Hello Reader,
Most firms I work with can name something they tried in the last year or two that went nowhere. New software, a new way of running projects, a hire meant to change how something got done.
When I ask what happened, the answer usually lands on the tool. Wrong software, wrong vendor, wrong month to start.
It was never a problem with the tool.
What stops it is more fundamental, and has more to do with culture and the firm's ability to adapt over time. Four questions get at it:
How does the firm respond when somebody raises a problem?
What happens when something the firm tried doesn't work?
Does anybody here get an hour that isn't billable?
What happens when a person wants to try something new?
This week I talked with Sarai Williams, who built a career in design and social impact real estate that the profession had no template for. The question she kept running into is the same one firms run into: what do you do when the thing in front of you isn't the thing you already know how to do?
Those four decide whether a firm can answer that more than once. AI is the change in front of us right now, and it will not be the last one. A firm that reorganizes around one new thing and can't do it again hasn't solved anything. It's bought time.
So I built something that asks about those four directly. Sixteen questions about what you've watched your firm actually do, not what it intends to do. Five to seven minutes, and your result comes up on screen the moment you finish. It's free, and nobody at your firm sees what you put down.
What comes back is four numbers, with one of them named as the constraint setting the pace for the other three. As soon as we reach 100 responses we start making comparisons across firms, and everyone who has taken it gets their result again with that part filled in.
Take the Adaptability Read: practiceofarchitecture.com/adaptability
Which of those four would you guess is your firm's constraint, and would the person sitting two desks away guess the same one?
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 for Practice Owners: The Moves You Can Still Make Before December 31
Thursday, September 24, 11:00am Pacific / 2:00pm Eastern. Sixty minutes on Zoom, free to attend.
Gelt walked me through a payroll processor mess and a hardware purchase I'd been expensing wrong. On the 24th, four days from this Sunday, Rachel Richards, CPA, and Spencer Carroll, CPA, of Gelt, a tax advisory firm, do the same thing live with real firm situations rather than a lecture, so bring whichever version of that problem is sitting in your own books.
/// practice disrupted ///
🎧 EP248: Unruly Practices, with Sarai Williams
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Sarai Williams trained as an architect at Howard and added a dual master's in city planning and landscape architecture at Penn before becoming Vice President of Housing Strategy and Partnerships at BDP Impact Real Estate. We talk about what she kept from architecture school, what happens to housing after it's built, and the Penn elective she co-teaches where guests show up with nothing prepared.
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/// the signal ///
Three threads I've been following this week.
Audax Private Equity just bought Integral Consulting from Imperial Capital, the private equity firm that bought it in the first place. A firm shopping itself to a "strategic buyer" is increasingly finding a financial one instead, one that already has its own exit written into the deal before your ink is dry. If you're weighing a sale, the harder question isn't how generous the offer is. It's whether the buyer across the table already knows who they'll sell you to next.
Phase0 just closed a 2.6 million euro seed extension to expand AI agents that handle tendering, billing, and construction-diary reporting for small and midsize architecture and engineering firms, with an architecture firm CEO among the angels backing it. More than a thousand offices are already running the platform. None of what it automates draws a single line, which is exactly why it's worth more attention than another rendering tool.
The Fed raised its target range a quarter point on Wednesday, to 3.75 to 4.00 percent. Rates going up in the middle of a soft market is not the direction anybody was planning around. The projects most likely to stall are the ones already sitting in design on last year's assumptions, and the owner who has been quiet since spring is quieter now. If you have a proposal out on a project that isn't financed yet, I'd ask about the financing before I assume the schedule holds.
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 hour that goes first
1. For the next two weeks, every time a deadline moves, write down the hour you gave up to absorb it. Which hour, and what it was going to be.
2. Change nothing while you're collecting. You're building a record, not fixing anything yet.
3. At two weeks, sort the list into two columns: hours that were going to be billable, and hours that were not.
4. Total the second column. That's what your firm spent on adapting in two weeks, and it's the number nobody reports.
5. Take the one item you most want back, put it on next week's calendar with a name and a start time, and tell one other person it's there. Then see whether it survives the next moved deadline.
Gelt works with firm owners year round, not only at filing. Book a free consultation.
/// up and coming ///
Gelt's Year-End Tax Playbook webinar is September 24, four days after this send. If you haven't grabbed a seat, register here.
The next three on the calendar:
AIA Oklahoma Conference, keynote, Enid, Oklahoma, September 23. register here
AIA Arkansas Convention, keynote, Rogers, Arkansas, October 9. register here
Drury University, lecture, Hammons School of Architecture, Springfield, Missouri, October 14.
The full list is at evelynlee.com/speaking.
Booking for 2027? Reply to this email and let's find a date.
