Blog Archives

Top 10 Ways Architects Lose Money

10/15/2015

Architecture is not known, at least to those involved, as the most profitable of businesses. Salaries aren't commensurate with responsibility. We all need to work on this. Here's my first shot.

#1 ’PLANNED’ LOSES
The number one way to lose money, or at least limit your profitability, is to inadvertently plan for that outcome. (See Architectural Economics.) Many firms ignore the facts of their own operation and use industry rules of thumb instead. Know your costs and ratios; and run your firm based on facts.

Secret Sauce For The No 1 Marketing Tool

10/12/2015

How I Found The Secret Sauce For The No 1 Marketing Tool

I started publishing a newsletter using Constant Contact about 10 years ago. In hindsight there was a lot we did wrong. Besides focusing on what WE thought clients SHOULD BE interested in, it was a newsletter. We had three articles and several tidbits in each issue. It probably took three days of effort once a month and cost $25/mo. When the economy tanked, neither the time or cost was sustainable.

When I started writing Architekwiki I learned from the blogging gurus that you want subscribers because you will eventually want to know who likes your stuff. I implemented that idea using Google’s Feedburner. Feedburner takes your blog posts and turns them into email and sends them to your subscribers for you automatically. Google doesn’t really support Feedburner anymore. A better solution is FeedBlitz, although it has a modest monthly cost. There are a lot of cool things you can do with FeedBlitz. It is a valuable tool. There is just one problem.

The Problem With Selecting Colors

10/7/2015

Selecting Colors

I like to select colors. I think I'm pretty good at it. I don't do it often enough to be great, but I think my results are pretty darn good.

Maybe if I selected colors all the time, I would know more about the politics of selecting colors and get good at that aspect, too. Because politics is the problem with selecting colors.

After an interiors person returned from a color-review meeting in tears, I developed the following process to head off more unpleasant experiences. Honestly we haven’t gotten to use it often enough to know if it can be improved; so feel free to contribute your experience/advice in the comments. The world -needs- a solution to the “color problem”!