Hello Reader,
Most firms think the portfolio is the pitch. I spent ten years on the owner's side of the table, the side that hires architects, and I can tell you it isn't. The portfolio tells me the history of what the firm has built. It never tells me why I should trust them with what I was trying to build.
Lee Schneider, my guest this week, produced for Dateline NBC before he spent a decade teaching architecture students at USC how to tell those two things apart. His framework is simple enough to remember. Every firm needs three stories: an origin story, why this practice exists at all; a testimonial, someone else saying out loud that they believed it; and a case study built for the client in the room, not the six projects you're proudest of arranged in the order you're proudest of them. Lee calls that last one the genius reel, and it's what most firms open with.
I hear the genius reel constantly on advisory calls. A principal walks me through the interview deck, and it's beautiful, and it's entirely about the firm. I really like Lee's perspective on this, and it changed the way I thought about things: the client isn't sitting there hoping to be impressed. They're hoping to be understood. A case study that opens with their problem does more work than four more renderings of a building that isn't theirs, and from the owner's chair I can tell you that held more often than not.
Most firms would probably identify this as a marketing problem. I'd push it further back than that. A firm that can't say why one specific client hired them usually can't say why any client does, and that shows up everywhere the portfolio doesn't reach: in the fee conversation, in the negotiation, in the pursuit that goes to the firm down the street with half the awards and twice the clarity about who it serves.
You already have the origin story. You already have a client who'd vouch for you without being asked. What's left is the question most firms never ask before the pitch goes out. Not what should we show them, but what do we actually know about why they'd choose us.
What would you say if a client asked you that out loud, before they'd decided?
Keep learning and growing,
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Evelyn Lee, FAIA | NOMA
Founder, Practice of Architecture
Host, Practice Disrupted & Fractional COO
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This issue is brought to you by Gelt.
Year-End Tax Playbook: the moves you can still make before December 31
Thursday, September 24, 11am Pacific, on Zoom, with Rachel Richards, CPA, and Spencer Carroll, CPA, from Gelt.
Gelt helped me work through two issues this year, one with my payroll processor and one with hardware purchases, and they're setting me up for a successful tax year next year. On September 24 they're doing the same thing live, so bring your own questions.
/// practice disrupted ///
Getting Chosen: How Storytelling Changes the Way Firms Win Work, with Lee Schneider
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Lee Schneider, founder of Red Cup Agency and longtime USC School of Architecture instructor, on the three stories every firm needs and why the highlight reel isn't one of them.
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/// the signal ///
Three threads I've been following this week.
A private equity platform that spent seven months buying engineers added an architecture firm to the portfolio two weeks ago. Hunter Forest Capital's Agathos platform, which started in February with two engineering firms, brought on Hartford's Tecton Architects on August 22. Every acquisition before this one sat on the countable side of the business: survey, environmental, engineering hours you can put a number on. An architecture practice was the harder one to price, until documentation started looking countable too.
read here
AIA National is opening its first Firm Management Symposium in Washington, D.C., October 1 and 2, a paid day and a half on winning work, driving results, and getting paid, aimed at small and mid-sized firms. AIA announced it in early August. I spent the last year inside the institute's own machinery, and what strikes me isn't that the content is useful. It probably is. It's that the institute is now selling the thing chapters and advisors used to hand you as a member benefit. That's not a criticism of the program. It's a data point about where practice knowledge actually lives now, and who gets to charge for teaching it.
read here
Builders FirstSource, a materials supplier, led a $25.3 million Series A for Digs in late August, an AI platform that builds a running digital record of a home from design through construction. The lead investor isn't a software fund. It's the company that sells the lumber and trusses. When the firm supplying what gets built is also funding the tool that decides what gets specified, the sales conversation and the design conversation are having the same meeting, whether or not anyone in the room agreed to that.
read here
Want more where this came from? I track all of it week to week, and Lab members get the full list every Friday, with sources and one line on what each item means for a practice.
more about the Lab
/// the handoff /// - something you can do on Monday
This week, write your firm's three stories the way you would actually tell them, not the way you would defend them in an interview.
1. Write the origin story in four sentences: why you started the firm, or why you took it over, without using the word passion.
2. Pick one past client who would vouch for you unprompted, and write down the exact sentence they would use, not the sentence you would want them to use.
3. Take the next active pursuit on your list and write a case study for that specific client's problem, not a project you're proud of that's merely adjacent to it.
4. Read all three out loud. Cut anything that sounds like a résumé line instead of something a person would actually say.
5. Send the origin story and the testimonial to whoever writes your next proposal, before the next one goes out, not after.
/// up and coming ///
The next three on the calendar:
AIA Oklahoma Conference, keynote, Enid, September 23, register here
AIA Arkansas Convention, keynote, Rogers, October 9, register here
Drury University, lecture, Hammons School of Architecture, Springfield, October 14
The full list is at evelynlee.com/speaking.
I'm booking 2027 speaking now. Reply to this email if you'd like to talk about a date.
