Architecture, And: An Evolving Career in Tech

A I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain. We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

B Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects.

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted.

B Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

A Hi, Evelyn. Hi, disruptors.

B So I am happy to say that I knew our guest way back when you were the New Jersey Regional Associate Director, And then, again, when you were the Western Mountain Region Young Architect regional director, and this is all within the AIA, so definitely an AIA connection. But now we don't have any more regions in the AIA. We have states. And during that time, you've moved from traditional practice to marketing and business development, which I know Janine can resonate with, to being now a pretty new title of knowledge leader at a tech company that primarily works with the c part of the AEC industry. And you also have this unique role as a part time operational specialist at Method Group.

C Yeah. Yeah. I've been fortunate enough to kinda work on both sides of the country. I don't know. You've been from California would call Colorado West Coast, but it feels like it to me. And getting to see all the different kinds of work styles and really grow into the tech sector has been an interesting journey. I've always had a passion, I think, and it started with the AIA of how can I make the biggest impact in my profession? How can I really help architecture be what it wants to be? And there was a point in my career, I think, we were talking about the career paths at the AIA, and I started to realize that I can only ever make so much impact at a firm. And if I wanna make something more, I really probably should change my focus to helping firms, and and focusing on a lot of the things that I used to see as an intern and a job captain at firms that would always beg me to ask the question of, like, why are we still doing things the way we've always done them? And really start to learn a little bit more about what our relationship is with the technology that we use.

B Yeah. And, Nick, I don't think I don't think you're the only one asking that question, and you're not necessarily the only one coming to that realization as they're going through practice. I think, though, when people think about tech, and we've said this before on the show, you know, people think about UX as immediately what they jump to. And my position at tech is at a very large company. Right? Even Slack was 3,000 or more people, which in architecture terms is a large firm. It's huge. But you're at Avocado now, and Avocado isn't like a big tech company, and you're not doing UX design. So I wanted to talk with you a little bit about kind of the other opportunities and the other roles out there as you have transitioned in your path to where you are.

B But why don't we start by first saying your name? I don't think we've said your name yet in full. And then just introducing yourself a little bit more in terms of where you are now.

C Totally. So I'm Nick Carabello, and and great to meet you all listeners. I am an architect by trade, like probably many of you listening in. I work at a variety of small shops from Arcari and Iovino out in New Jersey to Davis Wentz, which was the last place I worked in Colorado, to firms like Gensler and learned a lot about, you know, the differences between small and large architecture firms and how many of them actually have similar pains to do with how we do our work and how we communicate and how we track that. I was working at David Smith. I've always been passionate about being a business developer. One of the things I noticed in architecture is that we don't typically traditionally get a lot of good business skills in school, and then we're caught figuring it out as we go. And one of the things I knew that I recognized at Gensler is if I wanna work on great projects, I need to go find great clients.

C And so that really started to introduce me to, you know, what's good marketing and what's good sales for firms. But as I was doing that, you know, I realized too that, you know, there's a lot of owners that need help. There's a lot of contractors that need help. And much of the pain and frustration in our day to day jobs just comes from the fact that we're all kind of individuals learning it as we go, doing the best we can. And so how do we actually start to have the conversations across those channels to do more? And so one day, I was filling out a submittal log like the rest of us might know. It painfully boring, incredibly essential, but not exactly what I you know, when I went to school, I thought I'd be doing. And, you know, I started to think as well, you know, people are submitting this information, and we're sharing this information. And then we're spending a whole bunch of time doing, like, this really rote work of, like, keeping logs and tracking that stuff.

C It's like there's gotta be a better way. And that's really what started my journey into tech. I found a a platform in Genius at the time. It was the first tech company that I worked for. And I remember them sitting on the AIA conference floor talking to architects about returns on investments and, you know, how they're gonna get more value out of the tool. I was like, oh, gee. This is like it's such an awesome tool. I'm such a fan of what they're trying to do.

C They're building this platform for people to share information so I don't have to keep track of this stuff anymore. It's like, just by sharing, it's there. It's like and now these guys are going and talking to architects about return on investment when really, like, most of us, at the end of the day, like, we wanna design. We wanna explore problems. We wanna, like, have the fun and creativity that our profession brings us. And, like, the ROI is getting to do more of that. It's not the dollars and cents. We're probably one of the more altruistic professions because we have to care about the the community and the public and all these other things that aren't necessarily our client at times.

C And so we changed the messaging on the expo floor. I tested it out. They actually got somebody to go on for a sales opportunity. And I started at Ingenious as an account executive, just working with architecture firms, talking to them about their problems and how, you know, we could help them at the time to do that. But that's where really, like, the architect in me kind of took over because user experience, as you said, is a really easy I think it's not easy, and nothing in the tech industry is easy. But it's a easy transition to see because it's still design oriented. UX has to do with how people interact with digital space, much like architecture has to do with the physical space. So it just, like, it makes sense.

C It's so translational. Like, no one needs to, like, think really hard about what that means when you're when you're moving over. But all of that, I guess, I started to realize is that design 2 is about how you build a business, is about the way you conduct business, the way you conduct the experience with your customers. And by going into sales, I started to then hear from the firms that we had sold to and them saying, hey, this is really great, but this isn't working the way I thought it might. This isn't doing the thing that I might want it to do. And that's where the role of product really kind of it took over in my life because I was like, wow, like, we can really be thinking about how we design this product from that more concept level and then work with the UX teams similar to, like, how a project manager works with the design team, a product manager with the UX folks. And so I found a lot of passion and success in bringing my empathy from the industry to the table as the thing that creates value and then me focusing on what are our product goals, what are the marketing goals, and how do we make sure that that aligns with the audience that we serve. And I think that's something that a lot of technology companies lack is, like, they're building a product, but they don't they know the customer, and they know the pain.

C It's easy to do them in in business case studies. But to, like, really intimately understand in the case of Ingenious at the time was, like, that talking to architects about a return on investment versus talking to them about getting the design work were 2 entirely different conversations. And I think that's something that was, like, really exciting to observe as I started my my journey into the tech sector was, like, this design empathy thing that we pick up on as architects is one of the most valuable tools that any industry could be tapping into.

A So I always love these conversations. And for our listeners, this is part of what we call our architecture and series, which is interviewing different career professionals who have made the pivot from architecture into something else. And so, Nick, it's really amazing knowing your story because I did see you come up through AIA and then seeing where you're at now in your career. I wanna get further into the tech piece, but I want to maybe just pause for a second and talk about how did it feel for you leaving architecture, you know, taking that step away from the traditional practice? Because I think that's what our listeners wanna understand is, like, how do you get from there to this new career venture, and what does that feel like?

C To be on the nose about it, it's scary as hell. I remember spending about 2 to 3 weeks as evaluating the opportunity to move over. I had a great opportunity at Davis Wind. So I was I went from getting licensed to becoming the business development lead. I was in charge of the Colorado office in terms of all of our, like, public facing work, and it was a great opportunity. It's something that I think I aspire to be when I was in school. And so I was sitting there thinking, like, I've achieved, like, this awesome job that I'm so happy to have. And then here's this opportunity that's so wildly different.

C Like, what do I do? And I think there's not a lot of us quite yet that have made this transition or made this transition as long as I have. So it it does feel lonely at times. I think there's this there's also our impression of, like, what the ivory tower architect is and, like, will they welcome me back into the profession? Because that was a lot of the things I was thinking about. It's like, okay. I'm gonna have, you know, 5, 6 years of tech experience. If I wanna get back in architecture, is someone gonna hire me? Or are they gonna say, hey. Like, your your pencil's gone dull. Like, we can't do this anymore.

C And so those are all a million ideas that were running through my head. I think what made it easy for me is I did choose a tech company that was working in the construction industry. And I knew that by building relationships with other firms, the worst case scenario of my Ingenious job was that I was getting paid in network, That I would be building relationships with firms. I'd be helping them with their business. I'd be developing that trust. And if everything went wrong, I'd have a 1000 people to call. And that was the thing that really helped me be like, you know what? There's a little bit more security in this, and and if anything, it might help me with my career growth, especially with being interested in business. Because I was getting questions from folks like even my mom, and she was like, I don't like, you just spent, you know, 5 years in school, 10 years getting your license, and now you're just, like, throwing it all away.

C I was like, I don't feel like that, but, like, I understand. Like, I the other voice in my head was whispering to me. I was like, are you doing all of this? And I was like, well, you know what? Somebody has to do this, and this is something that I think the AIA really taught me. It's like, we wanna see change in the industry. Like, someone has to roll up their sleeves and, like, do it. And so it's just like, you know, I'm gonna throw caution to the wind. I'm gonna say worst case scenario, I'm networking, and, you know, I'll land on my feet. And I think that's really what helped me is to have that confidence is that I knew my industry.

C I was still working alongside. I was still trying to help them. And that if I was still focused on architecture and at least a little bit, it wasn't gonna be that bad. The other thing I think that really helped me get over the hurdle too was I started to build good relationships with other firms. So Method Group who I help as an operations specialist is a very small role, but it allows me to, like, have touches with an architecture firm and, like, feel like I'm still involved in the day to days without, like, having lost everything that I've done.

A Do you still feel at this point in your career that you're part of the architecture community?

C I think I do. I think COVID really made a huge impact to how close I felt. Like, we weren't having in person conferences. A lot of the ways that I was getting in touch with the community kinda dissipated over the past couple of years. But I keep in touch with a lot of people. I, you know, caught up with Evelyn, and now we're here. And so I think it's definitely not the same. I miss continuing education.

C I miss lunch and learn. I miss all the kind of stuff where we get to sit and learn and talk and and do design. But all of those things I miss, I feel that I get to do differently. So with my role now being, you know, a thought leader, I get to work with the marketing team and talk about how does our messaging connect with the audience, much like how does a design connect with the people that are gonna be the end users. It's kind of hanging on to, like, that what is being the transferable skill set and how am I still leveraging that makes me still sharp as an architect if I were to ever come back.

B That's interesting to me. I guess, would you ever come back?

C Would I ever come back? I think the answer is, yes. Maybe. It really has to do with the temperature of the firm, the type of opportunity. There's a lot of ingredients. I think that the industry is rapidly changing whether we like it or not, and I'm really curious to see how firms start moving faster and getting past a lot of the barriers that I see in traditional practice today. So I would never rule it out. I think if there was a really exciting opportunity at a firm to contribute, I would always be happy to have a conversation. But at this stage where I'm at, I think I've gained enough confidence out in the tech sector where I know I'm developing new skills every day.

C I've always, as part of my career mantra, is position myself for growth. Everything else will come after that. So if I'm learning new skills and I'm in new environments and picking up new things, I see that as ways that it's helping me develop my career. So if I choose to go to architecture, it would have to be something that is a little bit more product driven and is a little bit more thoughtful about the way they they create their designs, almost more tech centric, which was kind of what brought me over to Method was this idea that, like, how can an architecture firm operate like a start up? Josh is incredible with enabling that kind of environment in his firm, which is why it was such a unique opportunity to work with him. And that's kind of like that is the architecture of that idea right now, which is funny if you, you know, wind the clock back. I remember sitting at the interview for Gensler once, and I said, you know, the thing I'm most interested in is the architecture of architecture, not necessarily like the practice of. So I wanna know how the teams come together. I wanna know how we do our work and design better processes for that.

C And I think being in product and being in tech has really helped me be a lot more thoughtful about what it means to create things.

A Oh, that's so well said. I really hope that people heard what you said because I'm hearing so frequently, I think, a little bit of confusion and disappointment from people in the industry that people are leaving and not continuing their journey to become architects. But I think what you've summarized points out several things that are understandable. The fact that I think the 3 of us can agree that we're looking for a culture shift in the way architects practice to make it more enticing, and we believe that that's possible, and that's why we're advocating for it in our careers. But also just kind of expanding, you know, the possibility of how you practice. Like, you're talking about a business model change, like merging lessons from a different industry into the industry like, take the business model of practice and design it in new ways that address some of these problems that we're all facing. I think we are completely with you that we believe that that's possible for our industry.

C Like, it's cool to think about, and it's hard I think it's hard to perceive from the inside of the industry. I remember all the different conversations even through throughout the AIA where it's like, we don't wanna commoditize architecture. We don't wanna think about architecture as a product. But there's aspects of architecture that are products that we create drawings. Those drawings create products, and those, if they're good, they create outcomes, like, you know, projects are delivered on schedule. There's less questions. People know what they're doing. Design is still very much a service, and, like, finding ways to blend those business models and think differently about how we deliver, I think, gets a lot of clarity.

C If you treat a design team like a product manager and you treat the documentation team like they are the developers, you give them really clear requirements. You give them really clear expectations for what they need to do. Measuring work becomes so much easier. Design has now clearly communicated the performance requirements and the aesthetic of a building. There's ways to tee this up. It's not all that different from the way we do things today, but it's the responsibilities are sequenced a little bit differently to give people more autonomy. Because what I find is, like, being a younger person person in the profession, it's like, I wanted to be able to design. I wanted to have some authorship over a building.

C But in the old project management way, it's like, no. We need to do this, period, end of sentence. 1st product is really like, hey. This is the what. You guys figure out the how. And, like, that relationship and that autonomy is something that I would feel would be really attractive to the younger and the aspiring architects of the world that are really looking to have some authorship and ownership in the creative process, but haven't really been enabled because we have this old project management structure in place.

B What's really interesting about what you just said, I think, and hopefully a few people were, like, shaking their heads saying, like, oh, there's an interesting correlation between product manager. So in tech, when you're managing a product, as you're a product manager versus project manager in architecture, a lot of the titles of product manager are the ones that we complain about in architecture when they're called software architects. So I think just interesting that you're you're beginning to draw that connection between the 2. And it's almost like I know we give software architects a lot of grievance, but looking at their processes and how software architects, their workflows, and and how they manage teams, I think, actually can be helpful to the architecture industry at large.

C Yeah. I think for what it's worth, and maybe this is gonna get people to grumble, but there's there's so much similar about a software architect to an architect. It's systems. It's, like, pulling them together, and then it's creating good outcomes from it. And, like, that's what we do is we understand, you know, building systems and how they come together, building program and how they come together, no differently than a software architect is gonna understand, like, how are they building the solution? What are the what are the limitations of it? What can it accommodate? And, like, how people are gonna experience it. And I think tech has embraced its similarities to architecture, where architecture is like, no. No. This is our our corner of the universe, where I think there's a lot of room for us to learn that, you know, as these tools develop, as we become a more tech forward industry, there's a lot we can learn from the people who admire our profession and take that same structure and have executed differently and are having better results.

B There's a lot of interesting analogies that can be made between tech and architecture. What I also find interesting is that you've held a lot of different positions in tech. So that role is evolving for you. So, like, you talked about being a accountant manager. What were those positions? And then I think, where were you applying your architecture skills on each?

C I held a lot of different positions. So I I started in sales as an account executive. So it was a start up. And the thing about start ups is, like, you're plugging the holes in the wall as they're they're flooding, and you're doing everything that you need to do. So, like, we didn't have a a full marketing team. So, like, I was doing sales, but I was also doing enablement. And I was also working with the sales development people to make better phone calls so that we could get better leads. And the next role that I had was quality assurance, and that really came from, I think, being an architect and caring about users.

C I've always kind of told people who would hire me is, like, look, one of the things about me is that, you know, you're hiring me to care deeply about the company and about what we do. Like, I'm gonna provide feedback. You might not like it. I might tell you you're, like, I might tell you to your face. I'm like, this is like we have a problem, and that these are the things that we have to do. And I think in start ups, that is it's welcomed. It's frustrating, obviously, to hear things that are contradictory to what you're working on and what your focus is, but it's important. Like, if you're not listening to, like, you shouldn't let people who say dissent kind of determine your path, but you should definitely listen to them because they're always gonna tell you what, like, they're worried about.

C People speak from their fears. And so I got into quality assurance because I was getting phone calls from customers, and they're like, hey. We need these things to work, and they're not working the way we'd expect them to or or the way we'd use them. And so I went back to the product team, and I said, hey. You know, I was getting all this feedback. I decided to, like, you know, open up the application myself, spend a couple hours with it. And here was all the things that I uncovered that we really should be taking a closer look at. And as we were starting to pivot away from architecture firms and look more towards owners and owners reps, my experience in sales wasn't as relevant because I didn't have that empathy for owners.

C And so they were like, well, how about you come and help us with the quality of the product? And so then that's really what brought me over to the product world was just being able to, like, observe, which is I think a good architect skill is to be able to observe and understand what's happening and then design a solution for it. And so I'd sit with the product teams. I would sit, with the developers, and we would define that scope for what part of the product we were cleaning up and improving. And then we would go and we'd test it, and I'd be the kind of the last gate of, you know, is this something that we'd be comfortable putting in front of a customer or not? But by doing that, it's like, I kind of the more you know about the story, like, the more organic all of this feels because as I was doing all that QA stuff, the best way to control quality is to control the top of the funnel. Like, if you put crap in, crap things out the other end. That's just how it works. And so my quality job very quickly went to, like, okay. We have these bugs to but how do we stop these bugs? How do we make this so that this job is much different? And so I started working really closely with the product team.

C We worked on how we delivered things, how things are reviewed from design to delivery. We cleaned up a lot of that process. So that way, when it got to QA, it was a matter of checking boxes. It wasn't a matter of, like, what are the 500 things that I need to guess could possibly go wrong here, and I I don't know enough. So by doing that, that really exposed me to the product leadership opportunity. And as I was working at Ingenious, I started to ask a lot of questions of, like, okay. This is the solution we're working on. What does the industry need? And one thing that I observed, and and this is, like, no flack to Ingenious.

C I think they have a great product and a great vision for what the future and the profession could look like, but I don't think that there's ever a silver bullet. Like, we know that there's a 1,000,000 designs for any one project. And so something I started to observe about the industry and these kind of ecosystem solutions is that by putting everybody into one platform, you fall into the kind of design for everyone, design for nobody kind of problem. And the reason people like point solutions, why architects like things like Revit and ARCHICAD, why general contractors like Procore and so on, is because those tools are purpose built for them. And so to me, I started to see that future shift of, well, the ecosystem is a good idea, but what we really need is something that enables decentralized service through connected information. If we could all use what we want but then share, like, can we get the same results differently? And that I think was very much like the the question I was asking at the time that led me to Avocado, which is truly we're not a tech company as much as we're a tech consultancy, and we support owners with creative technology solutions. So when an integration doesn't exist, we support that. A big problem in the world right now of data is that, like, getting it all in one place so that you can report on it, really challenging.

C We help owners with that because, you know, as you get all these projects, they're all on different systems. You can roll them together and, like, actually see how things are performing across your portfolio and help owners make better decisions. Because I want owners to make better decisions because an owner who can make good decisions is a great client for an architect. And the owner who can't make good decisions or doesn't have good historical knowledge about the products they've worked on are sometimes the more difficult clients to work with. And so I've been, like, pulling on this thread as I've gone. I was like, okay. I was doing sales. I saw problems.

C I commented on problems. So then I became QA. I was doing QA, and I saw that there's problems in product development. And so then I found myself a product role over at Avocado to try and create a product of my own. From there, I learned the harshities of the tech sector where, you know, startups fail. It's worse than the services based organization. And so when you have to make business decisions, as unfortunate as they can be, we decided not to do the product anymore. And that was really challenging.

C That happened in November. But they said, hey. You know, you connect with the industry really well. You understand these problems. You like talking about them. You don't shut up. And, like, let's give you an opportunity to do those things. And so now I work with the marketing team at Avocado because we've developed all these different verticals for how we can support owners, and now our goal is to connect with them.

C So now we're designing, you know, different kinds of campaigns of how people interact with social media, of how people interact with emails so that we can attract the right business to our company, which is, you know, really fascinating. Because when I was doing BD ages ago now at architecture firms, I don't know if we, like, truly leverage marketing the way we should be in our industry at all.

A No. The answer is no. You did not. I can tell you.

B And they still don't.

C Yeah. I

B think as the follow-up to that. Well, because and

A hear me out, you guys. If you're shaking your head or rolling your eyes, like, proposals are not marketing, and we default to proposals and qualifications all the time. But, guys, that's, like, such just one little baby percentage of what marketing can be, And we don't max it out. Like, we're just defaulting to the quickest way to get project work, which is through proposals to interviews.

C Mhmm. Yeah. And that's, like, it's the problem. Like, if they're doing proposals, they're sales, they're not marketing. And and even then, they're not even sales because they're just being told what the they're a graphics department at so many firms, unfortunately. And there's so much about marketing that that I learned in tech starts with just, like, understand your market. Who knew that's what marketing meant? But getting into, like, yeah, how many people could be our customers in our area? How what is their spend? What is the size of the market? How much money can I reasonably get from this market if I were to capture all of it? How much am I really going to capture? Like, those are the things that your marketing team should be working on and then identifying who the people are in those spaces and how to reach them. If they're not doing that and they're doing just proposals and they're doing, you know, website updates and blog posts, that's keeping the lights on.

C That's great. You know, like, you're supposed to do that stuff. But, like, if you're not being thoughtful about how you obtain business, like, what can our expectation be? And so that's really what's been exciting about building this marketing team. We're up to 3 people now, which is super cool. We get our hands dirty with everything. But being thoughtful about, you know, our website, what does it mean to visit our website as somebody and be looking for information? How hard is it to find that information? This is UX stuff for everybody who's interested in UX. But, like, being able to sit and, like, think about if I this was this other individual, what is my journey, and how do I get where I'm going? I don't feel like I've stopped practice because I I feel like anybody listening to this conversation is like, oh, this is, like, so similar to, like, how I'd be thinking about, you know, design flow and program and other things.

A Absolutely. I wanna ride this because we we're having a really good marketing conversation. So, yes, it's a very similar process to how architects take a lot of time and care to think about the users of their building and delivering them something that's exceptional, but it's just applied to something different, which is the business as a whole. So, like like you said, the client's journey trying to attract them to the firm. It's not about getting any client or just getting revenue. It's about getting the right client, the right project that you want, and how do you get that. You have to build a thoughtful pathway that connects that person to your organization. And I was just gonna say, Nick, knowing what you know now about marketing, what do you think could help firms level up? Like, what would you take back?

C Yeah. That's a it's a good question, and it's it's interesting to think about some of these problems that I was having as a business development lead where they're like, okay. We'll go make $300,000 in the education sector. And I'm like, where did you get that number from? And so the very first thing that I'd recommend from firms is to to be thoughtful. There's a lot of great things out there. A business model, Canvas, Google it. There's templates. It's super easy to use and understand, But it's gonna ask you a ton of questions about who your customer is, where they are, how you serve them, what the values are.

C Because I would then challenge Studio did not do us any good when it came to marketing and presenting our projects. Talking about views, talking about like, we all love that stuff, and I think there's a lot of reasons to appreciate it. Is not going to sell your architecture. It's just not. Your client is making an investment of multiple 1,000,000 of dollars probably, and they want specific results from that. They want to know that your drawings are gonna be good, and there's not gonna be a lot of questions. They want to know that, you know, there's not gonna be too much fluctuation in their cost. They want to know how you're gonna provide them value.

C And it's important, 1, to understand that value so that you can speak to it. And then that's how you go in and track the right, like, customers. The Davis Wins is now Wellology. They just rebranded. The firm is all about wellness and healthy living, and that's what their firm speaks to. I think that's actually it's really good marketing because now I know as a customer, I'm looking for an architecture firm, and wellness is truly important to me. They're someone who speaks to my need. They're not talking about this building and that it did these things.

C They're talking about, hey. This is how we create value in the world of wellness through architecture. So I think it's really about understanding who you are and then understanding how to, like, create the mirror that you wanna hold up to your customer for them to see you and the value that you create. But, you know, we deliver award winning projects that doesn't tell anybody anything about your firm and, like, what you care about. So what was award winning about that project? Why did that contribute to the project and the outcomes? Like, I think the problem is is we feel like we always have to have the answer, like, right now or immediate. Like, take your time, step back, and think about how you're truly contributing because delivering it right is a lot better than delivering it at all. I typically say, you know, perfect is the enemy of done. But in this case, like, take your time and be thoughtful about, like, what people are going to be searching, not what you want to tell

A people. Really well said, Nick. Thank you for sharing that.

B I was just thinking in my head, you know, if I'm looking for an architect, how am I gonna search on Google for them, and I'm not gonna start with award winning architects. I almost feel like the general public is, like, award winning architects. Sure. It's, like, really expensive. So as the average consumer anyways, I was thinking about putting myself in the customer's shoes.

C Well, it is interesting because, like, I think that's where marketing comes in. Right? You wanna attract the right customers. You don't wanna attract the tire kickers. You don't wanna attract all these other people. So, like, marketing yourself as, like, a low budget architecture firm, but that's gonna get you a whole lot of low budget business. And, like, is that what you wanna be doing? Short answer can be yes. If you have a really well defined process and can push out projects very effectively and efficiently, delivering low budget economy projects might be for you. If you don't care about that stuff and you wanna do high design and you wanna be more boutique, lean in, embrace your personality, embrace what makes you different because that's what's going to attract that kind of business to you.

C Not, hey. We do award winning whatevers, and we do low budget project. That's not the kind of customer. And I think too many times, firms get into this place of work. We all work is good work, and we have to just continue to, like, absorb it. And, like, to a degree, that's real. Like, we have to pay our bills at the end of the day. But taking a job to put money in the bank is one thing.

C Being thoughtful about your marketing so that you can start to attract the right customers while you're doing that is, like, the next step. Like, don't I'm not telling anybody to turn away work be if they need work. I'm just saying be thoughtful about the work you accept, the stories you tell. And it's okay to do work for people and projects that you're not even gonna talk about. Like, yeah. Sure. We did this one little thing off for somebody. They were a friend, blah blah blah.

C That doesn't get in marketing material. You know, we did our job. We helped somebody out. We did whatever. But where everything we do needs to talk about, like, who we are and the value that we create. It would be really interesting to see an architecture firm that says, you know, what their average like, I hate this because I think RFIs are not a good metric, but, like, owners do for some reason. I I find I'm gonna get on the soapbox for half a second. I find having a bad taste of our RFIs in your mouth is not good.

C Asking questions is important for the success of our project, good or bad. So let RFIs happen because if you create an environment where you don't like let people ask questions, you get mistakes. That's from experience. But owners look at that stuff. And so if you say, you know, projects, we we deliver x 1000000 square feet in this sector and, like, this is our rate. That's something that an owner might take away and make a decision on. I'm not saying put RFIs on your website. Again, you heard how I personally feel about them.

C But there are things that owners consider and they think about when the they're buying the service, and they want peace of mind. They want to know that everything's gonna go okay and that, you know, their budget's gonna be protected. And those are things we should speak to.

A Yeah. You're absolutely right. I usually see that metric in public clients who really care about demonstrating that the project's not gonna go over cost. And I remember the days, like, we were scrambling to find that information because it's not necessarily something that, like, we're tracking on every project, but it is something that you can use as a way to demonstrate different variables about your firm. And so that taught us to get out in front of the way that we're thinking about measuring project success, not just the photography alone and, you know, a really great ribbon cutting ceremony, but, like, what is the perception of the client when they occupy the building, when they've written the last check, when they've, like, turned the key over to them?

C Yeah. There's something that I learned to ask early on is to always, like, talk about success at the very beginning of our project and talk about what success looks like to an owner and make sure you track the hell out of that. Like, you wanna make sure, like, hey. These are the 5 things you listed as success for my project, and here's how we delivered on them. Because if you hit those 5 bars, I don't wanna hear that the project went poorly. If it did, then we'd had a communication breakdown because something wasn't shared that made that experience go poorly. So always making sure that the north star is really clear between you and the customer or the client is really critical. And I think too many times too, we get in this habit of, like, people pleasing, and it's okay to tell a client no.

C It's okay to say, hey. You know what? Good success on this project also looks like good communication to me. And if you're taking a week to get back to me, that's not gonna help this project be successful. Being able to be a good partner means communicating those things even if somebody doesn't wanna hear it in order to share that success, and we have to be a lot more open about that. I was at, KOA, which is it's the owners association. And one of the things they brought up, AIA was doing a panel, and they brought up the whole RFI thing. And but they also then brought up CA, and they said, you know, architects tend to deliver their drawings, and then they go walk off-site. I mean, that they're not involved in construction administration.

C I'd love to have literally, and I quote, an old gray hair walking around my site, making sure my project goes well. And I remember crawling out on my skin during this conversation because I know we're beaten up over construction administration fees left and right. Like, that's the one part of the industry where you're just guaranteed to bleed. And I remember standing up and was like, listen. If you want your architecture to be on-site walking around every day, tell them. Tell them. They I guarantee they will be more than happy to do it for you. Just know that paying somebody to go live on-site for, you know, an hour or 2 hours a day, we're not at a $5,000 CA fee anymore.

A The highest billable rate in the firm.

C Yes. And, honestly, CA should probably be one of the most expensive phases on a project if you want that kind of care. And I think one of the ways this is something that I've been thinking a lot about having been at that conversation in November was, why are we not this is way off topic. But why are we not considering CA as part of the construction budget? It really is. It's part of the construction activities. It's part of making sure the building goes. CA should be broken as part of the larger construction budget. These charge as an administrative line and period end of sentence, it's a better slice of the pie to be part of.

C And then let design be design phases. And I think that's one thing that our industry really needs to innovate on is, like, breaking those 2 because they're not design is not the same as administration, and we need to figure out how to build differently for it because putting it into the design model is screwing us time and time again.

A Wow. I'm gonna resist the urge to really ride that because I think that's such a fun conversation. But since we're nearing the end of this conversation, I wanna come back to any other lessons that you've learned about what we can learn from the world of technology as a career. And, you know, Evelyn and Nick, you both have worked in tech firms at this point. You have the experience and the knowledge at different scales. I'm always super curious about the cultural elements and what we can learn because I often think that that's really what younger staff are hopeful about when they take that pivot into tech. Like, the it's the culture piece. So tell us about what we can learn that we could adopt back into our practices in architecture.

C So I think one of the biggest opportunities is this idea of lean or agile. And I don't wanna say, like, go to lean construction. You need to find how this works for your firm and your culture. Lean is crazy. It's gonna involve being very uncomfortable, but it it also involves putting a lot of trust back into your teams. And so that product that I was talking about earlier, like, the difference between a product and a project manager product is really about, like, what, and then the design the developing team is about the how. That relationship allows for really good synchronicity in companies so you can be fully remote because the product manager is saying, we need x delivered. We need this delivered.

C We need that delivered. The the the people doing the work says, this is gonna take us how long, and we're going to deliver just that. That is way more collaborative and way quicker to deliver things when you're just doing requirements and deadlines that way than thinking like, okay. Here is our DD milestone, but we don't have any kind of things or any kind of decisions about what is actually being delivered in that package. Product forces you to think about the what so much more. And when we get into that side of things, we can actually more effectively manage products. The thing that I struggle with most as a younger professional was lack of clarity, lack of expectation, lack of understanding of what my PM felt was a complete set or what my customer or my client felt was a complete set. But moving that and shifting it from working on a project to we're delivering a seal like, we're developing our lighting strategy for this entire project, and we wanna have this done and reviewed.

C That's way more meaningful than, like, we need to have our CPs done and, like, stop there and nobody knows what that means. Like, what what is a complete RCP? At what stage? You know? And and how much needs to be there? We need to be much more thoughtful about our work and what it means to achieve complete at the many steps of the way.

B One of the other things that we haven't really talked about is kind of this role of the AE, which is how you first found yourself in tech and how that role is lacking, I think, in the field of architecture. So for instance, if our, quote, unquote, product is our process or how architects process and deliver projects, right, the role of the AE is to continue to make that process and that service delivery and that experience for the client better every single time they go out or they ship. So for me, there's a huge opportunity there. I know architecture firms are always trying to do, like, lessons learned from every projects. But what we rarely do is ask us a question, okay, here were the lessons learned. What could we do so that doesn't happen again? And how do we change processes to build in additional checkpoints or to remove friction in the decision making process or to enable people to ask questions. So other things like that won't happen again.

C So the one thing that and this is a book, like, the the the Toyota way and talking about the 5 s's and going back to those lean principles. When you start to trust the teams doing the work to figure out how they need to deliver the work in the best way, they're gonna start to clear a lot of the crap for you. I think sometimes you have the people who are doing the lesson learned are the ones that are not involved in the work. And so it's like, you're not connecting your wires. It has to kind of start with the bottom and how we do things. And then when we observe problems, we have to ask, well, how did we not catch that? What is things that we can change about it so that we do? And what we'll find pulling back on that thread is that maybe somebody didn't have the right information. So how do we get that information sooner? Maybe we have to ask questions sooner. Like, a a good example, I had a change order come in on a project, and it was because a submittal came through, it didn't have a substitution request form on it.

C And so it looked the same, smelled the same, felt the same as far as I was concerned by design intent, it matched. Well, it resulted in a $20,000 change order. This is one of the very first times I was burned. And I was like, oh, wait a minute here. Like, how can we get better if it's not obvious that it's a substitution? That's clearly a problem. So how can we get better about the way we submit? And, like, at from that point in my career forward, like, you were not getting a submittal through me without a CSI cover letter. Like, that was the end of the road. But we had to go back and forth.

C And I was like, listen. Our jobs respond for design intent. Like, I went back to the law book. It's like, this met our expectations. You didn't tell me it was gonna cost more, and therefore, like, we or the owner is not footing the bill for this mistake. You can go and find the other product again, and we can go entertain that. But, like, as far as I'm concerned, this one's suitable. And that was my job as the reviewer on that project.

C But I still felt really bad. Like, there was this $20,000 bill at the end of the day that somebody was gonna have to eat. And I was like, how do we make sure that that doesn't happen anymore? And so it's like thinking about that process, thinking about what created that pain, and then putting in steps to prevent that from ever happening again. You're not gonna do that unless you include your full team for them to be open and communicative about, hey. I wasn't I didn't have this or I didn't have that, and that's why I fell short. People need to be a lot more comfortable falling short and owning it. And that's the thing I think a lot of firm owners need to be aware is, like, creating that, I hate to say it, safe safe space for their team to be communicating about where we failed so that we can work towards success. Because I think a lot of people are a little bit, especially in today's climate, afraid that, like, owning a mistake is gonna be owning the end my resignation too.

C And, like, it's not that I've been promoted more times than not for being a pain in the ass and being very communicative about where we could be doing better and why I was messing up because, you know, we could be doing better things. And so we need to create that trust. We need to treat that culture where we're letting teams actually own their work and letting everybody contribute the way they most meaningfully can on projects.

A Nick, I love what you said in this interview, and I will be cheering you on to continue to build these bridges back to how to make the profession better. So keep them coming.

C Yeah. I mean, it takes a village. I'm excited about, like, this podcast. I'm excited what I see in Entre Architect and all these other communities. There are people who are really thinking about how a change looks like in this profession, and I feel like we're getting really close to that inflection point, especially with things like chat GPT and AI art where, you know, if you're not ready to start moving fast tomorrow, you are going to wake up eating dust. Like, it's time to start thinking about how to change your business because people are going to do it, and it's gonna be really hard to keep pace with them when they do.

B Thank you so much, Nick.

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