Hello Reader,

Every conversation I have with architects about money starts from the wrong question. Not hourly or fixed fee, but the one underneath it: who is actually carrying the risk in this arrangement, and does the number on the invoice say so honestly?

That question kept surfacing this week, across advisory calls that had nothing to do with each other on the surface. A firm undervaluing its own scope. A partner unsure how to price a client relationship that had quietly become a joint venture. Different symptoms, same root: pricing decided years ago by habit, never revisited once the actual risk in the room had changed.

Lisa Sauve, my guest this week, doesn't bill time. She never has. She takes equity instead of fees when the deal calls for it, turned sweat equity into a rent credit for a tenant who renovated her own building, and pays herself fifty thousand dollars a year on purpose, not because that's what an owner is supposed to earn, but because it's what lets her keep taking the kind of risk she wants to keep taking. Before anything else, she asks every client the same question: how did you arrive at that budget? I don't ask that directly, out loud, nearly as often as I should.

Hourly billing survives less because it's efficient and more because it lets both sides avoid answering that question. The client absorbs scope creep quietly. The firm absorbs underestimating quietly. Nobody has to name who's exposed, because the invoice never asks. A fee structure built around equity, or around a fixed outcome, forces that exposure into daylight before the work starts. That's why it feels riskier. It's often the safer arrangement.

I'm not arguing every firm should abandon hourly billing by Monday. Your firm chose its pricing model once, for reasons that may no longer hold, and almost nobody thinks about what it would take to pull together scope differently.

What would you actually have to know about your own risk to price it honestly, and do you already know it?

Keep learning and growing,

Evelyn Lee, FAIA | NOMA Founder, Practice of Architecture Host, Practice Disrupted & Fractional COO

This issue is brought to you by AISC, the American Institute of Steel Construction.
​AISC: the 2027 IDEAS² Awards; entries close August 31.
​see the categories and enter​

/// practice disrupted ///

Stop Waiting in Line: Lisa Sauve on Owning the Risk

Synecdoche's co-founder on taking equity instead of fees, holding out on licensure by design, and the one question she asks before any client sets a budget. listen now

/// the signal ///

Three things caught my attention this week, none of them about design, and none of them in my LinkedIn Sunday roundup.

The thread: the firms and platforms moving fastest right now didn't pick a better tool. They decided who owns it.

There's a stat about Revit going around that I want to push back on: more than three billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, ninety-five percent market share, repeated so often it reads as settled fact.
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I traced it back to an a16z blog post that cites no source for either number, and Autodesk has never published either one either. What Autodesk actually reports is a $3.583 billion AECO product family that bundles Revit with Construction Cloud, Civil 3D, Forma, and more, with Revit never broken out on its own. The lock-in argument still holds without the invented precision. I'd rather base my opinion on the honest number: Autodesk paid $133 million for Revit in 2002, and nobody outside Autodesk knows what it's worth today.
​read here​

Trimble just shipped AI takeoff and estimating into Accubid Anywhere: automated quantity takeoff, symbol counting, conduit routing, the work that used to sit with an estimator or a junior MEP engineer. Trimble reports roughly sixty percent time savings on takeoff tasks, and a recent industry roundup counts more than four thousand contractors already using it. The tool isn't just doing the counting faster. It's absorbing a piece of the workflow that used to belong to a person, and by default, deciding that Trimble owns it now.
​read here​

Eight acquisitions crossed my desk this week: a public engineering firm taken private for about a billion dollars, a fire-protection engineering firm changing private equity owners, three architecture firms folded into larger platforms, and that's a partial list. I don't think the headline is consolidation. I think it's that the firms doing the buying are pricing distinctiveness, not size, which means the safer place to be right now is not the biggest firm in your market. It's the most specific one.
​read here​

/// up steel, together, better - Tuesday /// presented by AISC

Early collaboration for project success, with Georgi Petrov (SOM) and Wade Lewis (Puma Steel). A live Zoom panel on what changes when architects, engineers, and fabricators collaborate before the drawings are final, hosted by Evelyn. - Tuesday, August 18, noon to 1 pm Pacific. 1 AIA approved.

/// the handoff /// - something you can do on Monday

This week, pick one active project and write down, next to the fee, who is actually exposed if the scope grows: the client, the firm, or both. Twenty minutes, no meeting required.

1. Pull the fee proposal or contract for one current project, the one where the scope conversation makes you most nervous.
2. Circle the fee structure: hourly, fixed, some blend. Write one sentence next to it: who absorbs it if scope grows by ten percent this month.
3. If the honest answer is “we do, quietly,” write down what would have to change in the contract language for that risk to be visible and priced, not absorbed.
4. Do the same for one project where you feel confident. Compare the two sentences. The gap between them is usually where your firm’s actual negotiating leverage lives.
5. Bring one line to your next principal or partner meeting: here’s a project where I think we’re pricing risk we’re not naming.

Why it matters: most firms know their overhead rate to the decimal and have never once written down who’s exposed when a project runs long. The fee structure is a risk-allocation document wearing an invoice’s clothes, and almost nobody reads it that way until something goes wrong.

/// Practice Lab Open ///

I closed enrollment a while back to rebuild the room properly. That work is done, and starting today, new members are welcome again.

The Lab is where a question like the one above stops being theoretical: a room where members test real changes to how they talk about their fees, the tools they use, their next hire, in front of peers doing the same thing. It's about building the next generation of practice.

It's $79 a month, cancel anytime, no commitment. Or join annually for $790 a year, which also includes AI Foundations, a course I'm building right now, at no extra cost when it launches. Because you're reading this newsletter, the annual price is $590 for your first year, through August 30. That's $358 less than paying month to month for a year. The annual plan also carries a thirty-day money-back guarantee, so joining isn't a leap; it's a look.

If you're already a Lab member, none of this touches you. Your rate hasn't changed. Join here - use code REBUILT590 for $200 off the annual rate.

/// up and coming ///

Steel, Together, Better, with AISC, live Tuesday, August 18, noon Pacific, register here​

AIA Oklahoma Conference, keynote, Enid, September 23, register here​

NOMA Annual Conference, moderating the AIA/NOMA Leadership Panel, Miami, October 16, register here​
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Your Firm Is the Project, workshop at the Trimble Dimensions User Conference, Las Vegas, November 9 register here​