REDEFINING PURPOSE
We often meet small-firm principals who are overwhelmed because their work-life balance is thrown off: They are putting in long hours managing clients and producing drawings. MT: How has the Emerging Leaders Program equipped you as an architect to advance the profession? KL: One way to frame effective leadership is as advocacy for ideas in a way that benefits the people within the process of growing those ideas – not just among the designers, but with our clients and within the community. A lot of my work is in the public realm, where community engagement is not just publicly vetting plans, but sharing in the vision process, often among people with different cultural goals and background to mine. The understanding I’ve gained through ELP has allowed me to more significantly connect to and collaborate with the broad cast of voices in the communities I work in.
Small Business Mentorship: Charrette Venture Group & ARCH406 Scaling the basic tenets of interpersonal mentorship to the smallbusiness level can be a unique and challenging opportunity. Charrette Venture Group (CVG) has realized the potential of offering support, mentorship, and business advice to small, architecturefocused businesses as an investment that pays dividends both to the small business and to itself. Noticing a trend of great designers lacking in business acumen, Matt Ostanik, AIA, founded the CVG to help bolster small-business plans, assist with marketing and other business-development tasks, and ultimately strengthen the financial well-being of small firms across the country. MT: Tell us a little about the Charrette Venture Group. How did it start? How does it function? Emily Hall (EH): CVG is one of the world’s only investment companies focused on growing small to mid-sized architecture firms. Investments can be in the form of mentoring and business advice, marketing and business-development support, technology, or other expertise and resources to help architectural firms be more successful. Our agreement with our investment partners is a shared-risk five-year contract, where CVG offers our full suite of services in exchange for a percentage of our partners’ net operating revenue. If our partners grow, we grow. There are other companies who do management consulting, but CVG goes beyond that – we are focused on being a long-term partner who takes a stake in both the risk and the reward of our
partners’ success. MT: Typically, mentorship is viewed through the lens of personal relationships. What does it look like to shift the focus to the corporate scale? EH: The mentee-mentor relationship is based on the transfer of knowledge and experience with personalized professional guidance. At the corporate scale, CVG is working with firm leaders to help them define and reach their goals, both individually and as sustainable businesses. We often meet small-firm principals who are overwhelmed because their work-life balance is thrown off: They are putting in long hours managing clients and producing drawings. They struggle with delegation for multiple reasons. Staffing and pipeline fluctuations cause frequent disruptions. CVG addresses this by “mentoring” firms holistically. We’ll work with principals to strengthen leadership skills. We’ll work with emerging leaders to leverage their strengths to build management skills. We’ll work with junior staff members to ensure they have the tools (and environment) needed to learn and perform at their best. And we’ll perform operational charrettes with the whole firm to talk through issues and solutions together. CVG’s five-year partnership model enables us to really get to know the firms with whom we’re working because we’re in the trenches with them on a day-to-day basis. Our work as corporate mentors is most effective because we’re personal mentors as well. MT: Where do you see innovation at work in the context of your investment partners? How do you harness that innovation and grow it into something sustainable? EH: Our partners all practice with different levels of technological and/or design innovation. The commonality with all of CVG’s partners is that, from a business point of view, they were innovative enough to invite us to work with their firms. It takes a very entrepreneurial mindset to make the five- year commitment to a shared- risk model with a new “partner.” And CVG is very selective about the firms we partner with. We need to believe that the relationship will be successful for both parties. All firms that CVG works with have committed to us because
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