last friday, i caught dwain cox of chik-fil-a as he spoke at the atlanta creative mornings series. beyond being a great speaker and head of innovation for the cow-run company, he's also the former owner of his own design consultancy. in fact, as he tells it, the main reason for the jump to chik-fil-a a couple years ago wasn't because of a lack of work or dissatisfaction with running a studio, it was that his group was doing so much work with the home team that he simply decided he could have a bigger impact, in a company he truly seems to love.

in his talk (which you can check out in a week or so), he outlined a few principles of working with clients (from his perspective as a studio owner and now as the client). so simple, they're impossible to refute:

less is better (when it comes to solving real problems). crowdsourcing  won't solve everything.

find and use your sweet spot. this separates the pros from the amateurs.

clients don't expect you to solve their problems. they expect you to listen and then help them as much and in the best way you can. there is a difference.

if, at the end of a meeting, you've said more words than your client... you lose.

finally, the simplest of all: be truthful. in all aspects. if a prospective client comes to you looking for a new logo or website to solve their sagging sales, but you know it's really because they're serving crappy food, you have to have the courage to say so. the clients you really want to work with will respect truth delivered without heat.

this last one has hit home the last couple of months with us personally: in one recent project, we were hired to make some modifications to an existing structure, to bring it into a regulatory compliance. the client believed the wrong material had been installed during construction and needed to be upgraded. as we launched into gathering the existing documents, we determined literally within the first two hours (by doing some forensic digging and back-checking) that in fact the originally specified material was almost certainly what was installed. 99.9% sure.

now, we weren't hired to confirm what was there - we were hired to manage the replacement. it would have been very simple to take their internal findings at face value and take off designing the replacement. and we're guilty of doing this on occasion as well. but part of being truthful is figuring out when you're not really needed. sometimes.

telling our client about our findings would not only save them a couple hundred thousand dollars in construction costs and another umpteen thousand in inconvenience, but it would also talk us out of a job. there was some risk we'd embarrass the staff who had come to the initial conclusion. in the end, of course, there was no hesitation about the right move to make. as diplomatically as possible, we laid out our findings. and... we hope that we'll get another shot to work with them in the future. nobody said doing the right thing was always easy...

in the autobiography on steve jobs, he claimed to spend a lot of his time designing 'the company' as much as any of apple's products. this was especially true during his last few years - after the cancer became manifest and, presumably, a concern for his legacy brought into sharper relief. and...

it's been a long couple of weeks - massive proposals, a respiratory illness, responding to people coming off the last couple of posts. hopefully, we're finally back on schedule.   for some weekend reading, this piece in the nytimes today sums up the cultural trend that...

  In the companion to this post, we took a look at some of the challenges and barriers to creating an incubator culture that could support architectural startups. But, when you take a step back, would accelerating the number of new startups really solve some of our most pressing issues? The...

  There must be something in the air.  My last post - about a recent conversation FastCo had with fuseproject’s Yves Behar - looked at that design firm’s equity role with some of the startup clients they work with. Later that week, David Fano and Steve Sanderson of CASE took...

  been swamped doing proposals (green shoots in the air!) but fast company beat me to by next post, which was going to feature fuseproject, the industrial design firm headed by yves behar.    best quote: 'Where most design firms work for a fee and then part ways with their client...

  so, just to muddy the waters of the study put out by georgetown university yesterday, this evening the wall street journal's reports on the Department of Labor's annual average unemployment figures, released today as part of the overall jobs report (positive news on the whole. still...

so, the above graph is taken from an article by the washington post, on projected unemployment rates for upcoming 2012 graduates in various professions. you can read the whole article (as short as it is) here.   i'm not sure what's more depressing on a 20 degree morning in atlanta - the fact...

“Networking”, as the OED may tell us, is “a supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest:” Simple enough, right? Except… what kind of system? Who are the individuals and groups? And most...

i've been out meeting people a lot these past couple of weeks - some who i'd rather not see again but a ton of inspiring and interesting people from all walks of life.    one of the best was ben chesnut, an industrial designer who's gone on to work in (what else) software development...

(image from 'it's a wonderful life' - of course you all know that. i don't have anything to do with the copyrights on the movie though.)   One of the main attractions for starting this blog was the excuse to reach out to interesting people and get their perspective. And one of the first...

  i'm working on a couple features for the blog, but in the meantime some data from the feds this morning. all emphasis is mine....   "Construction spending rose 0.8 percent in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $798.5 billion, the Commerce Department said. While an...

without question, the last 3-4 years have been ruthlessly unkind to many recent graduates and interns in traditional practice. my own alma mater, for which i'm on an alumni advisory board, was tracking about a 15% employment rate for one of the recent graduating classes (now, to be fair, this was...

    with two major proposals wrapping up today, this cartoon has never felt more right...   back to the regular programming this weekend. 

while i'm waiting for my network to reboot (and in the midst of proposal hell), it makes some sense to talk about why the best, most savvy clients (ones we'd all kill to work with) generally make their decisions:   it's the people, not the firms.   and it's pretty obvious, but...

  it seems like this week will be a string of never-ending proposals, but since the show must go on....   i found the coincidence today of the 20th anniversary "re-release" of u2's achtung baby (containing its idiosyncratic delight that is 'ultraviolet') with this story in...

  in the last post, we took a quick (very quick) look at the various corporate structures that are available under the us tax code. if you missed it, here's a shortcut.    so, to guide you through our own process, let me give you some of the particulars - there were going to be...

so, one of the questions asked recently was about which type of legal structure someone starting a firm may want to use. to put in the usual disclaimer - i'm neither a lawyer nor a tax expert so you'll need to take anything i saw with a mountain of salt - i'll just offer some thoughts we went...

whether you love, hate or are indifferent to frank o. gehry's work, if you've ever really studied his career path, it's clear that he, almost alone among his brethren, figured out how to create a business model that supported the kind of ambition his work aspires to.   which is a fancy way...

jammed up with proposals, but this very timely article in the times caught my eye because i genuinely believe it's a major reason people are scared to hire full time right now (forget the threat of future regulations - pure bunk and posturing). consider their example case: "Here is how the math...

back to our regularly scheduled programming...   one of the topics that frequents the dicussion forums, as well as numerous websites, books, and other media, is 'what do i need to do when starting a firm'? the short answer is: a lot. or a little. because, like most of life, it all really...

just a quick update today - i penned a lengthy reply to sherin wing's feature on the macro relationships between the economy and employment that, taken together, form another kind of discussion about what kinds of trends are driving the opportunities we'll see in the coming years. needless to...

one of the most essential aspects when starting a firm (or even while growing and evolving a firm) is to personally develop an ability to look in the mirror and be truly comfortable with how well you understand the person looking back. without some ability for self-introspection and the...

it seems like the eulogy count for steve jobs is approaching the numbers of people who own an apple device (i've got 2 sitting 8 inches to the right). and the commencement speech he gave to stanford university, back in 2005, is seeing record numbers of hits (and worth seeing if you haven't yet)...

  i was put onto this book today - it's on order but it looks like it could be interesting, especially considering the author (jenn kennedy) is a photographer and journalist more than an architect. the roster of firms that are interviewed - all in southern california - is pretty...

quick break from the start up train - the aia's architectural billings index (abi) is one of the more important benchmarks and 'canaries' that measures the overall health of the profession. if you want some more background reading on how the readings are measured, you can read this description on...

in our start up vein, looking at the macro level, there's been a more pronounced uptick in companies that are re-thinking how they get off the ground. 'bootstrapping', 'lean', 'leveraged' - the words all change, but a majority of the principles stay the same. what's interesting to me isn't the...

To kick things off, I want to focus on start ups for the first few weeks of the blog. Partly because of circumstance - the current economic climate in Europe and the US has forced many architects and designers to become entrepreneurs whether they were ready or willing to be. Partly because it's a...

starting a blog is part masochism and part regimented meditation. great blogs have a kind of implicit compact - if the content's good, there's an obligation to participate in the conversation.   having no idea how the former will be received, the latter's the only hope i'm bringing with me...