Every Monday morning, team members in the Philadelphia and Princeton offices gather together via video-conference to discuss firm news and upcoming events and projects. Since 2003, founding partner Allan Kehrt, FAIA, has delivered his Monday Morning Musings, weekly slices of personal insight into the design profession, to the firm. To comment on any of his posts, send an email to us. We look forward to hearing from you. |
| February 22, 2010 Familiarity The selection of an architectural firm is in many ways similar to the selection of many other products or services. We buy that with which we are familiar. The issue of course is how to make us familiar to those whom we wish to select us. We often say business development is all relationships, relationships, relationships, and it's true that every project in the office has come from some type of relationship. The important thing is how to develop those relationships so that people remember us and are familiar with us. Sometimes they develop because we target specific clients and make frequent contacts to keep our name in front of them. Sometimes the familiarity comes about because potential clients hear of us over a period of time from our existing clients, and sometimes it occurs because our name continues to pop up in articles and advertisements. It is important for us to continually look for ways to get our name in front of potential clients so they are familiar with us. The old PR adage "I don't care what they say about me, as long as they spell my name right" is also true to a large extent; studies have shown that people who are familiar with a name will not necessarily remember anything bad about that name...but it will be familiar to them. |
| February 15, 2010 Recessions I attended our Roundtable a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who aren't familiar with this, it is a group of 14 firms from around the country put together about a dozen years ago by Hugh Hochberg, of the Coxe Group, a management consulting firm we've used over the years. The main topic of conversation was of course the economy, the Great Recession, and how we were all managing. The firms ran the gamut, from one in the Midwest that had not laid off anyone to one from the West Coast that may not survive. It was a difficult series of nonstop discussions lasting the three days we were together. KSS came out looking pretty sound compared to most; we have of course let some people go, a painful process, but we are still here, still viable, still busy with those remaining and we are beginning to see some signs that things will once again return to something approaching normal. A recent book titled This Time It's Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmine M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff examines financial crises over an 800-year period. The book states simply that these crises are almost never really different from one another; financial history keeps repeating itself with the only change being the details of the crisis and its severity. Each eventually ends long enough for us to set up for the next one. And this one really does seem to be ending. |
| February 8, 2010 Profit (again!) To many architects profit is a dirty word. Architecture is an art; it is a calling; it is beyond and above the pursuit of money. Architecture is not a business; it is almost a religion; it is something for which to live one's life. All of this may be true, but in many ways it is also very limiting. It may also be the reason the vast majority of architectural firms in the U.S. are made up of only one architect. The influential architectural firms, the successful ones, the ones that design great buildings and survive to design more understand that profit is also the lifeblood of their practice. It is the thing that allows them to buy better equipment, reinvest in the firm, use new technologies, attract, hire and retain better people, pay better salaries and bonuses, worry less about recessions, and in countless other ways make the difficult task of making architecture a bit easier. It does one other very important thing: It allows us to focus the art and the calling and the religion on doing really good work. And in times of stress brought about by uncertainty and economic hardships, it gives us options that other firms may not have because they have not considered nor planned for the realities of practice. |
| February 1, 2010 Talent The office has an astonishing amount of talent. There is technical knowledge that rivals the best in the profession; there is a depth of design talent that is extraordinary. There are those who can make any computer program we use sing, and there are those who can deal with virtually any digital difficulty we will ever encounter. We have the knowledge to get the most complicated projects though approvals and have over the years solved the most thorny client problems. There is additionally an abundance of institutional knowledge accumulated by all of us over many, many years. The depth of knowledge and experience at KSS is very impressive, but we should all be using it to a greater extent that we are. It is the responsibility of the leaders of the firm to make sure that our exceptional resources are understood widely and are available to all; it is the responsibility of others to utilize them to the maximum extent possible. There is really a lot of good stuff out there. |
