People Management
The sole practitioner
Whether you are set up as a limited company or a sole trader, the sole practitioner architect is also the office manager and will need to do all of the following:
Despite the term ‘sole practitioner’ the job is very much about working with people, as on every project the architect is part of a team that includes the client, the consultants and the contractor. When working on a variety of small projects at the same time, the sole practitioner will spend a significant amount of time on the phone to clients, consultants, contractors, planners and building inspectors, and out of the office meeting existing and new clients and carrying out site visits.
Good health
Your health and your presence in the office during the week are important. Rather than struggle to work all day when you are coming down with something, it is better to immediately prioritise what must be done now and what can be left until later. Reschedule meetings if necessary, clear the urgent items, then leave the office to rest and recover – for a few days if necessary. If you are usually on top of everything and your contractors have all the information they need, and you are not holding up any payments, you will find that people will be sympathetic and will manage without you. It is best to avoid having meetings with clients if you are not well – you will not be at your best or make a good impression, and you might pass on a bug to your client. Most meetings can be re-scheduled.
Planning for an emergency
As a sole practitioner you will always have concurrent jobs at different stages, so you will need to plan for an emergency such as serious illness, accident or sudden death. You should have an emergency plan coordinated with your Will so your instructions on closing the practice can be followed through by your executors – see the section on emergency planning in Part 1. The emergency plan will ensure that your clients can be informed, and arrangements made for the projects in the office to be taken over by another practice.
Pension
Whether you have a limited company or operate as a sole trader, you should take advice and make arrangements for a personal private pension plan. Your accountant will be able to give you advice on any tax advantages available, depending on how your company is set up. One of the current advantages of being a company director of a limited company is that the company can make direct pension contributions into a director’s personal pension fund before the calculation of Corporation Tax on the company profits. This is currently a tax-efficient way of saving into a pension fund. Always take current advice, however, as tax regimes change from year to year. The RIBA can also provide advice on pensions for architects.
Holidays and time off
The difficulty of taking a long holiday far away from the office is probably the worst thing about being a sole practitioner or running a very small office – but with good management and some flexibility, short holidays, time off and nice breaks are still possible. In a well-organised office, you should be able to go away for a week at a time without too much disruption, if you arrange everything in advance and let everyone know you will be away. If you cannot live without a long holiday every now and then, you will have to arrange cover.
Your PI insurers will require you to have emergency cover in place if you are not available or are out of the country on holiday. If you have a network of colleagues running similar practices, one of them should be able to provide this cover. Such an arrangement might be reciprocal, so you provide cover for them in return.
Backup from other consultants
Solicitor
A solicitor, like an accountant, can help in the setting up of a new company or partnership, or if you experience problems in the running or closing of the business and need advice. Even if you never have to employ a solicitor, it is comforting to have at least the name of one you can contact if the need arises. There are solicitors who specialise in construction law, and for certain queries you may need this specialist expertise. The Law Society can help you find the right solicitor.10
RIBA members will have access to 15 minutes per year of free legal telephone advice provided by a firm of London lawyers who provide advice to the RIBA and specialise in construction law. This small amount of time can often be enough to resolve a straightforward legal or contractual query on an individual project. Over my own years in practice, I have used this useful service on many occasions, and I have also attended many excellent CPD seminars at the same law firm.
Some (but not all) insurance companies that provide professional indemnity cover will employ their own in-house lawyers who can provide advice if you think a client might be going to make a claim against your practice. This type of legal advice is included in your policy premium.
If a claim is made against your practice, your insurers may appoint a firm of solicitors to deal with it. You will have no say in the selection of the solicitors. You will need to provide whatever information is requested, and the solicitors will provide you with advice on how best to respond to the claim.
Bank
The bank will be able to provide some advice on how to manage practice finances, and you should balance the value of this advice against the charges for the bank account. For a very small practice, it might be better to select a bank because the charges are low and get the advice you need from your accountant.
Insurance broker
You will need to find an insurance broker who specialises in professional indemnity insurance.
Remember that insurance brokers do not provide advice in the same way as solicitors or accountants, who are paid by you and act in your best interests. Brokers will obtain quotes for professional indemnity insurance cover from insurance companies, and are paid by the insurance companies. Insurance claims will be dealt with by the insurance company, not the insurance broker. The RIBA Insurance Agency offers professional indemnity insurance on terms agreed with the RIBA.
IT support
IT can be a challenge for the small office, so you must set up some form of support contract for times when you cannot deal with the inevitable issues and problems you will face. If possible, use a local IT support company who can send an engineer to the office if necessary, but can also remotely access the practice computers from their office.
It is a good idea to accept that we all have IT problems, which take time and money to resolve. You might need to allocate, say, three days a year to sorting out IT problems – and include an IT support budget in your cashflow forecast for the year (based on the amount you spent on IT in the previous year, if you have this figure). You will probably then find that the lost time is actually less than you anticipated.
When you do have an IT problem, years of experience have shown that the following simple procedure often works: don’t panic. Close all your work documents and clear your desk. Close the computer and have a cup of tea and ten minutes away from your desk. Then turn everything back on and – amazingly – 50% of the time things will be working again! If you still have a problem, the short break and the cup of tea will sustain you while you try to figure out a solution before calling your IT support company. If you are conscientious about backing up daily, you will not have the added worry of losing more than a few hours’ work.
Website designer
Some small practices set up their own websites and use their own photographs, but these tend to look less professional and it might be a false economy. It will take a long time to produce your own website, and you will not get the same result you would with something by a good, professional designer.
There are hundreds of excellent websites for architectural practices, so you can learn a huge amount by just going online and looking at them. Finding the right web designer for you can be a bit more challenging. If you can find a person who can come to your office not just during the design stage, but to update the site for you, this is ideal. Everything can be done remotely these days, but sometimes a face-to-face meeting with a fellow designer is more productive and enjoyable.
Photographer
Commission the best photographer you can afford and, if possible, use the same photographer for all your projects so there is consistency of style across photographs. This is not just good for your website – it is good for your own morale to have excellent photographs of the work into which you will have put so much care, time and effort. Your clients will also be happy to show these photos to their friends and family and on social media, and this is where your next job might come from. It will also be easier to have your work published if you have good photos.
Just be sure to agree copyright issues and permissions with the photographer in advance before using or publishing the photos. Keep a record of these permissions on file.
Quantity surveyor
On larger contracts, a quantity surveyor (QS) will be appointed direct by the client, but on small contracts where no quantity surveyor is appointed it may still be a necessary to get some help from one with budgets or even final accounts, and paying for this on an hourly charge basis. You might need just a few hours at key stages. If you do not have the skill to produce detailed budgets and pre-tender estimates, you will have no choice but to appoint a quantity surveyor or arrange for the appointment of a QS by the client.
Design team consultants
Even the smallest project might necessitate the appointment of various consultants, including:
Your clients will probably expect you to decide what services the consultants should provide and to arrange for quotes. It is quite rare for domestic clients to want to use consultants other than the ones their architect recommends, though they might on occasion want more than one quote or they may know a particular consultant they want to use. You can speak to consultants on the phone to see if they can take on a job before sending them all the details and asking them to provide a quote for their services. Quotes from consultants should be sent direct to the client, and consultants should be appointed by the client. Invoices from consultants should also be sent direct to the client, even if they are copied to you for checking and authorising. Remember that your PI insurer will insist that the consultants you work with also carry professional indemnity insurance.
If you are doing the same kind of work in the same geographical area for many years, you may be fortunate enough to work repeatedly with the same consultant QS, structural engineer or services engineer or party wall surveyor. These colleagues, along with your network of other small practices, with whom you have an ongoing relationship, can be invaluable when you need five minutes of telephone advice. The arrangement has to be mutual though, so you should be prepared to help others with their queries too. While we have had any number of IT support companies and arrangements over the years as technology has evolved, we have worked for many years with the same accountant, bookkeeper, website designer, quantity surveyor, structural engineer and party wall surveyor. Their advice and support have been invaluable.
It is a good idea to have a contact sheet for each project with contact details for all the consultants, and to circulate this to all parties involved. Domestic clients will often ring the practice years after their project is completed to ask for a structural engineer’s name or telephone number, or to help with a query on a fitting specified by a consultant, so it’s a good idea to have these contact sheets to hand afterwards, too.
Employing staff
Growing the practice and taking on staff can be rewarding, and allows the practice to bring in new skills and talent, use resources more efficiently, and be more flexible about taking on larger or more challenging projects. However, careful planning is necessary, especially if you have not employed staff before, as office and IT systems, pension arrangements and your PAYE system might all need to change. You might also have to move to larger office premises.
If you are currently a sole practitioner and are taking on staff for the first time you must check current employment legislation,11 notify your PI insurers, speak to the practice accountant for advice and consider the following for each new employee:
You accountant may be able to advise you on employment legislation, such as your obligation to enrol your employees into a workplace pension, and on employment issues generally, including redundancy and dismissal procedures.
Employee qualifications and experience
When writing a job description, you must decide what level of qualifications and experience your new employee will need, and the appropriate salary level, bearing in mind what the practice can afford to pay. It is a luxury you probably cannot afford to employ someone who is over-skilled for the job, but it is also a false economy to employ someone who is under-skilled, as they will not be able to work independently and might make mistakes that you will then need to rectify. Also, the less skilled an employee is, the more likely it is that you will spend a lot of your time training them, and this will reduce your own productivity. As with everything in the small practice, it is important to get the balance right.
Resource and performance analysis
As soon as the practice employs more than one person, the allocation of resources and performance analysis will become more important. Employing junior employees will allow the senior employees to focus on the more challenging tasks in the office, while junior staff will take on the tasks appropriate to their skill level, making more efficient use of resources. How to allocate resources to a project is covered in detail on page 101.
Full- or part-time staff/Long- or short-term contract
The workload in a small practice varies, so it is good to be aware of the possibility of employing full-time or part-time staff on either a permanent or a short-term contract. The ability of the practice to bring in new staff will also depend on the office accommodation, as each new person will require a proper workstation and a minimum amount of space.
Employee career development
A challenge that every small practice will face is career development for employees, so that each individual feels they have a future within the practice. If you employ someone who needs a lot of training and supervision, once they have developed their skills they may seek better-paid work elsewhere and leave. You will therefore need to find ways to encourage good employees to stay with the practice, such as increasing responsibility, regular performance and salary reviews, and other benefits such as specialist training, a good pension scheme, or providing lunch or flexible working hours.
When employing new staff and deciding on the most suitable candidate, think not just about what work needs to be done immediately, but how both you and the candidate feel about the longer term. If you have a very small practice, then the experienced architect returning to work after parental leave with a child at a local primary school and wanting to work part-time might be more suited to your practice than the ambitious young architect who will want to work full-time but may leave after a relatively short period, forcing you to go through the costly and time-consuming recruitment process again.
Outsourcing
Sometimes it makes sense to employ consultants rather than trying to do everything in-house. While this can seem expensive, it does enable you to access skills on an ‘as needed’ basis. The consultants you might employ, who will charge the practice for their services on an hourly charge basis, are an accountant, a bookkeeper, a quantity surveyor, a website designer, a photographer, an IT support company and CAD survey company (for more about working with consultants, see page 110).
It is possible to employ architectural staff through an agency, but this is expensive and should only be considered as a short-term solution when no other option is available.
Work/life balance
The best way of working is the way that suits your needs and preferences. These will vary from one individual to another and at different stages in your career. What has worked well for me is running a small architectural practice from home. It was the only way I could continue to work full-time and be sure that my daughter never came home from school to an empty house. The house is quiet during the day and is large enough for me to use the loft level as an office, and I enjoy working on small projects. Working from home means no commuting, so it’s possible to work an eight- or nine-hour day and still have time to go for a swim in the morning before work, and to be in the kitchen preparing dinner five minutes after closing the office.
Sleep
Architects hold a lot of information in their head, and proper sleep allows the brain to organise and logically store all the information gathered during the course of the day. To stay up all night trying to meet a deadline (and what architect has not done this?) is rarely worth it, as productivity the next day will be likely to drop.
Good food
Lunch and a proper break away from the office in the middle of the day to take a short walk will keep you going a lot longer than a rushed sandwich at your desk.
Exercise
The best way to keep fit when your work forces you to work at a desk all day is to find a form of regular exercise you like. It could be the gym or swimming or cycling or running. What I enjoy is dancing, because when you are on a dance floor it is impossible to think about work – it is mental relaxation, a bit of socialising and physical exercise all in one.
Holiday, working hours and flexibility
Limit the hours that you work to a reasonable level, and take breaks. If you are a sole practitioner, it is difficult to take long holidays without making arrangements for cover, but you can often take days off or work shorter days when the office is not busy. For some, this year-round flexibility may be preferable to working flat-out nearly all year and then taking a few weeks off. For staff members with small children, it will be important to enable flexible working hours to fit around childcare.
If possible, holidays should be undisturbed by emails and texts about work.
Work/life balance review
The success of your practice depends on the people it employs, and their wellbeing and loyalty are critical. It is a good idea to consider the work/ life balance of your staff as part of the yearly review, even if you are a sole practitioner. If members of staff or sole practitioners are constantly working long hours, or feeling stressed and not taking time out, this could be an indication that the practice is taking on too much work, or that the work is not being undertaken efficiently, or that the fees are too low for the work involved, or the office overheads or salaries are too high, or a combination of these things. These should be checked and addressed before a problem develops that affects someone’s health or happiness, or the viability of the practice.
Training and continuing professional development (CPD)
The basic CPD requirement for an architect is 35 hours of learning per year/100 learning points, regardless of what stage you are at in your career and whether you work for a large or a small practice, or as a sole practitioner. You should plan this training carefully as it will take up a lot of time, especially if the courses are not in-house – you might need to travel a long way, even for a one-hour session. Make sure the courses you attend are relevant to your needs and the work of the practice. Every architect should keep their own record of training courses attended.
CPD categories
Many of the above topics will be covered during the CPD day of the RIBA Small Practice Conference or other CPD days at the RIBA.
Some CPD sessions are provided, free of charge, by other architectural practices or consultants, including lawyers and structural engineers. You can contact the consultants you work with and ask to be included on their list of invitees.
If you want to do a particular CPD course, such as structural glazing or basement tanking, you can contact specialist firms and ask if they will be doing any presentations in the near future, preferably local to your office. If they are, they can arrange for you to attend.
Many CPD sessions are paid for by product manufacturers or specialist contractors, and sessions can often be arranged during a lunch break in your own office. Small practices doing similar work can benefit hugely from sharing these CPD sessions, as they can then be specifically tailored to the work these practices do. Providers usually ask for a minimum of 10–12 attendees, and they usually offer to pay for refreshments.
Increasingly, CPD is being offered in the form of webinars, and this is extremely efficient as you can choose those that are best suited to your CPD needs. The speakers are often skilled and senior people, and no time is lost travelling.
Health and safety – first-aiders
To comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act, every company must have a first-aider in the office. The one-day courses for first-aiders run by St John Ambulance at its premises are excellent practical courses, and good value.
Working with domestic clients
Whoever they are, your clients are key to making your business a success and profitable – so it is important that you understand them, look after them and meet their expectations over and above providing the architectural services they have commissioned.
The typical domestic client
Working with domestic clients – or any clients on small, one-off projects – is quite different from working with commercial clients. Domestic clients can be any age, from 20 to 90. They might be wealthy or struggling to make ends meet. They might be an architect, or a professional in another field, or a business entrepreneur, or retired. They might be any nationality, and might not speak English well or even live in the UK. They might be eccentric, or suffering from a medical condition, or disabled, or neurotic, or so busy at work you hardly ever meet them. And on top of all this, a domestic client is rarely one person. More often than not it will be a couple, or even two couples living side by side. We had a project in the office some years ago where the client was a woman at the beginning of the project and had changed gender to become a man by Practical Completion.
Domestic projects tend to be relatively small, so even in a small office you are likely to have many projects running at the same time, and as many individual clients from all the above walks of life. On some refurbishment projects, the clients will remain in the property during construction. You must get to know clients quickly and sufficiently well to be able to design and work on their homes, and to help them enjoy the project even if the budget is tight, there’s dust everywhere and they had not realised how noisy and stressful it would be to live on a building site. What domestic clients want and expect from their architect and how much they will involve themselves and influence the design of their project will vary hugely. This is part of the challenge and the enjoyment of doing domestic work – but you, and your contractors, really do need to understand people and enjoy working with them. A good sense of humour helps.
The ideal client
The ideal client will like what you have already achieved. They will readily confirm your appointment and agree your fees without trying to negotiate a reduction. They will give you a realistic brief, agree a realistic budget and take your professional advice on all matters throughout the project. They will let you get on with the project, only meeting and corresponding as necessary. They will approve the design and budget and pay invoices without delay. They will get on well with the contractors, and allow you to photograph the property for your website. They will recommend you to all their friends and tell them they love what you have done and how you have done it.
If only it were always like this!
The difficult client
Some very nice people – they might even be your family or friends – can make difficult clients. Some clients, for example, cannot fix their brief. Others will be convinced that you should be able to do the project for less than the budget you recommend. Some will want to design the project themselves, and it can take a long time to persuade them that their design ideas may not work. Others will want to use a contractor they know for all the wrong reasons. such as he’ll give them a good price if they pay in cash! Some are only available for meetings on Sunday mornings or after 9pm on weekdays. Others still will send long emails on a daily basis, or make long phone calls, or want to meet on site twice a week. All these issues are common with domestic work, and as long as the clients are reasonable people it is still usually possible to establish a good working relationship. You may have to give these projects a bit more time and be flexible about the hours you work – but be careful: if one client takes up an excessive amount of your time, it is unlikely you will make any profit on the project. You could also be distracted from other more profitable projects in the office.
The problem client
Most architects who carry out domestic work over a number of years will have a story about the one client they wish they had never met. Problems usually revolve around a client’s reluctance to part with their money, and might include some or all of the following:
Even if the practice needs work it is better to turn down a commission from such clients if you suspect this behaviour is likely before your appointment is confirmed. The experience will be unpleasant, a lot of your time will be wasted, and it is unlikely that the project will make a profit.
Unless you are very lucky, it is possible that you will sign up one or two problem clients over the life of the practice. Never underestimate how damaging such clients can be to the practice, and how difficult and unpleasant it will be to see these jobs through. Keep a note on the project file of any warning signs. Make sure your documentation and records are thorough, and keep records of conversations and phone calls. Confirm everything you discuss with your clients by email, even if it means the archives for these jobs are twice the size of your normal files. Contact your insurers if you think the client is going to make a claim and get advice.
Some excellent free legal advice is available to RIBA members, and your insurers may also employ lawyers who can provide advice. You can also discuss and agree with a colleague the best strategy for dealing with your difficult client. This could be another architect or perhaps the project quantity surveyor who knows the client. Your colleague may be able to offer objective advice. If you have a good strategy for dealing with the situation, and you tread carefully and cautiously through the project, you have a much better chance of surviving the ordeal. It can at best be a learning experience!
Always resolve any client issues or complaints prior to Practical Completion when the client still needs you on board to complete the project. Make sure your invoices are up to date and based on an accurate estimate of the final account, and paid on time, so the amount owing after Practical Completion is minimal. This is good practice generally, but vital if you are dealing with a client who you suspect is trying every trick in the book to short change you or the contractor.
Selecting clients
Deciding which clients to accept are among the most important decisions you will make (along with selecting contractors, see page 171), and the success of your practice will depend to a large extent on these decisions.
Carrying out a preliminary site consultation on an hourly charge basis is a good way of getting to know a client before taking on the full project.
Charging your clients
There is no reason to do any work for free on domestic projects. If you charge properly for your work, your clients will probably respect you and value the work more than if you do it for nothing. You will also make more money!