Evelyn Lee
Hello Reader, I turned 47 this week. I'm at the age where I have to pull out a calculator to remember how old I am, mostly because I'm not counting toward anything. No landmark, no countdown. But I did stop long enough to write down ten things my 30 year old self would be surprised by, and I put them on LinkedIn yesterday. Everything on that list was cultivated. None of it was planned. It grew because I had time, and because I kept getting to choose. Stacy Thorwart, my guest this week, came at that from a different angle. She works on AI adoption, and her argument is that the people opting out aren't who you'd guess. It isn't generational. It's time and exposure. Nobody grows into something they were never given room to try. I've been reading the acquisition news this summer with that in my head. Firm after firm changing hands, most of it filed under private equity, and some of it is. But the one that stuck with me was mid-August, when Michael Graves Architecture bought Peterson Architecture, a small practice in Noblesville, Indiana. An architecture firm bought an architecture firm. What it bought was a name a town already trusts and years of relationships nobody can build from scratch on a deadline. Ask a firm why clients hire them and you'll hear about relationships. It's the first answer and usually the only one, and it isn't wrong. It's also the least cultivated thing a firm owns, because relationships sit with people, and people retire. I've watched small firms arrive at that math late, with no succession plan and a founder ready to be done. By then selling isn't a strategy. It's the only door still open. Selling isn't the wrong answer. But it's one option, not the only one, and every other door, handing the firm to your staff, merging with a peer, or building a bench underneath you, takes time you have to make before you need it. This is one of the conversations we keep having in the Lab, usually with people who still have room to choose. The newsletter rate closes tonight. If you'd rather talk it through first, book a call with me this week and I'll hold that rate until we've spoken. What are you assuming you'll have time to figure out later? Keep learning and growing,
This issue is brought to you by AISC, the American Institute of Steel Construction. /// practice disrupted ///The Intelligent Designer: Navigating the Realities of AI Adoption, with Stacy Thorwart
/// the signal ///Three threads I have been following this week. Dezeen surveyed twenty six of the world's leading studios and found twenty five of them now encourage staff to use AI, with Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT the most adopted. Encourage, not permit. The number isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that the policy question is settled almost everywhere, while the fee still gets built as though the work takes exactly as long as it used to. NAVFAC Pacific awarded ADRS, a Honolulu firm, a $249 million architect-engineer contract on August 19, running five years across Guam, Hawaii, and Australia. One offer was received. A quarter of a billion dollars of design work went to the only firm positioned to bid it, in a year when private billings have been contracting for months. Federal work is not easier work and the setup to chase it is real. It is also the part of the market still committing budgets. Illoca opened a beta on August 21 for Plamo, which turns a sketch, a reference image, or a sentence of plain description into editable parametric geometry rather than a rendered picture you would have to draw again. Most of this month's AI news landed on the paperwork around the drawing, the RFI responses and the takeoffs. This one lands at the front of the work, in the part of the process where a firm's judgment is supposed to live. I would rather have my own hands on that before a client shows me theirs. 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. /// the handoff /// - something you can do on MondayThis week, take your top ten client relationships and write down who else in the firm could carry each one if you stepped back this year. Mark every line where the honest answer is nobody. That list is your succession plan's first page, whether or not you ever sell. /// Practice Lab Open ///The Practice Lab is open. It is where a question like the one above stops being theoretical: a room where members test real changes to how they price, what they use, and who they hire, in front of peers doing the same. It is $79 a month, cancel anytime. Or $790 a year, which includes AI Foundations at no extra cost when it launches. Because you are reading this newsletter, the annual rate is $590 for your first year, with a thirty-day money-back guarantee. That rate closes tonight. Join here - use code REBUILT590 for $200 off the annual rate. If you're not sure the Lab is the right move, take fifteen minutes with me before you decide. Book by September 6 and I will hold the newsletter rate until we have spoken. book an intro call If you are already a Lab member, none of this touches you. Your rate hasn't changed. /// up and coming ///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 NOMA Annual Conference, moderating the AIA/NOMA Leadership Panel, Miami, October 16, register here AIA New Mexico, lecture, George Pearl Hall, Albuquerque, October 26 Your Firm Is the Project, workshop at the Trimble Dimensions User Conference, Las Vegas, November 9, register here My 2026 speaking calendar is full. If you're planning something for 2027, hit reply and tell me about it. |
