Four Keys to Becoming a Successful Owner

The best advice anyone can give on becoming a new architecture or engineer firm owner is this: Understand exactly what you’re getting into. 

One of the first items on your agenda is to get a handle on how to maximize your success from the get go. You must recognize, at a minimum, four points key in order to be a successful owner in a design firm:

1. The informality you have enjoyed with your coworkers will radically change as an owner. By necessity your professional relationship with them will become more formal and business like.

2. Your management and leadership style influences the firm’s ability to attract and retain top talent. While there are examples of successful firms with autocratic (dictatorial) leadership, the trend is clearly toward a more participative management style among the most successful firms. Young professionals will only stay under the strong hand of a centralized, autocratic management style as long as it is convenient to them. As soon as they reach a certain professional and financial level, the most capable professionals will move to a more acceptable leadership environment.

3. You must become a team builder. The skills needed to build an effective team are substantially different from those required to become proficient professional designers. Some leaders have natural talent, but most have to work hard at it.

4. The key to achieving success in any business is directly related to bringing in new work—new clients. Whether or not you enjoy the marketing and sales aspects of business, you must develop your ability to manage clients, establishing and maintaining relationships with them built on trust and mutual respect. The one who “owns” the client has the clout, every time.

For most people, ownership represents a major financial commitment. It’s also a personal decision, a career decision, and a business decision that will have an impact on many lives besides your own. Arm yourself with all the knowledge you can gather.

How do you take a complex and multi-dimensional challenge and translate it into clear steps that you can actually implement? By joining us at PSMJ’s AEC Ownership & Leadership Transition Roundtable. Too often, AEC firm owners procrastinate or just fail to act on succession planning…until it is too late. Don’t let this happen to you! Planning for a successful transition is one of the biggest long-term challenges facing AEC firm leaders today. Through case studies, war stories, and more, we give you everything that you need for success.

You also might be interested in these other ownership transition resources from PSMJ:

AE Ownership Transition Study

Changing Expectations of Firm Ownership

How to Get Millennials to Buy In to Firm Ownership

How to Manage an Internal Ownership Transition

Ownership Transition E Book