’t work.

– Matthew Griffin, Co-Founder of Deadline Architects

***

Follow your heart and do what you love to do. However, if it’s business you want then you need to learn to take care not only of yourself but also your customers.

– Qi Su, Co-Founder Modelo.io

***

Architects have to educate themselves a lot more in the areas of digitalization, programming, economics, and the invisible infrastructure of cities. It’s not enough to simply understand how a building is drawn and set up if you want to shape and think about the modern cities of tomorrow.

– Andreas Rauch, Co-Founder of CABIN SPACEY

***

What are your favorite quotes that inspire you?

The post 17 Inspirational Archipreneur Quotes that will Motivate You in 2017 appeared first on Archipreneur.

The architectural profession is dominated by service-based businesses. The conventional way in which architects run their studios requires them to reinvent their services with every new client. Specific requests and project briefs are mostly approached with a high level of customization that is time-consuming and inefficient.

In recent times, a new business model has entered the field of architecture, enabling businesses to become more competitive. The concept of productized services proved to be a superior alternative to the established business model, offering a faster turnover rate, more freedom for principals and employees and more room for scaling.

The idea of productized services draws from the field of product development. While services offer greater flexibility and adaptability, products are considered to be standardized and inflexible. In order to reconcile these two contrasting approaches, business owners can appropriate the efficiency and scalability of products with various levels of customization.

The idea behind productizing design services in not to make services more inflexible, but to systematize them in a way that benefits both clients and service providers by creating repeatable, standardized, and automated practices. This can significantly reduce risks for clients and establish trust through consistent delivery of reliable services. By standardizing prices and billing procedures, clients are more likely to perceive architectural design services as value instead of cost. The often intangible qualities of good design are made more transparent and measurable.

Firms looking to offer productized services have different profiles. Some are just starting out, while others are existing businesses with a healthy client base. Productizing existing business models can also be achieved by adding products to your offering which will complement existing services.

It all starts with the customer/client experience and feedback. Explore what new value a productized service would provide to your clients. Define which parts of your business are the easiest and important to standardize. You can use different online tools to automate parts of your processes. A simple pricing system can go a long way in helping you get new clients. Complement this with a consistent look and feel that make specific service elements recognizable.

MIMA Lab introduced productizing very early on. Marta Brandão and Mário Sousa started their business from scratch, offering prefab housing concepts with plan sets that can be ordered online. The structures are delivered together with a folder of drawings that may be necessary for licensing procedures, as well as fact sheets, and guarantees for fixed prices, components and finishes, construction, electrical installations, sewage and water installations, house permits, five-year warranties, and transportation and assembly within Portugal.

They decided to create a business around the idea of affordable, productized architectural designs. As they said in an interview for Archipreneur, software engineer Miguel Matos helped them to create a software that translates all the design information for the factory and simplifies the construction process. The software also allows clients to locate their property on Google Earth and generate an automatic 3D model of their future houses and its position on the site.

Finnish firm Workspace, on the other hand, is a great example of how productizing can be enhanced by focusing on a specific niche. The firm is a leading Nordic consulting and design agency specializing in workplace design and management. Their approach focuses on creating integrative design that combines resource, space management and information communication technology in order to appeal to businesses in need for environmental solutions for new, emerging organizational structures and business models. They create designs that supports various scenarios of use.

In an interview for aec-business.com, Jyrki Yläoutinen, Executive Workplace Consultant at Workspace, said that a large part of their productizing strategy was to focus on finding businesses and not individual clients. They were inspired by the gaming industry in which developers get user feedback very early and fast.

Their services include workplace management and consultation, support for change management and communication in workplace changes, interior design, and architectural design. With their services clients are saving up to 30% in real estate costs and productivity and speed is increased by 5-50%. The resulting business model led to clients fully understanding what they get for their money and the firm now requiring less time for sales and negotiations.

Eric W. Reinholdt took a more gradual approach to productizing his business by introducing products that complimented his existing services. He started his firm, residential design studio 30X40 Design Workshop after gaining extensive experience working for other architects and seeing the consequences of the recession first hand.

His business struggled until he introduced pre-designed plan sets that cut energy consumption. He established a fee structure for schematic and construction packages. Reinholdt added this new product line to his established service-based model, adding customers that didn’t fit the established model as driving force for his passive income model. His website also allows visitors to buy his influential books on architecture and entrepreneurship.

***

The key to productizing architectural services is to replace the time-consuming model of billing by the hour with a more efficient model with set prices similar to those of products. Potential customers are easier to target, hiring people is more straightforward and project turnover rate increases. It is important to remember that productizing services is not a one-off endeavor, but a process developed by looking at what clients need.

The post How to Productize Architectural Services appeared first on Archipreneur.

Eric’s career as an architect initially followed that well-trodden path many architects are familiar with. After being awarded his professional degree, he went on to an internship, before gaining his licensure and finally starting work in an architectural practice. Eric had spent most of his working life doing the “8-5”.

For Eric, the feeling of working for someone else felt like an existence that was at least sustainable and reliable. But he always had a wish to one day have his own practice. Eric believed, however, that the idea was reserved for an indeterminate time far in the future, a time when he knew that there would be plenty of work available, and that he would be ready for it. His decision not to take action was dominated by the part inside of him reserved for the survival and protection of his family and finances.

How to Start an Architectural Practice from Scratch?

In early 2013, shortly before he turned forty, Eric’s employer had to cut salaries across the firm by 20%. The choice was either to work for no pay on Fridays, or to pursue work elsewhere on that day of the week. This was the time Eric finally decided to ignore the protesting from his inner voice telling him to always take the safer option and started researching how to start his own business.

He began searching for a handbook or step-by-step guide that would help him to get started. But the publications he found were either uninspired or completely outdated. Everything he found, including AIA (American Institute of Architects) publications, seemed filled with fusty descriptions that belonged more to the past than the future of architectural entrepreneurship. So he turned instead to online resources, finding blogs, forums and articles on the Internet that were of much more use to him.

Two years on, and Eric successfully started up his design business, 30X40 Design Workshop. He has detailed everything he learned on the way in a new book, Architect + Entrepreneur. Eric says it is the handbook he would have needed when he first opened his own design practice.

Part narrative, part business book, Architect + Entrepreneur is filled with contemporary, relevant, refreshing tips and advice from Eric’s path to building his business. These are tips that worked for him, as he says in the first sentence of his book:

“Opening my business has been the best career decision of my life” – Eric Reinholdt

Using the Lean Start-up Methodology to Create a Design Business

The concept of the book is that the reader adapts the lean start-up methodology to the founding of his or her own design venture and to create a “minimum viable” product – something like a rough sketch of your business – to achieve business success right from the get go.

The lean start-up methodology is what Eric Reinholdt emphasizes the reader uses when starting a design firm because it specifically looks for ways to avoid spending money on things that aren’t important, and focusing instead on what matters.

The handbook encourages that the potential business owner takes successive small wins that, brought together, support the grander vision for the company as a whole. This sentiment can be summarized in Eric’s statement, “think big, start small, and learn fast.”

12 Things you Will Learn from the Book

The book is structured into 12 separate chapters, each packed with useful, hands-on information on how to start a design firm. The following list summarizes the key things you will learn from the book:

• How to foster an entrepreneurial mindset and prepare to start your business while still keeping your day job.
• How to choose the business model that’s right for your design business.
• Tools and ideas to define the brand and “story” of your start-up.
• How to define your USP and set up a marketing strategy for it.
• How to use online Email marketing, social media and SEO to market your business.
• What to have in mind when getting hired by clients and how to communicate effectively with them.
• How to structure your contracts and fees to get paid what you are worth.
• Basic principles of finance and taxes you will need to consider when starting your design firm.
•  The essentials you will need to outfit your dream studio.
• An in-depth breakdown of your total start-up cost.
• How to implement Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to work the most efficiently.
• What software you should use in order to produce your best work.

Building a business isn’t a single action – it’s a series of small steps. Eric’s book will give you the outline for you to start planning today. The chapters are organized to guide you from your initial idea, to taking action on it. Rather than write a business plan, you’ll be challenged to craft a brand, one that you’ll then start to sell through clever use of new technologies and media.

Have I piqued your curiosity?

About the author

Award-winning architect Eric Reinholdt has built his design practice, 30X40 Design Workshop, using the methodology outlined in this book. He has successfully transitioned from employee to architectural entrepreneur and continues to refine his brand message, help other architects build their independent practices and serve his clients… all from a longhouse he designed himself on Mount Desert Island just off the coast of Maine.

The post Architect+Entrepreneur: A Field Guide to Building, Branding, and Marketing Your Startup Design Business appeared first on Archipreneur.