Hello Reader,
I spent most of this week in Oklahoma. On Wednesday I opened the AIA Oklahoma Conference on Architecture in Enid, my second time at that conference since 2023.
Before that, I had dinner in Oklahoma City with a friend I hadn't seen in ten years. She'd just moved there, read in this newsletter that I'd be in town, and wrote to me. You'll hear more from her soon on an upcoming episode.
The conversations after the keynote kept landing on the same question. Firm leaders wanted to talk about how a firm grows beyond traditional services, and how that looks different at five people than at fifty. They can see people outside the profession changing how the industry works, and they want a say in what comes next.
Someone outside the profession has already made a move. In early September, CIVC Partners, a private equity firm, took a stake in Cushing Terrell, an 88-year-old architecture and engineering firm based in Montana. Billings are still contracting; the August Architecture Billings Index came in at 47.2. They bought in anyway.
My guest this week, Mayra Arntz, is a principal at Building Ventures, which invests in technology for the built environment. I asked her why so little venture money goes to software for architects. Her answer wasn't about what architects are worth. It came down to wallet size: how much firms spend on technology, and how many firms there are to sell to. Owners and contractors spend more, so that's where the money goes.
I really like how plainly Mayra put it, and it changed the way I read the Cushing Terrell deal. An investor isn't paying for this year's fees. They're paying for what keeps working when any one person steps away: clients who call the firm and not one partner, a record of how projects actually get run, and people who know how to run them.
That's also where the Enid conversation starts. Before a firm can grow beyond traditional services, it has to know what it already does well enough that someone else would pay for it.
If someone outside the profession wanted to invest in your firm tomorrow, what would they be buying?
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.
Rachel Richards, CPA, and Spencer Carroll, CPA, walked me through a payroll processor mess and hardware I'd been expensing wrong instead of depreciating, on a call that took less time than I expected it to. Q4 just started, which is exactly the window where a fixable mistake either gets caught now or turns into next April's problem. Book a free consultation.
/// practice disrupted ///
🎧 EP249: Someone Else's Clock, with Mayra Arntz
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Mayra Arntz, principal at Building Ventures, on why venture capital funds construction and property technology well before it touches architecture itself, and what that says about where the industry's capital thinks the value actually sits.
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/// the signal ///
Three threads I've been following this week.
Katy Barkan, a principal at the Los Angeles practice Now Here, talked with Archinect about running a small firm on purpose: work worth doing and enough of it to pay the people doing it, rather than a target headcount. I talk to firm owners who treat growth as the only proof a practice is working. Barkan's version puts the proof somewhere else, in who you kept on staff and what you turned down to keep them.
Michael J. Crosbie interviewed Patricia Negrón Meléndez, AIAS's vice president, in Common Edge on what's actually on architecture students' minds right now: tuition, whether the degree still qualifies for the financial aid it used to, and a studio culture that's already teaching them how firms will treat their time. If you're recruiting against that, a nice culture page is competing with four years of direct evidence.
UCLA is looking for a campus planning consultant on call, under an agreement that runs up to three years with an option for two more and up to $1 million in fees across the term. No specific projects are named yet. That's how a lot of public university work gets decided: the firms on the on-call list are the ones who hear about a project first. Responses are due October 14.
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
The buyer's memo
Write one page as though you were pitching your firm to someone who will never see a rendering.
1. Pick your three largest active clients.
2. For each one, write two sentences on what your firm reliably delivers that has nothing to do with design quality: turnaround, communication, follow-through, consistency under pressure.
3. Read those six sentences together and ask what pattern someone outside the firm, a buyer or a client's next referral, would actually notice.
4. Write one honest sentence naming the single thing your firm would lose if you personally disappeared for a year.
5. If you can't write that sentence yet, that's this month's actual project.
The Adaptability Read, so far
Twenty-seven people from sixteen firms have taken the Adaptability Read since it opened last Sunday. Twenty-three of them came back with the same constraint: what happens when something the firm tried doesn't work. Leaders scored their firms higher than staff did. It's early, and comparisons across firms start at 100 responses. Sixteen questions, five to seven minutes, free: practiceofarchitecture.com/adaptability
/// up and coming ///
On October 21 I'm joining BQE for a live webinar on workforce strategy in architecture and engineering firms, drawing on BQE's benchmarking data from more than 3,000 firms. 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, and it earns one CEU. register here
The next three on the calendar:
AIA Arkansas Convention, keynote, Rogers, Arkansas, October 9. register here
Drury University, lecture, Hammons School of Architecture, Springfield, Missouri, October 14.
AIA/NOMA Leadership Panel, moderator, NOMA Annual Conference, Miami, October 16.
The full list is at evelynlee.com/speaking.
Booking for 2027? Reply to this email and let's find a date.
