Entrearchitect Podcast With Mark R. Lepage

How to Pursue Your Passion as a Small Firm Architect Most architects are born dreamers, but we tend to be afraid to pursue those dreams. Often our dreams are stuck in our head and it’s hard to find a way to reach them. Success in achieving our greatest goals can only occur if we… start. Make a plan and take the first step to move toward your dreams! This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Victor Caban-Diaz talks big ideas and Pursuing Your Passion as a Small Firm Architect.   Astronaut or Comic Book Artist? Victor didn’t make the decision to study architecture until he was ready to make a decision about where he wanted to go to college. Growing up, various professions like being an astronaut or a comic book artist were more appealing to him. In high school, he was great at math and art and wanted to pursue both skills, eventually landing on architecture and attending the University of Miami in Florida. He received his bachelor’s degree there and began his degree. In the beginning, he did

10 Steps for Creating Standard Operating Procedures for Architects Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth Revisited, said, “Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go, but the systems remain constant.” This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Simple SOPs: 10 Steps for Creating Standard Operating Procedures for Architects. In business, standard operating procedures are the answer to your questions. How do you make more money? How can you find more work? How can you get your employees or contractors to do what you want them to? How do I get more done? The answer is SOPs; Standard Operating Procedures for Architects. They make you a stronger, more effective leader. They clarify your vision and communicate, support and help with decision-making for realizing that vision. SOPs build a better culture. They’re an intentional reinforcement of the behaviors that help us realize

 How to Grow Your Architecture Firm This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, How to Grow Your Architecture Firm with Todd Reding, President and CEO of Charrette Venture Group and Rena Klein, founder of RM Klein Consulting. What is Charrette Venture Group? Charrette Venture Group (CVG) is a firm that provides a wholistic approach to building a business; they provide services from management, leadership, finance, marketing, business development, and more to architecture firms who are seeking to build a strong business in the design space. What’s new for Charrette Venture Group? CVG is thrilled to announce a merge with RM Klein Consulting. The parallels with of Rena’s mission and CVG and with EntreArchitect led her to want to share what she knows with those around her, building a consulting practice to help architecture firms succeed. She was excited to meet the founder of CVG, Matt Ostanik, and join in an innovative approach to helping small firms succeed. She found that one of the barriers to success

Beautifully Simple Websites for Architects How can you find more work? How can you convert more proposals into projects? Tell your unique story to your target audience. That’s brand building, the essence of marketing. The best and maybe most important tool we have to accomplish this strategy is our website. When our potential clients start the process of seeking an architect, the first step is to search online for someone in their local region. Are you on the first page of Google? If not, you’re invisible. You need a website that can find its way to the first results of a search engine. When your prospects find your website, it has to be beautiful and clear, and it must tell your unique story as the first impression of your brand. We know you have so much to do and so little time. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Beautifully Simple Websites for Architects with Robert Yuen of Monograph.io. What is Monograph.io? Monograph is a website builder with a concierges’ service. As three previous

Copyright Protection for Architects A question often raised is, “How do we protect our designs?” How can we deter a client from overextending their license to our ideas and using our designs beyond their initially intended or contractually bound uses? As creatives, how do we protect our creativity? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Copyright Protection for Architects with Abe Cohn of Howard M. Cohn & Associates. Abe’s Origin Story Abe has always been interested in entrepreneurship, and finds it fascinating to deal with so many people in so many different areas who have such different and novel ideas. He started a tech company a few years ago and after dealing with a ton of intellectual property law there, it made sense for him to move over to the legal sides of things. What’s the difference between copyright, trademarks and patents? Intellectual property is a broad category that includes the intangibles involved in a new creation. Depending on what that is, you can turn to a sp

Public Interest Design Firms At EntreArchitect, we’re learning that we need to build a better business so we can be better architects. We want to make the work a better place. That’s why we became architects in the first place. We want to provide a positive social impact. What if by building better businesses we built a better world? What if a part of what we do benefits the public in an impactful way? Stay tuned as we share a new online resource to learn more on this idea. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Public Interest Design Firms with Mia Scharphie and Gilad Meron of Proactive Practices. Mia’s Origin Story Mia has a masters in landscape architecture but feels that she’s secretly a social worker with designer skills. She’s always been interested in people who get left out and how to bring them back in for most of her life. She worked at a nonprofit in San Fransisco, Public Architecture, that takes on design challenges that the private market doesn’t have an incenti

How to Build a Profitable Architecture Firm Profit… Then Art. In order to be a better architect, we must first be better business people. We need to build better businesses. This week’s guest is the author of Profit First, a book outlining the simple process of transforming any business from a cash-eating monster to a money-making machine. Accounting can be overwhelming and complicated, not to mention difficult to understand. This week, you’ll learn a step-by-step process to guarantee that you’ll be profitable. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, How to Build a Profitable Architecture Firm with author Mike Michalowicz. Mike’s Origin Story Mike was a Jersey boy all his life who worked at a computer store right out of college. He had a drive to start his own business and quickly realized that managing a business wasn’t as easy as he thought. It took him a few years of trial-by-fire to fall in love with entrepreneurship. He learned that as the solo-guy, you only eat what you

Design-Build is the Future of Architecture Architecture, construction, interiors and furniture. This week’s guest is a successful architect from Austin, Texas serving the high-end residential market. He started his firm with a single speculative project and grew it into a $20 million integrated design-build firm. How does a design-build firm like this work? How do they structure their fees and communicate with one another? How do they ensure that every project is built to the exact standards promised by their powerful brand? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Design-Build is the Future of Architecture with architect Luis Jauregui. Luis is originally from Mexico, and his family moved often when he was a child giving him great exposure to different architecture styles throughout the country. His father was a civil engineer, so the construction concept was already built into him. In high school, he discovered how exciting building was to him. He enrolled in the school of architecture in Mexico City, and

An Architect on the Inside at HGTV HGTV To many of us residential architects, that's a four letter word. Promoting unrealistic expectations for most projects regarding time, quality and budget, HGTV has made our tough job as architects even more difficult. This week's guest is a successful residential architect serving the southeastern region of Michigan. One day, about a year before we recorded this episode, she received a mysterious telephone call, which lead to her being the lead architect for the most recent HGTV Urban Oasis giveaway home. She shares the story of her experience of being on the inside at a HGTV project, how she landed the job and her quest to be a faithful representative of us small firm architects. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, An Architect on the Inside at HGTV with the founder of Studio Z Architecture, Dawn Zuber. An “Architect” Since She Was 11 Years Old: ) When Dawn was five, her grandparents moved to Florida from Ohio and they moved back when she was 11.

Public Relations Strategies for Architects You’re out there hustling, shaking hands and responding to all your RFPs, you’ve got your business development down. At the other end, you have a strong brand, your website is working and your marketing material is telling your story. Somewhere in between the two, lies a critical step to your success as a small firm architect: public relations. If you get it right, your phone will ring off the hook with your next best clients. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, “Design Evangelist” Julie Taylor joins Mark to share 3 Proven Public Relations Strategies for Small Firm Architects. With a background in art history and fine arts, Julie was always drawn to creative expression. As a secretary receptionist just out of college, Julie worked at an architecture firm in Chicago, learning various aspects of the industry. Following that, she worked for a magazine for interior designers and continued to pursue her own writing. When she decided to go into PR

How To Be Happy as an Architect Architecture is a tough profession. We work long hours for years with passion and dedication to become architects. We struggle to launch our firms without basic business fundamentals. We search for the best clients and then work to serve them to the best of our ability. Being entrepreneur architects gives us so many freedoms that we wouldn’t have if we were employed by another firm. It’s tough, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Still, sometimes we question whether or not we made the right decision. Would we be happier working for someone else? True happiness is the result not of your profession, but of the choices you make and the person you choose to be. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage shares his 3 Steps to Happiness as a Small Firm Architect. Love Love has a lot of meanings to a lot of different people. Love is about respecting and caring for one another. How can you be there for others and support them? Not just your spouse, kids o

How To Succeed as a Residential Architect with Dale Mulfinger, FAIA It’s a difficult choice to pick a target market and focus all your energy, resources and effort on one market. It’s a decision many small architects are afraid to make because we’re afraid of missing out on other opportunities and we don’t want to have all our eggs in one basket. When you pick a target market and become an expert on it, you’ll find that your next best client will find their way to you. Our guest this week has succeeded in making that decision and focusing on a target market early on in the development of his firm, and he’s thrived for over thirty years because of that. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Dale Mulfinger, FAIA of SALA Architects joins me and he shares his knowledge about How to Succeed as a Residential Architect. A Minnesota Farm Kid Dale grew up as a farm kid in rural Minnesota. After discovering his lack of desire to pursue farming, he excelled in a drafting program in hi

How to Build a Brand That Resonates with Your Most Valuable Clients Your brand is more than just your logo. Your brand is your story in the minds of those interacting with your firm. It’s about emotions and feelings. It’s the way people see, feel, touch and experience our firms. This week at EntreArchitect podcast, Declan Keefe of Placetailor joins us once again to discuss How to Build a Brand that Resonates with Your Most Valuable Clients. What is branding? Branding is the story that the people who hear about your firm would tell somebody. Branding can be associated with the story that you tell as a firm, but you want it distill it down to what the client is left with. That’s the essence of what the brand really is. You know your brand, your company and what you want your organization to be, but good branding is a matter of what the client believes and what they’re left with. Moving past the colors and fonts on your website, branding expands to how your client feels when they see one

How To Use Your Story to Find the Work You Want We all know that storytelling is a critical part of your success in business. We need to know our story and how to tell it to our target market. That’s how we find the work we love and the clients we want. How do we craft our story, to whom do we tell it, and how does our story help us find more work on a consistent basis? This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Jeff Echols of Echo Engagement joins us to discuss How To Use Your Story to Find the Work You Want. Jeff’s journey in architecture began when he moved from Atlanta to Chicago as a kid, growing up close to many Frank Lloyd Wright homes and watching This Old House with his dad every Saturday morning on PBS. He attended Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning and worked first in Chicago and eventually moved to Indianapolis working for firms ranging from 3-people firms to one of the largest firms in the country. After over twenty years in the traditional architecture world in some k

Living an Integrated Life As small firm architects, work life balance plays a critical role in the success of our businesses as well as the success of our personal lives. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage shares his thoughts on Living an Integrated Life as a Small Firm Architect. The integrated life allows us to live one continuous life with both our business and personal lives at the same time. Sometimes it’s crazy, and sometimes it’s wonderful. For those of us who work from home or who are trying to juggle full time personal lives and full time professional lives, it becomes a struggle: we’re either going to end up with a failing firm because we focused on our family, or we’re going to end up with a forgotten family because we focused on our firm. Imbalance in life shows itself as stress. When our attention and intentions are appropriately distributed, the stress is reduced. This doesn’t mean that the distribution needs to be equal. How do we balance our time,

 How to Design and Sell Modern Architecture as a Small Firm Architect When the world was in the midst of an economic crisis and there were no jobs, a young architect moved to a new town with one contact and a ton of ambition. Today’s guest built his own business flipping ordinary ranch houses into modern architectural works of art. Using their unique story, they built a brand and made a profit. This week on EntreArchitect podcast, Cavin Costello of The Ranch Mine shares How to Design and Sell Modern Architecture as a Small Firm Architect. Gavin was first introduced to architecture when his father, a civil engineer, designed and built the house that he grew up in just before Cavin was born. In high school, a teacher suggested he go into architecture because he excelled at math proofs. With no previous experience in art or drawing, he attended Northeastern University in Boston because he didn’t have to have an art portfolio and because it was a co-op school, meaning he was able to do schooling alon

Every architect has a dream of having their work published in books and magazines. For some, it's a right of passage a testament to hard work and years of focus. For others, it’s a marketing strategy. Publication is a form of social proof indicating that our designs are worthy of our prospective clients' attention. Do you want to get your work published? Well stick around… This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage will share How to Get Published as an Architect. 10 Steps to Get Published as an Architect 1. Design Interesting Details & Spaces // Many of us don’t have huge budgets to design at the level we want to throughout the whole building. While you’re designing, think about the spaces you may be able to design with no extra budget that will create a great photographs for publishers. 2. Photography Matters // Unless you have the skills of a professional, you’re going to have to hire someone. Even if you have great architecture or a great story, edito

When did you discover architecture? At what age did you learn that architecture was something you could do as a profession? When did you decide to become an architect? What was it that inspired you? Why did YOU choose to become an architect? Those are questions Mark asks every guest at EntreArchitect Podcast. Were there places; Were there people in your life that guided you or inspired you to make a difference through buildings? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, we dive deep into one entrepreneur architect's story. She shares her very early influences, her inspirations, her passions and her reconsideration of her entire life plan. This week, The Journey to Design the Thrivable Home with Architect Stacia Hood. Stacia knew in the second grade that she wanted to be an architect, inviting her friends over to draw and build playhouses complete with elevators and balance beam. When she moved to a small mountain town across the country, she created an amazing friendship with a young woman with disabilities w

How To Pass the Architect Registration Exam When Real Life Gets in the Way How long did it take you to become a licensed architect? How many years went by before you focused on your studies and passed the Architect Registration Exam (ARE)? How do you do all the things that are going on in your life and find enough time to study and pass the ARE? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Evan Troxel of Archispeak Podcast talks about How to Hack Your Life for ARE Success and Beyond. Evan grew up in the mountains as a very outdoor-loving person, always building houses and projects out of rocks and sticks. He jokes that his dad must have had the longest-standing permit for an addition to their house in Tahoe where they worked indoors in the winter and outdoors in the summer. He learned carpentry and construction skills from working with his dad, loved taking this apart and putting them back together, and developed technical drawing and writing skills throughout his education. He went on to win a Regional Opportunity

Profit…Then Art: 12 Steps to Business Success in Architecture For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we focused on Personal Development and encouraged you to dedicate some time to building a better you. For our final installment, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage shares 12 Steps to Business Success in Architecture. For full show notes and a list of references from the original podcast, visit https://entrearchitect.com/podcast/ea092-profit-art-podcast/. FREE Special Session Webinar Want to learn about the 3 critical business systems you need to succeed as a small firm architect? Register for our FREE special session webinar on September 7th at 6 PM EST. Visit EntreArchitect.com/FreeWebinar. Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) Photo credit: Pixabay // TBIT   The post Profit…Then Art (Best of EntreArchi