Curious what the staffing structure in everyone's studio is like, and your ideal structure should be.
By staffing structure, I mean the demographic pyramid of the firm - by experience level. A healthy firm, IMO, has a bulge in the middle and a base that is just as fat or a bit slimmer. The pyramid's top is relatively light. In terms of personnel experience, this would mean a firm that has a solid core of folks with 5 - 7 years experience who are able to guide new staffers (with the help of more experienced architects of course), and a group of senior PMs of around the same size.
An unhealthy composition (Again, IMO) is one with a small waist. That is, a lot of 5 - 7 year experienced folks have left the firm, leaving a gulf between untrained new staffers and overworked senior PMs who have no time (or incentive, given the history of folks leaving) to teach newcomers. The newcomers are left frustrated and leave soon after, perpetuating the vicious cycle - though the firm can still count on a steady supply of eager young grads and hungry international candidates.
We have five job role/compensation band tiers for a current staff of 18. This structural allows parallel career tracking and compensation adjustments for different specialty areas and is intended to scale up to a team of 50+ in the future:
Vice President / Managing Principal (Department Leader x 1)
Director / Principal (Team Leader x 3)
Senior Professional / Associate (Senior PMs, PAs, PDs, PEs)
If you're comfortable telling us, what is the breakdown of the remaining 15 team members at you firm gwharton?
Nov 25, 24 6:55 pm ·
·
gwharton
Right now we don't have anybody at Tier 3, since that is reserved for internal promotions only (we do have people on track for this). Only two of three Tier 2 (Director) positions are currently filled, since the third studio work team does not yet fully exist (As VP, I am also wearing that hat until we hire somebody to do it, and the two members of that team report to me).
The remaining staff all fall into Tier 4 (11) and Tier 5 (4). We do try to hire one new graduate/early career professional every year, especially as Staff promote up to Professional.
We try to maintain a hard limit where nobody ever has more than six direct reports. Also, now that we are expanding into other geographic areas, this structure is going to expand with the overall business.
Also, the Interior Design team has a similar but parallel structure to architecture and engineering, with a Director, two Seniors, a few Professionals, and a couple of Staff.
We don't have a particularly healthy breakdown but the bigger problem is only half of the ownership core knows it (despite my very obvious comments).
1x President and 3x VPs (owners' circle) - Equity shares
3x Seniors (where live) - Profit shares
2 to 5 intermediate professionals (number varies depending on who you ask)
5x junior to junior(ish) across arch, tech, int des
2 support.
18-20ish person office (arch and int des), medium size for my area. The real problem is too many in the intermediate arch position consider themselves senior even thought they are not. So we have the extra fat of a top-loaded pyramid without the experience benefit.
Nov 25, 24 7:39 pm ·
·
gwharton
I would say the biggest problem with that org chart is it's super top-heavy. 7 execs/seniors out of 19 total is ridiculous.
Nov 26, 24 2:04 pm ·
·
OddArchitect
It could be that the upper level people act as the PM's / design sector heads. I think if that was the case then they wouldn't be 'top heavy'. The first office I worked at was similar. There were eight managing partners in a 32 person firm. Each ran projects. It worked fine and the firm is still very successful and profitable.
Yes, that's likely. It's common in firms that pipeline project managers into leadership. It's also a separate problem if the organization ever has any intention of trying to scale up, since it will make that very difficult. For best effectiveness, leadership functions should be focused as much as possible toward "on the business" work, and away from "in the business" work. When you have senior leadership people doing "in the business" stuff, it's an organizational failure. They're not doing their primary jobs. Some senior roles straddle this (the Director level tier in my own organization above), splitting their responsibilities between IN and ON with specific targets. But nobody at the VP level or above should ever being doing "in the business" project or managerial stuff. If they are, they have been over-promoted.
I agree, kind of. The first office I worked at had one senior partner who only found projects, aka focused 'on the business' work.
Not every firm can function like this though. Most need their senior members to still do some "in the business" work. I've found that it's typical for a 75/25 split between on / in business work.
It's just me in mah van these days, but throughout my career I noticed the problem you are speaking of - the skinny middle.
As someone who graduated into the 2008 recession, I always sort of noticed there were never many people at my level/ age in the firms I worked in.
As I became more experienced, licensed, then a senior-level employee, that became even more obvious.
I was pushed to take on PA duties way earlier than was fair or reasonable and now, 10+ years later, I can only find PA/ senior PA jobs because the director positions at most firms are full.
One other place I worked at had an inverted pyramid structure - where almost 40% of the workforce are Directors in name and senior PMs in practice. This left around 20% of the staff doing fulltime production work, assisted by 20% interns and fresh grads. The former 20% consists almost entirely of green card applicants who stomach long nights and weekends to produce CDs. An unhealthy structure, IMO but still sustainable thanks to the Chinese, Pinoy and Mexican cohort.
I do it all, residential design only, with occasional help from consultants. I'm a decent technician but not a great manager and the older I get, the less patience I have for clients and contractors. So I guess you might say that I'm a bit fat in the middle. ;-)
I used to work at a very large office. the company was structured similar to gwharton’s example (along with a bunch of specialists and departments that handled specific tasks). The best functioning teams had a senior PM with essentially an “assistant PM/PA” who sat next to them and was their right hand. They could handle pretty much any scale of project. Small stuff they would just handle it themselves. Large and you’d have two in sync people keeping tabs on the big picture.
Some teams would even have a core group of up to 3 or 4 people who worked extremely well together. The teams would grow and shrink based on the size of the project but generally this core group was pretty consistent. Sometimes this core group would break apart to support other teams or one person would decide they wanted to join another team, specialize, or move into a PM role themselves and allow someone else to move in. This is how the office worked for a couple decades. And it worked well.
The beginning of trouble in that office was when the long time staffing manager retired and upper management along with the new staffing manager decided that PMs couldn’t assign more than one project to any one individual - so you’d often have individuals reporting to multiple PMs trying to piece together work - and PMs who used to rely on support from their core group were forced to do a lot of smaller tasks themselves instead of being able to delegate - and they got overwhelmed.
I heard this change was due to complaints from some PMs that the others were “keeping all the good people to themselves.” But the reality is some people just work better together - and do their best work when they have the right kind of support.
A ton of people quit - repeat clients that worked with specific teams stopped calling - and they had to eventually lay off a bunch of people.
I live in a medium sized college town (around 300k people) and the firm I am at is very top heavy. We do mostly government projects ranging from feasibility studies to about 50 million. In a dream world we would have another PA and 3 designers. Given our location though we have a really difficult time finding solid people. We currently have:
3x Principals (one will retire in the next 5 years)
1x Project Architect
1x Project Manager
1x Project Designer (currently a contract employee via a recruiter which has been interesting…)
Staffing Structure
Curious what the staffing structure in everyone's studio is like, and your ideal structure should be.
By staffing structure, I mean the demographic pyramid of the firm - by experience level. A healthy firm, IMO, has a bulge in the middle and a base that is just as fat or a bit slimmer. The pyramid's top is relatively light. In terms of personnel experience, this would mean a firm that has a solid core of folks with 5 - 7 years experience who are able to guide new staffers (with the help of more experienced architects of course), and a group of senior PMs of around the same size.
An unhealthy composition (Again, IMO) is one with a small waist. That is, a lot of 5 - 7 year experienced folks have left the firm, leaving a gulf between untrained new staffers and overworked senior PMs who have no time (or incentive, given the history of folks leaving) to teach newcomers. The newcomers are left frustrated and leave soon after, perpetuating the vicious cycle - though the firm can still count on a steady supply of eager young grads and hungry international candidates.
We have five job role/compensation band tiers for a current staff of 18. This structural allows parallel career tracking and compensation adjustments for different specialty areas and is intended to scale up to a team of 50+ in the future:
If you're comfortable telling us, what is the breakdown of the remaining 15 team members at you firm gwharton?
Right now we don't have anybody at Tier 3, since that is reserved for internal promotions only (we do have people on track for this). Only two of three Tier 2 (Director) positions are currently filled, since the third studio work team does not yet fully exist (As VP, I am also wearing that hat until we hire somebody to do it, and the two members of that team report to me).
The remaining staff all fall into Tier 4 (11) and Tier 5 (4). We do try to hire one new graduate/early career professional every year, especially as Staff promote up to Professional.
We try to maintain a hard limit where nobody ever has more than six direct reports. Also, now that we are expanding into other geographic areas, this structure is going to expand with the overall business.
Also, the Interior Design team has a similar but parallel structure to architecture and engineering, with a Director, two Seniors, a few Professionals, and a couple of Staff.
We don't have a particularly healthy breakdown but the bigger problem is only half of the ownership core knows it (despite my very obvious comments).
1x President and 3x VPs (owners' circle) - Equity shares
3x Seniors (where live) - Profit shares
2 to 5 intermediate professionals (number varies depending on who you ask)
5x junior to junior(ish) across arch, tech, int des
2 support.
18-20ish person office (arch and int des), medium size for my area. The real problem is too many in the intermediate arch position consider themselves senior even thought they are not. So we have the extra fat of a top-loaded pyramid without the experience benefit.
I would say the biggest problem with that org chart is it's super top-heavy. 7 execs/seniors out of 19 total is ridiculous.
It could be that the upper level people act as the PM's / design sector heads. I think if that was the case then they wouldn't be 'top heavy'. The first office I worked at was similar. There were eight managing partners in a 32 person firm. Each ran projects. It worked fine and the firm is still very successful and profitable.
Yes, that's likely. It's common in firms that pipeline project managers into leadership. It's also a separate problem if the organization ever has any intention of trying to scale up, since it will make that very difficult. For best effectiveness, leadership functions should be focused as much as possible toward "on the business" work, and away from "in the business" work. When you have senior leadership people doing "in the business" stuff, it's an organizational failure. They're not doing their primary jobs. Some senior roles straddle this (the Director level tier in my own organization above), splitting their responsibilities between IN and ON with specific targets. But nobody at the VP level or above should ever being doing "in the business" project or managerial stuff. If they are, they have been over-promoted.
I agree, kind of. The first office I worked at had one senior partner who only found projects, aka focused 'on the business' work.
Not every firm can function like this though. Most need their senior members to still do some "in the business" work. I've found that it's typical for a 75/25 split between on / in business work.
It's just me in mah van these days, but throughout my career I noticed the problem you are speaking of - the skinny middle.
As someone who graduated into the 2008 recession, I always sort of noticed there were never many people at my level/ age in the firms I worked in.
As I became more experienced, licensed, then a senior-level employee, that became even more obvious.
I was pushed to take on PA duties way earlier than was fair or reasonable and now, 10+ years later, I can only find PA/ senior PA jobs because the director positions at most firms are full.
Similar experience here - ended up as a rocket booster and played into wanting to start my own firm
Opposite end of the spectrum with my two-person outfit but here we go.
Me - owner, 15 years experience
Next hire - PA/PM - 7-10+ level (hoping by mid-2025)
Current employee - Designer, 2-3 years experience
We're a 15 person firm. We take on projects ranging from $5 million to $160 million. We mostly work in education, public projects, and MOB.
3x Principals - All are Senior PM's, on is the director of architecture. One partner is about to retire. :(
1x Senior PM
2x Senior PA's - both are on track to be PM's within a year
2x Interior Designers - One part time
6x Interns - two are nearly licensed. Two are fresh grads
1x Student Intern - part time
1x Office manager
With the exception of our office manager and the two fresh grads everyone takes on some responsibilities of a PA. We all do a bit of everything.
One other place I worked at had an inverted pyramid structure - where almost 40% of the workforce are Directors in name and senior PMs in practice. This left around 20% of the staff doing fulltime production work, assisted by 20% interns and fresh grads. The former 20% consists almost entirely of green card applicants who stomach long nights and weekends to produce CDs. An unhealthy structure, IMO but still sustainable thanks to the Chinese, Pinoy and Mexican cohort.
That's horrible.
I do it all, residential design only, with occasional help from consultants. I'm a decent technician but not a great manager and the older I get, the less patience I have for clients and contractors. So I guess you might say that I'm a bit fat in the middle. ;-)
I used to work at a very large office. the company was structured similar to gwharton’s example (along with a bunch of specialists and departments that handled specific tasks). The best functioning teams had a senior PM with essentially an “assistant PM/PA” who sat next to them and was their right hand. They could handle pretty much any scale of project. Small stuff they would just handle it themselves. Large and you’d have two in sync people keeping tabs on the big picture.
Some teams would even have a core group of up to 3 or 4 people who worked extremely well together. The teams would grow and shrink based on the size of the project but generally this core group was pretty consistent. Sometimes this core group would break apart to support other teams or one person would decide they wanted to join another team, specialize, or move into a PM role themselves and allow someone else to move in. This is how the office worked for a couple decades. And it worked well.
The beginning of trouble in that office was when the long time staffing manager retired and upper management along with the new staffing manager decided that PMs couldn’t assign more than one project to any one individual - so you’d often have individuals reporting to multiple PMs trying to piece together work - and PMs who used to rely on support from their core group were forced to do a lot of smaller tasks themselves instead of being able to delegate - and they got overwhelmed.
I heard this change was due to complaints from some PMs that the others were “keeping all the good people to themselves.” But the reality is some people just work better together - and do their best work when they have the right kind of support.
A ton of people quit - repeat clients that worked with specific teams stopped calling - and they had to eventually lay off a bunch of people.
I live in a medium sized college town (around 300k people) and the firm I am at is very top heavy. We do mostly government projects ranging from feasibility studies to about 50 million. In a dream world we would have another PA and 3 designers. Given our location though we have a really difficult time finding solid people. We currently have:
3x Principals (one will retire in the next 5 years)
1x Project Architect
1x Project Manager
1x Project Designer (currently a contract employee via a recruiter which has been interesting…)
1x Office Admin (accounting and RFP responses)
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