Many talks highlight incredible work and great successes that architects have, but the path through profession is never as straightforward as starchitects may have you believe. It is through those more challenging moments, the mistakes we make, that we learn.
With that in mind, in our second episode of the series, we sat down with Ray Brown, co-founder and chief mentor at Archibiz. Ray has a passion for helping business owners – particularly architects – to realize their personal potential and that of their organization. An open and honest talk about everything that architects do wrong in business: common mistakes that architects make when they are starting their own practice or within their businesses, and also look at how we can solve them.
A truly global audience attended the live event — architects from Ecuador to Lebanon and Croatia to Philippines tuned in — and Ray responded to a number of stimulating questions posed by attendees. To reach an even wider audience, the recorded session is available free on-demand! Click the button below to watch now (note that you will need to register to access the recording):
Ray has a passion for helping business owners – particularly architects – to realize their personal potential and that of their organization. During the talk, Ray presented four mistakes that he most often sees architects make in business, and how to solve them:
- Failure to get basic business education and preferring the ‘well meaning amateur’ approach to business
- Lack of vision for their practice
- Letting the work alone speak for their practice
- An inability to explain the value of architecture to their market
In order to do so, he explains an approach to treating your practice as a project itself; in addition to designing, as an architectural business you should also give a dedicated amount of time each month to business tasks. For example, treating marketing as a regular task.
If architects ultimately aim for certainty in their practice — certainty of workflow, certainty of income, and certainty of impact (that is, running a business that allows you to do work you’re proud of, and work that you choose to do) — what can they do to reach the kind of business stability that they desire?
Ray explains three crucial steps in climbing the “mountain of sustainable success”:
- Specialize: You do not need to be all things to all people. Instead, focus on who you want to attract and who you want to work with.
- Systemize: Know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Create a predictable process so you get the outcomes you want.
- Scale: Using that specialization and that system, scale your practice.
Throughout the talk he elaborates on each of these points, providing concrete examples and directly responding to questions posed by architects in the audience.
This information was taken from Episode 2 of Architizer’s new live series, Mistakes Well Made. The recorded session is available for free on-demand! Click the button below to watch now (note that you will need to register to access the recording):
If you missed Episode 1, where we sat down with Architect Michael Riscica, founder of Young Architect, the recorded session is also available to you here.