Architecture, And: Killing the Profession's Ego with George Valdes

A This episode of Practice Disrupted is brought to you by the American Institute of Steel Construction, AISC. The center's staff architects provide a curated collection of structural steel resources to help architects save time and money, reduce risk. Learn more at aisc.org/architecture. Welcome to Practice Disrupted, the podcast on the business of architecture and how it's changing. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee. FAIA, NOMA architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or rethinking what practice looks like, this show gets into how architects actually change the way they work. Hello, disruptors.

A Welcome back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. George Valdez was here 5 years ago running marketing at Monograph and building the Spatial Syndicate. What got him there is the better story. He came to architecture because an uncle told him it paid well. No role models in the profession. He went to FIU for landscape architecture, took a professional practice class, wrote a business plan for it, and then went and filed the LLC. He and his best friend were running a design firm before either of them graduated. In his words, you can just do things.

A Then Columbia for the M.Arch and a year at GSAPP working on the school's accreditation, which put him deep inside the NAB and NCARB accreditation processes and the whole machinery of how we make architects. That is the year he decided not to practice. Then came the tech years. Part of the founding team at Augmate, head of product at IrisVR, acquired by Autodesk, Paperspace, acquired by DigitalOcean, WeWork, Monograph, Integrated Projects. He was not a technical person when he started. He taught himself along the way. Now he is 4 months into Toolblocks, building a map of who in this industry has actually worked with whom. His premise is that 80% of the revenue here comes out of relationships people already have, and almost nobody maps that.

A We get into why he thinks the client experience is the battleground of the next decade and his line that the profession may need to kill its own ego to be reborn. He did that himself first. Let's get into it. Hi, George. Welcome back to Practice Disrupted. It's so great to have you here again.

B Yeah, great to be here.

A The last time we talked, you were at Monograph. And in order to kind of catch everyone up without necessarily making them go back and listen to your last episode, even though I think they should, why don't you tell us a little bit about your interest in architecture and let's just lay the foundation for, for why architecture in the first place.

B So I guess academically my background's in landscape architecture and architecture. I went to GSAPP for architecture, and I guess the start of interest for architecture in general was maybe a combination of a lot of different interests that I had in high school. I got to use like 3D modeling software pretty early, like Rhino and another tool called Animation Studio, when I thought I was going to get more into like filmmaking to some degree. Yeah, I got advised by my uncle to check out architecture because, in his words, it seemed like it was a very well-paying job. And so, that— it was actually not much direction, really. I didn't really have many role models when it came to the industry. And so, that prompted me to apply at FIU for that. And so, that's kind of where it started.

B Over time, I really got enamored, let's say, with the philosophical side of architecture, especially in undergrad.

A Yeah.

B And the technology piece came in more so at Columbia, where, while I did have a latent interest in technology, it was there where I got to see so many different types of practice that I just kept getting pulled into studios that had to do with, like, let's say, the cutting edge. And so I guess that's kind of where the evolution of that interest up until the point where I graduated and for 1 year, spent some time at GSAPP leading the accreditation where I got to really dive deeply into NAB and NCARB and the whole ecosystem around, you know, training architects to be architects. And so, I think it was there where I was really, you know, diving deep into the credentials and the criteria paired with the exposure to Evan Sharp, who was a student above me that ended up He ended up leaving, going to Facebook, became the founder, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. It was like those 2 things happening at once where I was like, okay, maybe technology is really where I should be focused on as opposed to becoming a traditional architect.

A Can you remind me, did that happen without any firm experience then at that time?

B I did work at several firms, so I spent— in undergrad in particular, I was both working and going to school. So I worked at Arquitectonica's Miami office in their landscape, uh, Arquitectonica Geo, which was an amazing experience. It was such a great team, very lighthearted, which could not have maybe be said about the architecture side of things. So I had some time spending working at different offices, small-scale offices. was part of entries for like PS1 MoMA, things like that, like small practices in Miami. And then in New York, also kind of participated with some small practices in like the summers, like worked with, uh, MOS Architects on a museum exhibition that they were doing. And yeah, so mostly those were kind of the experiences. Also, I guess I should not forget that I did with my best friend at the time in undergrad, we started our own design firm and did some projects on the landscape side as well.

B So yeah, kind of dabbled in it, but let's say maybe on the landscape side much more than architecture.

A Did your thesis at GSAPP have anything to do kind of with your lean towards technology too and the bigger players that were intersecting technology and how things move?

B Yeah. So actually, that was a Graham Foundation grant that myself, friend Simon McGowan, and David Tsai we applied for and got. Basically, it was research looking into what we call geographies of logistics. Basically, around this time, just to set the stage, was like 2012, 2013, there was a lot of conversation around, let's say, large companies like Google and Facebook and how we're— and how they were rethinking the city. In particular, at that time, there was a lot of articles being written about the buses that Google Sort of, you know, so many folks were working out of San Francisco, driving into the Bay Area. And—

A Is that— had the complaints started rolling in already?

B Yeah, the complaints were already kind of rolling in around that. Changes in property values were also starting to happen. And so we were looking at this from basically like at a certain scale, companies exert so much influence into the cities that they operate in, that it was becoming hard to know what did a company town look like at that point. Did Google operate a company town at the— or did Silicon Valley in itself operate a kind of company town through that? And so we were looking at parallels to company towns, and we visited Lowell, Massachusetts, Pullman in Chicago, and we just— we tried to dive really deeply into trying to just understand. And, and though the research didn't end up— we, we didn't kind of bear fruit into any kind of publication, though there might be still time for that— we, we just got to be kind of behind the scenes. We interviewed folks at Google in the real estate team. You know, it was crazy to hear things like Google's 12th employee was the head of real estate. That was like, okay, like there's some intention happening here.

B And we visited other companies like IBM there in upstate New York, their facilities that was kind of like a company town. I think it was— I forgot if it was Yonkers. I think it was in Yonkers. But— and we got into their archives, and we got to talk to a lot of folks there about what did design mean, the intention behind design from both the architecture, but really stemming from the company culture. And if there's one kind of salient takeaway from that, it was that company culture is so critical because it ends up having these externalities as companies grow that are maybe not anticipated. Or yeah, they just have to kind of be considered. Because by the time I got to, let's say, WeWork, the company culture was very ingrained. And, and the thinking about like how WeWork would impact cities was also very fascinating in that part.

B So at some point, like Maybe another way to think about it is that as companies grow, they start to also hire departments within their organizations that think about their relationships to cities as well. And in some cases, like going back to the old days of like old company towns, these were like total environment cities that were completely run by and maintained by this kind of quasi-pseudo governmental groups within these companies. So that's like the old version. The new version is like PR machines that just figure out how to exert political will and influence across the world.

A I would love to see you revisit that thesis and now look at the critical facilities and infrastructure, meaning the data centers and the power to power them and the type of influence, but also what that's doing to communities, both for their influx of money, right, coming from tax payments for occupying that space, but also what it does from a community standpoint. You have been pretty entrepreneurial from the start too. So it's not surprising that you started your own company in my head, but it's also not necessarily the path that everyone takes. So can you tell us a little bit more about how your, your own personal entrepreneurial spirit and where that stems from?

B If I had to go all the way back, it would likely be something to do with being part of a first-generation immigrant family where growing up in Miami, you just meet so many different people who just hustle to get by. I mean, they're just doing things. Like, they'll have their day job and then on the weekends they'll sell like avocados out of the back of their car at a shopping center. And so you start with that kind of, you know, as the base. When you start going into other areas or like others, like in school in particular, you start to question a lot of times why people are like sort of following the rules or like what are these rules that people are receiving. And by rules I might mean like, why can't someone start a company while they're going to school? Why can't they start a design firm? What, what is actually limiting them from them? Now, obviously in architecture there's all these other things like you need to be licensed, etc., but like there's other avenues by which one can express design that don't have to be licensed, right? You can do interior decorating or design to some degree. Landscape design doesn't necessarily— and even landscape architecture to a degree does not necessarily need licensure in some states. But you start actually asking all these questions, it's like, well, what's actually preventing this? And I think that's why my best friend Adrian and I, basically after doing a business— we had a professional practice class that introduced us to business modeling and business plans.

B We took that business plan that we designed for that class, and we just went to the bank, opened up a bank account, and filed an LLC corporation in Florida and just started what's called Foam Design. And we took on like a couple clients while we were also going to school. So it was, yeah, it was just this, this energy of just like, uh, you can just do things. And I think over time I've really gravitated toward people in particular that have that similar kind of agency. And so I think that's kind of, that's basically where it started. By the time I went to grad school, it was somewhat similar, you know, seeing Evan leave and go to Facebook, and then start Pinterest was a kind of also realization again, like, oh, wait, yeah, you can just do things. But I guess for myself, I still felt a little bit of like, it was new territory to go into tech. And I felt I didn't have like a traditional coding background.

B So I figured that I would be most useful trying to navigate the world of tech startups by by design at first, and then through product, and then ultimately through marketing, and then all the way back to product. But that idea of just like you can just do things has been very like default mode for me. I don't really under— you know, when folks sort of even within firms that I talk to, you know, when there's a sort of a friction or lack of agency, I'm always questioning why. where is that coming from? Like, who's saying that you can't do something? Like, why, why, you know, sort of questioning. So, maybe that's the sort of germ of entrepreneurial backstory, is just questioning, like, why can't I do that?

A You kind of mentioned, just very high level, your move, you know, how you've navigated tech without a tech background. Can you talk to us about your identity as an architect through those? You were working with companies that were selling to architects or within the AECO space still. So, you were a non-technical person working at a tech company, but the primary customer was the architect. So, what has that lens taught you about our industry and practicing within the industry and how architects think about technology? practices and, and business?

B I think for me at least, going into tech was really from, from the architecture background, which again, I was very in it. I was like very into the gossip. I would watch every lecture on YouTube that I could watch at the time or wherever. I was really in it. And that sort of ego killing, sort of the, you know, you have to kill the ego to some degree and kind of be reborn into some new identity, was very real at the beginning. where I had to sort of shed a lot. And even to the point where I remember I wrote a paragraph, like a bio. I felt the exercise of writing a bio, like one paragraph that said who I was, was very helpful to get me to rethink of my— like, re— kind of imagine myself or reinvent myself and commit to it.

B And how that has— how that idea maybe has operated within the companies I've worked with has been about also trying to figure out from the arc— on the architecture side, what does reinvention look like? Like at all our companies I worked with, let's say like at Iris VR, we were bringing, let's say we were the first one-click-to-VR solution, right? Take a Revit model and bring it into a VR environment that you can navigate. And the pitch there for architects was that you could do more on the client experience. And that you can kind of read in, in talking to them, you see the same struggles about innovation. In some sense, that has not changed since, let's say, 10 years ago. But I think this push towards reinvention is still something that, like, you know, I did at a personal level, and I think it's important for firms to go through that exercise at the company level, the corporate culture level as well, and really be intentional about it. Because in some sense maybe the industry needs to kill its own ego to be reborn. And I think I've been trying to pursue different ways of tackling that conversation at different companies that I've been in. Sometimes I haven't been as part of the conversation, like at Paperspace or WeWork in particular, because there was more like other round— like, uh, walkabouts, professional walkabouts that I was doing.

B But at Monograph, for sure, I mean, the idea that Hey, we should be more focused on operations. And, you know, part of the challenges that not focusing on operations leads to is, you know, burnout, churn, employees wanting to leave and go to other industries like tech. So maybe that's at a very high level. Hopefully that, that kind of answers the question a bit, but yeah, I think the profession needs to kill its young ego. To some degree.

A I feel like we are a little bit, right? Like there are no starchitects in the way there have historically been starchitects. So I feel a little bit of that is just happening innately. And I do appreciate this next line of questioning that's coming in from Gen Z, that as frustrating as leaders and partners that I talk to are with them, I think that they are actually asking the right questions about how we should be Working or how, how we should be balancing work and life outside work.

B Yeah, I mean, I think that generation is pushing a lot of topics that are— it also goes in some sense back to that question of like, why can't we do things? At one point, I called this generation sort of the expectant generation, and not in a negative sense. It was just more to say like that this generation is raised on technology in such a way that things are much easier. They're streamlined, right? But they're designed by our generation and the generation above us. And so why can't they expect things to be a bit different? I mean, the things around them are all much easier, smoother, more streamlined. I would— it'd be very natural to assume that you would want that to happen in the things that— where you work. It should be easier to facilitate certain transactions. Now, that's from the, the expectations that they're setting for the environments they're in. But I think we should probably lean into those questions more vigorously and take them seriously because, again, it's all these received ideas.

B The industry is full of received ideas from places and perspectives that don't matter anymore. And we can dive more deeply, but I feel like in my own personal— even just the concept of marketing in this industry is such a received idea from a time that didn't even think it was, quote, gentlemanlike to do. So, like, there's all these kind of, like, overhangs that we have. And I think that this next generation is really helping to question all those things fully.

A Before we get into what you're doing now, I think some people might be listening to this conversation and saying, like, how is he, this non-technical person, working on the product side of tech? Can you talk a little bit about your interfaces there and how you do it with a non-technical background?

B Yeah, well, I became technical, I guess, is the reality. You can only gain so much respect from engineers to a point. And I think, yes, you can know the customer problem very well, but it's like architecture to some degree, you know, where you're working. Let's say if there was an analogy, maybe a contractor. A GC or a subcontractor is the software engineer in a reductive way. And you kind of have to know a little bit about the materials that they're working with to be able to propose something. Otherwise, they just won't respect your ideas because they're just like, this can't be built, blah, blah, blah. Right.

B And so I think, I think there's a little bit of that. Like, yes, you, you can enter, or as, as an architect, you can enter the conversation from either the product or, or let's say marketing or sales or even customer support, which I actually think is an amazing vehicle by which to enter the industry. You can enter that through being more sympathetic to end users, which I think is what you get trained on as a designer. But at some point, if you do want to exert more influence on what is actually getting built, I do think it goes a long way when you do become more technical. And what that meant was practically taking courses coding boot camps, so many starts and fits here, there throughout the years, but also just being very curious with engineers. So talking to them about like, wait, so what is the— what— how are you designing this system? What does that do? What is this concept? And I think through that, just inherent curiosity that you bring, you can get a lot, uh, you can become more technical over time. But yeah, I think nowadays also with You know, if I had the tools that I have now back then, I don't know, I feel like unstoppable. I feel like, man, I would've been able to progress so much further by just building things and learning from building versus like having to learn a lot on the maybe more deeply technical side of things, but.

A When we were talking to the co-founders of Monograph, and when I talk to people that are looking to go into tech, I think one of the biggest things they struggle with is, what does the portfolio become, right? And that it's no, like, they just kind of literally tell them there's no need for any physical architecture projects there. Did you ever get that strain because you were still working so closely aligned with the AEC industry? And I felt it because I was, like, entirely on the employee experience side, but you essentially have to remove I removed the architect from the title. I kind of removed that piece of me for a while to, to be in that world.

B Yeah, it's curation. I mean, it's like good sales is good curation to some degree about like understanding what is it that they're looking for and how can you model yourself to be the thing that they're looking for. And, you know, it's not to say that like one has to lie about anything. It's just more to like, even your portfolio though, Can be useful. I mean, I feel like you definitely have to do maybe a better job of walking them through in a very reductive way what is the skills that were applied to the work that you did. But I, I think on the flip side, one can use it as a strength if they lean into a couple things. One is like they, they understand what the job that they're looking for is.

A Yeah.

B Right? Or like what the job requirements are. And then they're able to craft, kind of work backwards from that to kind of reposition their project to meet that in through the skills that they employed. Right? And so whether that's like how to reframe stakeholder management by talking about all the different user groups that a project might have entailed and how one had to think critically of like the different demands and desires that these user groups had in order to craft a design. I mean, it's, it's very similar, like. processes that you do in product management anyway. You're kind of working backwards from what does the market want or what opportunity is there and then crafting some design for that. It's not that different. It's just when you're talking to someone, you can't go into the weeds to say it's like, well, we, you know, we picked this, this element, or you just kind of keep it more at a high level.

B But again, the practice and exercise is much more on curation than been anything. It's like, how do you curate what you've done to the audience that you're presenting to? And then, you know, the hard part though, and I, and I resonate with it, is that there's a lot of imposter syndrome even now. I mean, that will never— I think if you, if you accept the fact that you will always feel like an imposter, then okay, like, take that off the table. Everyone feels like an imposter. You, if you just start from that position, just move forward with more confidence. Because that's what they're getting. Ultimately, that's what people are buying is like, is this person— can I trust this person? Do they look capable? And do they exude confidence in what they're doing? If they do not, if you don't show confidence in what you're doing and you can't curate yourself to them, then you got to work on that first because you ain't going nowhere without that.

A You mentioned just when we were talking About all the things that you were doing to bring yourself up to speed and kind of the new tools that are available to us now, especially with AI. They're also available on the client side. So what is more clients having access to the tools, do you think, doing to their expectations of their real expectations of what they expect out of their architects? And general contractors?

B I think the times are changing very quickly, and even a year ago, I was hearing rumblings from large firms that were getting— that were having to reorient their teams to accept designs that clients were already coming to them with. That is a big deal. Because you pair that with the other trends that are happening where more folks are hiring owners' reps, former architects, to kind of take ownership of managing the team or et cetera, the outcomes, right? As more tooling starts to move up the chain into the hands of those that have— that organize capital, the architect will be squeezed from 2 ends. From that— they'll be squeezed from, let's say, early feasibility activities, etc., and maybe early design concept, and likely be squeezed on the other end by GCs that are also trying to arm themselves with similar tooling, hiring former architects to build out design-build segments of them. Right here in Tampa, there's a company called Beck Group that has a design-build firm within it, right? It also has architectural services, and they're doing a museum here. And so, you know, if, if kind of a— we just have to very much reframe and reorganize the way we think about services critically. And maybe shocking, but even AI contracts are a received idea. At my time at Monograph, some of the more interesting conversations I had were firms that were like completely rethinking their contracts because it just didn't make sense with how they thought they should organize their services in order to meet the clients where they were at.

B Gluck Plus, I believe, or Gluck, uh, in New York is a good example of one in which they don't even do the standard, you know, phases of a project. They kind of rework it in a completely different way. And I think we're at that moment where we have to really rethink everything because all the assumptions about how services are produced, rendered, served, et cetera, are changing. And clients' expectations are also changing because you have a new generation of folks that are starting to enter decision-making roles. And they're going to start asking questions, well, why can't we do it this way? Why are you doing it this way? And so again, like, it's, it's all these— it's kind of like everything's coming to a head where I think one of the biggest battlegrounds for the industry writ large is going to be around the client experience, because it's kind of— it's going to have to be the only place, you know, there is where value is communicated and received on the other side by the clients. And client experience can mean everything from How do you build relationships with clients, to how do you manage projects with clients such that you set better expectations and deliver updates in a timely manner, et cetera, to how do you maintain those relationships over time? And like, how do you help them do their jobs better, even if it's not design? Otherwise, what you're gonna see is what I think's happening is other consultancies like McKinsey, are starting to wade into spatial design in some way or another. They maintain really good client relationships. They help their clients with a lot of things that are not design, and they're able to speak a language that their clients understand all the way through to potentially design outcomes.

B So I think now is the time to really start asking questions of leadership and the overall firm. It's like, what are we doing when it comes to the client experience? How are we meeting our clients where they're at? And, you know, that with that, you might have to rethink the whole business model too.

A A quick thanks to our partner, the American Institute of Steel Construction, AISC Architecture Center. It takes a huge amount of time and energy to create an elegant structural system, but as an architect, where do you start? With the diagrams and terms architects need to express their design intent, find resources and inspiration at aisc.org/architecture. Or contact the team at architects@aisc.org. I do think a lot of firm leaders would respond to that and say, yes. I think you and I would probably say no, only because I've seen the type of client experience that tech companies deliver on a whole new level. And I just kind of want to be clear, right? Like what we're talking about. All of the major companies, when they are looking to partner with people on dollars, have this executive experience, which is a fully built out multiple spaces, right? And they think through, as soon as they think through the first email they send out to those people that are going to be there, and they think about everything from logistics, from how they get there.

B Yeah.

A Transport from the airport to the location, what happens at the location, what type of swag they're getting, who's in the room talking to them. And I think they just do it with such a greater intention than architects ever do it. I've ever, you know, I've sat on the owner side for a while and have had many architects come in for an interview. And it was just clear to me that they didn't even look up the backgrounds of the people. that they were going to be talking to that day, even though it showed up on the calendar event. So, so much more that we could be doing there, which leads a little bit to what you're building now. So, do you want to talk about that a little?

B Yeah. Over the years, working very closely with different types of leaders on the go-to-market side and thinking, you know, thinking more broadly about this challenge of how do you win more work? That experience over the years has brought me to what we're doing today with Toolblocks. Toolblocks is basically, we do 3 things. One is we help you grow your network, we help you build pipeline, and we help you actually execute the work. And the insights that led us here had to do with the fact that in all the conversations I would have at Monograph, I would always come to this question around like, Okay, well, how do you— how are you organized to win more work? Because one thing is the production side of things and the operations around that, but, you know, what— how are you organized today? And the more often than not, you would hear something along the lines of, oh, well, we have a seller-doer model. Our principals are the ones that are, you know, bringing in the work, etc. Some firms may be more sophisticated, from my understanding, like firms like Gensler are much more, you know, they actively train their teams on how to do business development. But even from my perspective on the marketing side, I knew that there was— in this industry, there's all these challenges and how the work happens, like, and how the work is actually happening is not very well addressed by the tools that folks use today.

B So some folks have never heard of a CRM, customer relationship management tool. Those that have probably use something like HubSpot or Salesforce. And at any case, these tools don't really map over to the unique needs of this industry. And so what I mean to say is, when we say things like grow network, build pipeline, what we mean is that most of the work that you have is already in the network that you've built over time. We know that architects, most of the revenue they make is word of mouth or referrals, but they are not very intentional about even that. So In your case, Evelyn, right, you mentioned how imagine if like a firm is showing up to present to you and they don't even know the, the people in the room. That lack of detail also happens even with people they do know, right? So they don't even, you know, you often hear some of the biggest challenges that people have is just even following up with the people that they've worked with in the past. And moreover, the other challenges you hear a lot about that are not very well captured by tools today is things like, well, you know, I don't really know who else in my firm knows certain people.

B And that can be at the scale of an 8-person firm, or it can be at the scale of a 5,000, 10,000-person firm. And so when we say things like grow your network, What we're really saying is like, how do you— how can you tie into the tools you use today to see what your network looks like? So one of the things that we do at Toolbox is like we connect to your LinkedIn, and not just your LinkedIn, but you can have your employees link— connect their LinkedIn as well. And so now when you're using some of our other tools to find clients that could like— that sort of meet a profile that, you know, that's winnable, you can see whether someone else in your company already has contacts there. And so, you know, growing the network really means in some sense like being able to give you a lot of visibility to know more. And I think the other things that we do that are very, that are very compelling, even for myself, is like as a former marketer, or just all the kind of workflow things that we just want to collapse. So when we have access to your LinkedIn, we can tell you who in your network is speaking at what event in the industry. And we can apply filters to this too. So we can start to say, well, not everyone in your LinkedIn matters, but we know that you really care about— as a company, you care about hospitality.

B You can apply that as a lens or filter throughout your entire network. So who in my network works in hospitality? What events are they going to? Right. And so now all the noise that's out there about the market that you care about, we're just like, just like removing that noise, right? We're filtering it out to give you a very clear signal. We also have something we just launched this week called Signals, which is part of it has to do with these events. So if you're tracking a company, let's say you want to work with a related group and you can track these different companies within Toolblocks, you can see where their employees, people that you're not connected to, are also showing up in different events. We're extending that with other types of data that we're sourcing, like being able to see all of related groups' properties and who else have they worked with. So we have these various diagrams that we use inside the company. One is this sort of like these series of concentric circles where like your first— the first ring around you is like your personal network.

B The second ring is like your friends and/or the people that you work with. The third ring is like your professional network that's more organization-based. So it's more to say like, hey, I don't know anyone at Related Group, but I want to know what contractors they've worked with because maybe I have worked with one of those contractors or maybe I have a second-degree connection through that. And by the way, I also want to know what projects have they worked on, has that contractor worked on, so that maybe we can build a better team. So there's all these use cases that stack up on each other having to do with just like what business development looks like. We like to say sometimes, you know, it's, it's business today looks like it's in your email, on LinkedIn, and to some degree on the road. And that's like one lens that we use. And the other has to do just, just use with what I was talking about, which is.

B Like when you get to that third ring of being able to see, just gain more intelligence as to these are my target customers or clients that I want to go after. How can I build better pursuits with them to some degree by building better teams that they've already worked with and just lowering the friction to some degree? Because what we're also realizing as we talk to a lot of these folks in BD roles across the board is that it's very dynamic right now. The amount of firms that are also moving from international headquarters over here. Like, I think Herzog de Meuron might have opened an office in Austin, I believe. So even the competitive landscape is another layer to this, is to say, where are my competitors speaking at? Where— how are they showing up at different places? Who are they starting to work with? That, I think, is another, let's say, overall capability that we're applying to within Toolblocks. So it's interesting because we haven't really come across these type of workflows in one place, and so we're inventing a lot of new dynamics. At the same time, but we're, you know, our, our kind of north star essentially is like, how much time does it take you to do these things as a BD person or as a seller doer? And what if we gave you more time back so that you could know more about the market you're interested in and ultimately win more because you just have better intel than other folks might have in your, in your market. So that, that's the kind of the grow, the grow your network and build pipeline.

B On the do more work side, we won't have to talk too much about that, but just, we're just very excited about what's possible with agents today and how you can actually look at the activities that happen when you first have a, let's say, a potential project all the way through when a proposal is submitted and when it's ultimately won. There's a lot of non-billable time there, and a lot of that non-billable time is eaten by just very mundane things like Google research. And so with a very opinionated task list in which some of those tasks are actually agents that go and do work on your behalf, we believe there's a future where you just give us an address and we basically build a proposal for you based off of your company context and site conditions, and then ultimately help you, you know, win the deal based off of all the kind of other context we've gathered from the BD side. So, it's just really exciting, this kind of, you know, stepping all the way back in the kind of 10,000-foot view and say, well, there's so much non-billable time here, how can we collapse it? And how can we ultimately give you this kind of intelligence you just never had before around the markets you care about?

A We've often talked to people that work at Monograph and other SaaS companies about what it really takes to sell software to architects. Simultaneously to that, I am in Facebook groups and other AIA groups where people are looking for free solutions all the time. How do you sell this to architects ultimately going forward?

B I think like anything, it does come down to segmentation when it comes to business development writ large. For, for me, it really is honing in on the types of firms that are organized in a way that can use this today. Toolblocks is not for everyone. It's not, not really a good fit for folks that are not predispositioned to try to win work, which is why we kind of really market to or try to talk to as many business development folks whose job title it is to do business development, because a lot of the workflows that we're collapsing are part of their day-to-day, right? They want to be at more events. They want to have more contact time. They don't want to be in the office filling out like an event kind of write-up and summary, or they want, they want to spend less time pursuit planning and more pursuit doing. And so that is when I say segmentation, for those that might not be, you know, familiar with the word, it just basically means like, how do you really hone in on the the person who is most likely to buy what you have today. And so, I think that's where if you address— even at Monograph, we had a lot of lessons learned about where the software was during my tenure there.

B Where was it a really good fit? Where wasn't? And I think over time, there's maybe levels to the game as well, where when you're first starting out, You kind of are just trying to talk to as many people as possible, which is basically the stage that I'm in where I'm really just trying to understand as much of the landscape of what it looks like to really find and segment the types that would buy today. But as you start to scale up organizationally, then you really have to also apply more measurement. And now I don't know how, you know, at least from my conversations, I hardly ever hear metrics being brought up across different size of firms. But I think over time, if they apply the same principles that I'm trying to apply here, what you would get to is a world in which you would be able to say, hey, actually, we do really, really well with universities, like not tier 1 universities, but like tier 2 universities, research universities that are facing these exact problems. And when you can start to describe—

A And it's more than a gut check, right?

B And it's more than gut check.

A Which I feel like so many architects operate from right now.

B 100%. It's like we have— when you're able to say we close 60% of the proposals, we win 60% of the proposals that we send out to organizations, companies, etc., we close this, then lean into that. Don't then go and say, hey, let's do another type of project that we win only 10% of the time. Because either you get very good at selling and, and let's say standardizing the way you sell to that 60% win rate and figure out ways to increase the dollar value of those projects somehow. Like, that's a better focus area than going and say like, we're gonna then allocate X the same time we did for these 60% wins to this 10% wins. And so segmentation is a critical tool that you end up using to do so. And so when it comes to this industry, I think it's a lot of that. And the problem is that it's a tricky time with AI, I think.

B Well, both a boon and a tricky time, I'd say, because with AI, I think everybody is still somewhat hesitant to really understand like what, or dive too deeply. There's a lot of exploration.

A Yeah.

B But I think also it's been mostly relegated to the world of design and maybe not so much on the operational front. And so startups that are entering this space, that I think they kind of need to kind of suss out where the biggest opportunity is within that. In other words, when you get sucked into AI for design, it's almost like it's so competitive. right now where it is very difficult to get an edge versus, I would say, you know, and not to invite more people, but, you know, the area that I'm choosing to focus on is very interesting because there's just less happening here, right? You don't see right now at least as much conversation about how AI can be used on the business development front, which I think is actually a huge opportunity to carve out that conversation there. So in short, for those that are trying to get into this industry, I think— I mean, I'm just reflecting right now, like, a big challenge is also that, you know, as many people will find out, selling to a 5-person firm is about equivalent to selling to a large company. But those 5-person firms are supposed to be able to move faster, which is the dynamic of No, I mean, okay, I'm gonna give you real, like, real tactical stuff right now for those listening. Basically, when you're segmenting this industry, depending on the service that you're providing, you have to figure out who is going to own this. And at a 5-person company, as for— as an example, if they do not have someone that's in charge of operations, you're shit out of luck because you don't have a single-threaded owner who is going to be the person that's going to institute the rollout of the kind of software that you're trying to do from a kind of like a— if your product is focused in that arena.

B If it's design-oriented, then you have to contend with like all the workflows that they currently have today, and you have— you will get pulled into Not just the Revit ecosystem, but I think one thing that's really hard to suss out in this industry in some degree is like, who is the buyer? Like the user is like the folks that are like actually using the software, but the buyer, the one who actually has the budget to do it, can be all over the place. It can be a CFO or it can be director of design technology, or it could be a CIO if they have one of those. But it's so fragmented, unlike the world of tech. It's much easier to go into and to sell a sales solution, you know, relatively to a tech company, because it's kind of like they're all structured in a very similar way. They all have a chief revenue officer at this point, or they all have like a head of like a— their org charts are all very similar looking. In this industry, it's not the case, and it's very— and I think a lot of time is spent trying to find that. So Even for us, one strategy that we take is that we— Toolblocks should be useful just for one person. I don't need to hook into your Salesforce.

B I don't need to hook into whatever you have today. I don't even need to hook into your email because your LinkedIn is yours. That's your personal asset that you're gonna take with you anywhere you go. And if I can make you a more effective BD person by giving you a better use of your LinkedIn network for the work you already do today. That was my kind of revelation after really thinking about all the things that worked at Iris, what didn't work at Iris, what didn't work at Monograph. Like all this top-down trying to sell to the firm owner just so it can get instituted all the way down. Like I just need one person to use it. And I know that through the dynamics we've built in Toolbox, we can scale that to more than one person within a company.

B But I mean, you know, those type of learnings, uh, over time, yeah, it's hard, hard won, I, I suppose. It's just a lot of thinking around like, how do you design a product also that meets the industry sort of naturally where they're at, as opposed to saying like, hey, we need to come and sell this thing across all your whole, all your team members. It's just not gonna work. Your, your piloting takes too long, et cetera.

A I wanna leave this on where does this all leave kind of the future of architecture practice?

B Question.

A We are at a stage where there's a lot of people before they even graduate school are aware of the many other paths now that they can take outside of hanging their own shingle, and they're willing to take that. And it's for better compensation and benefits right off the bat. So what does that mean to the future of the profession and How are we going to need to change to be sustainable in the long run?

B Yeah, I think— didn't I see like a stat, or I don't know if you saw this stat too, that there's also less enrollment potentially happening?

A No, it depends. Due to the lack of babies that were happening because of the Great Recession, there's more people— or there's less people graduating high school, which therefore means that there's less people applying to go to school overall. If you talk to the American universities, this doesn't appear to be as true other institutions, but the American institutions, the individuals at the ACSA, they've actually seen enrollment stay steady and grow. And I think the interesting component there is the importance of design on the future and the fact that it's becoming more known that an architecture degree can be a foundational degree to a lot of different paths going forward. Long story short, I haven't seen enrollment decrease, but I have seen the decision-making that students coming out of those universities widen in terms of the career paths that they pursue.

B I don't have an answer, like a solution, but I do wonder out loud of like, one question, is it so— is it, is it so bad? Maybe what we should be doing at the educational— you know, it all comes down to schooling at the end of the day. So like what universities should be asking themselves is, does every student that go through it need to be licensed, or is the path for them straight just licensure?

A Yeah.

B And can we craft a different notion of what an architect is to meet the needs of, like, how things are just changing and how design is changing? Or having a, you know, it's having an influence in different ways that I think a traditional architectural education doesn't really set you up to recognize or realize. And so I feel like it ultimately has to start there because the firms themselves aren't going to do Outside of drastic change in terms of, like, retention, right? How do you keep the employees that you have? The other avenue would be starting to work together with universities to kind of rethink and maybe use our universities more as a proving ground for new ideas on what practice can look like that they can then figure out how to absorb in some way. You know, the reason why I went to to GSAPP was because, uh, we had a— Mark Wiggly give a talk at FIU once, and he talked a lot about this notion of the expanded architect. And that was like, you know, when you went to the website at that time, the Dean's Manifesto or whatever was basically that. It's like this idea that the architect had an expanded role and definition. And you saw that in the studios that we had at the time. So, a lot of the classes I took had to do with, like, you know, looking at synthetic biology as a— and simulating synthetic or sort of biological interactions in order to come up with the design prompt. And I think we've— I don't know if we've lost that.

B I'm not as in tune, but I think we need to maintain this idea that the training you have as an architect is not solely about a physical building at the end of the day, because the needs of what people are asking for are changing very quickly, where I think there's a big struggle to even ask, do we need new buildings, right? I think even very recently, that's become a very loaded topic as to, like, well, do we, you know, should we be building new things?

A Yeah.

B And so I think in light of that, we have to be more nimble and flexible such that, again, it goes back to like working backwards also from what the market, you know, market in the sense of like clients, what are their goals and objectives and how architects are positioning themselves relative to those things, whether or not the answer is a building. It can be something else. In short, I feel like if, if we don't take a more, let's say, intentional, concerted effort into this, then what will happen is that, you know, more folks will join groups like the one that I'm a part of called Architechie, that we see like every day someone new joins these kind of like Slack groups where folks are looking out of the industry, right? They to transition away from the work that they do into something else. So that, that's, that's on the, on the, on, let's say, the pipeline side. On the what do you do with the people you have today, I, I think of still a much more concerted effort on operations and management and what it would actually— what, what does management actually mean? Not like very tactical, but like the fact that there's very— that you have to wait a year for an— for a review to get promoted is nuts. It's bonkers. Why aren't you having weekly one-on-ones with your— with your team as a design principal where you're talking to them, helping them grow? Why aren't you— why does a review happen so far in before you know whether this person is actually able to take on more responsibility? Why, you know, there's like other little technical things that are just like big questions of like, why, why don't we do things? You know, why don't BD people get commission? It's like, why they bring in a multi-million dollar project and their compensation doesn't change? It's kind of like crazy. In the world of tech, you have account executives, which is relatively similar responsibilities as a BD person that make over a million.

B Anthropic is paying $10 to $20 million a year, and we're here talking about how like a BD person does not get support to help to bring work, or they have to like, you know, it's just like, it's, it's backwards. It's very backwards. And I think that it just needs to like reset, rethink, realign themselves. Look at what other companies are doing. Don't assume that because you're architects that it does not apply. That's bullshit. Other companies are actively innovating, coming up with new titles, new roles on a yearly basis because some new tool came out that helps them do more, because it reconfigured the roles and responsibilities of, of what used to be a certain person, and they're going with it. They're rolling with it.

B Meanwhile, in this industry, we're still talking about seller-doers spending 20% of their time on BD. And it's like, how are you going to pay people more if you're not winning more work? How are you gonna, you know, have the time to do these non-billable things that you keep pushing on the wayside if you're not bringing in larger value projects? If you're not rethinking the way that you're generating revenue? So that you don't have to spend like your most interesting, talented people. And I say talented in, let's say, the engineering way, like the more productive way. Like the fact that BIM managers are those folks that are the most software-enabled, software-like pilled people in the company that literally typify leverage. They can get more output out of teams. The fact that those people are on a billable schedule on projects, that they're not just like a critical non-billable resource that's just targeted towards like the next inefficiency we have as a business, that they're relegated to custom projects only, is bonkers. These people on your team— and I hope they're listening to this— these people on your team could be making twice what they make elsewhere. And they are, if not 3 times more, depending on like their— how good they are.

B So yeah, we, we just cannot— can't, can't do that. Can't— cannot keep doing the same thing because the times they are a-changin'.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Practice Disrupted. Want more of this between episodes? Start with Practice Rebuilt, our weekly newsletter on the business of architecture at practiceofarchitecture.com/newsletter. And when you're ready to stop reading about change and start testing it in your own firm, get on the list for The Lab at practiceofarchitecture.com/lab. Thanks for joining us. At practiceofarchitecture.com/lab. We'll see you next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.