Architect 2014-02.pdf

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CENTER
ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
BEST PRACTICES
THE POWER OF FOCUS
CHASING EVERY PROJECT MAY SEEM WISE IN A TIGHT ECONOMY. BUT SMART FIRMS SPECIALIZE. ARCHITECT
ASKED LEADING PRACTITIONERS AND MANAGEMENT EXPERTS TO SHARE THEIR PERSPECTIVES.
WE KNOW
WHAT KEEPS
OUR CLIENTS
UP AT NIGHT.
DAN ROWE, PRESIDENT,
TREANOR ARCHITECTS
Text by Nate Berg
Illustrations by Peter Arkle
IN LEAN TIMES, you take what you can get.
For architecture firms still climbing out of a
recession-sized hole, that can translate into
bidding for just about any viable project that
comes along, even if it’s outside their zone
of expertise. That can be seen as a sign of
desperation or as an instinctual survival tactic.
Ray Kogan, AIA, sees it as a mistake.
The president of Kogan & Company, an
Arlington, Va.–based strategy and management
consultancy, Kogan has been advising
architecture and engineering firms for 20
years. He argues that during times of reduced
demand, firms should be identifying what
they’re good at and focusing on becoming
experts in specific niches. Don’t diversify, he
says: Specialize. “It’s really just plain market
forces,” Kogan says. “When people want
something, a service of any sort, they typically
want the comfort level that goes with hiring an
individual who’s experienced with that service.”
Kogan suggests that firms pick a handful
of focus areas in which they’ve had market
success. The trick is finding markets that are
independently driven and that have economic
cycles that counter or offset each other—office
development and K–12 education, for instance.
“I think that as much discipline as a firm can
muster to stay focused on what they’re best
at, especially if they have their eggs in several
strategically independent baskets, they’ll do
better in the long term,” Kogan says.
Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business
School professor, has studied some of the
problems with diversification. In his book
On Competition, he mentions that in a longterm
study of 33 large U.S. corporations,
diversification generally did not result in higher
profitability or greater competitive advantage.
The common problem identified in Porter’s
study is that companies simply aren’t very good
at strategizing their way across diverse markets.
Some architecture firms have embraced
specialization, if somewhat reluctantly at
first. The Boudreaux Group, a 38-year-old
firm based in Columbia, S.C., had long seen
itself as a generalist studio. But after a recent
reorganization, the firm decided to narrow its
focus.“We’re in the early stages of making the
transition from doing a little bit of everything,
and trying to be all things to all people, to
really defining what our core markets are,”
says Heather Mitchell, AIA, the firm’s president.
“We’re trying to focus more on less.”
That has meant favoring markets the firm
excels in—higher education, religious facilities,
municipal government—and abandoning
growing sectors it has considered entering, such
as healthcare. For a 17-person firm, Mitchell
says, targeting a new market, even a thriving
one, would take too much time and money.
“It’s a risk you have to take to get better and to
be perceived as leaders in the markets you’re
trying to grow,” Mitchell says. “But it is very
hard to let go. I’m struggling with that.”
Treanor Architects, an 80-person firm
with offices in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas,
has long based its practice around highly
focused specializations. Dedicated teams of
architects handle projects in different sectors:
student life, science and technology, justice,
and historic preservation. Dan Rowe, AIA, the
company’s president, says that such focus has
helped his firm to establish credibility and
dominance in the marketplace. He’s found
that to be seen as a leader in a specific market,
architects need to know more than just how
to design the building. They need to be able to
think like their clients and understand their
concerns. “We know what keeps them up at
night,” Rowe says.