On Not Taking Rejection Personally

Reading time ~19 minutes

For anyone selling anything, being rejected on a regular basis is par for the course. It is going to happen and it’s gonna hurt. We’ll explore below why that is and how we can deal with this. Ideally, business is just business and we wouldn’t react to rejection when it happens. We’d just take it for what it is: a signal that a prospect is not interested and move on. But in reality, we often pour so much of ourselves in our work, that being rejected feels more like a personal insult where we take the rejection of our offering, be it products or services as a personal affront. It’s especially true for us, creative people, who are trying to sell our thinking.

If you’re particularly sensitive to what other people say about your work, perhaps the selling part is not for you and better left to seasoned salespeople. Some people have thicker skin than others and can take rejection all day, every day and never think twice about it. For others, including yours truly, there is a small part of us that cannot help but take it personally. When that happens, we can train ourselves to handle the situation swiftly in order to avoid being taken out of commission because we can’t handle it on a personal level.

How to reject people with grace and class

Not all rejections are made equal, some people are really good at being direct and open about their choices while being gentle at the same time. These people have mastered the art of being empathetic and by putting themselves in someone else’s shoes are able to say no while being very gracious about it. I once received a rejection letter from a Simon Sinek’s press team that actually made me feel good about being rejected. I had requested a podcast interview and Sinek was too busy to appear on my podcast. 

Below is an excerpt from the letter. That level of people skills is the gold standard that we should all strive for:

“I'm Jen on Simon's press team. Thank you for taking the time to reach out with your request to spread Simon’s message. We love it when people choose to share the WHY in their own right to inspire others. That is what makes the movement to inspire strong. So, thank you.

Simon is only one person. While we wish we could say ‘yes!’ to every worthwhile request that comes in, we are simply unable. Simon is knee-deep in writing his next book, The Infinite Game. We are doing our best to give him the space to keep charging ahead with the writing process and his significant commitments to grow the WHY movement. For this reason, we are going to graciously pass on your request.

Thank you again for what you are doing to make the world around you a better place. Your WHY (and HOW-- the podcast is great) is an inspired way to help the professional creative community!”

Reading the text carefully, we notice that a few elements stand out:

1. She responds by acknowledging the time and effort it took to reach out and says thank you. At no point, there is a hint of “We’re too cool for school and you should be happy that we deign to give you the time of day”. Her answer is positive, polite and empathetic.

2. She acknowledges the validity of the request and the purpose of it.

3. Then she proceeds to explain in detail why he is too busy to take on this request. Which is another way to say “your podcast isn’t significant enough for us to consider”, but without being hurtful.

4. She closes the letter by acknowledging once more what I am trying to accomplish and encouraging it.

I am aware that it may look like a shit sandwich on the surface. A shit sandwich is a way to give feedback that sugarcoats bad news or negative commentary with meaningless niceties and is completely ineffective. There is one major difference, in this case, is that the letter reads authentic. For anyone familiar with Sinek’s work, the response is completely consistent with his message, purpose and everyone working with him will communicate in a similar fashion, a sign that he has mastered the cultural foundation of his business. The authenticity and empathy are what make this missive stand out from the rest. I remember when I first received it, it actually felt good to read it because it wasn’t a rejection of myself or my work, but merely based on his inability to fulfill every request he gets, and Jen was a master at getting this point across.

How to deal with painful rejection:

Unfortunately, the majority of people don’t have nearly that level of skill and their rejections will be clumsy, merciless and will invariably sting. The degree of pain is directly correlated to their communication skills. Some people might even be total assholes about it and purposely try to hurt you while rejecting you. Perhaps their mommy didn’t love them enough or their spouse drove them crazy that day, but whatever the reason, better be prepared for it. There is nothing we can do about the other party’s actions, but there are things we can do to make that pill a little easier to swallow on our end. 

At a high level, being clear on your business’s purpose, mission and values make it easier to endure rejection. Knowing what you stand for and being clear on how you can help your clients with clearly articulated solutions helps tremendously, because if you consciously know why you do what you do and truly believe in it, then rejection just becomes another hurdle on the way, the true goal being to find your people, that is, the type of clients that believe in what you do and are culturally aligned with your business. If and when you reach that level of mastery no amount of rejection will affect you because you are anchored on a solid foundation. What’s even more amazing is that the stronger your culture is, the less you will be rejected as the people you interact with on a daily basis will become more and more aligned with you.

That enables you to take rejection for what it is: merely the expression of a lack of desire on someone’s part to interact with you or your business, but ultimately that has nothing to do with you. It’s much easier to deal with rejection when one is grounded and clear on their purpose. 

Another thing that helps is Meditation. It teaches us that all things in life are impermanent and in a constant state of flux. Good things come and go, but so do the bad. If we learn to accept the impermanent nature of life and stop craving for things, then we truly learn what’s important and let go of the things of unimportant nature, such as rejection. It is a tremendous practise that helps us stay grounded in tough times.

Some tricks that help.

One trick I’ve learned from a coach I’ve worked with is to constantly remind myself that I can train myself to be completely detached from the outcome when I am selling my services. I do so by repeating a predetermined mantra every day before starting my work. While this is very effective in the short term to overcome minor barriers and a great way to remind myself why it is that I do what I do, it is only a quick fix that if not practiced every day will quickly lose its value.

Perhaps, it’s the way we talk about our work that’s not convincing enough to make prospects see the true value of what we do. While we may think that our work is a gift from God in our heads - and it could very well be - if that fact is not clearly articulated when we try to sell our ideas and we cannot convince a prospect in 30 seconds or less why they should hire us, or at least grant us an audience, then this gift from God is useless. The best thing to do in that case is to educate ourselves and learn how to sell effectively so that we are rejected less often. A common mistake is that we all tend to talk about ourselves when trying to convince prospects to buy our services while failing to look for and address the client’s pain points. It’s a lot easier to persuade someone when the conversation is about them and how what we offer can make their life easier.

Another possible avenue for improvement is to be picky about the people we try to sell to. By trying to connect with just about anyone with a pulse, in order to sell our services, we end up talking to many unqualified prospects and therefore increasing our chances of rejection. By being more choosy, we end up connecting with people who have the greatest potential to become clients and thus reduce our chance of being rejected.

The way we conduct ourselves also says a lot about who we are and the people we speak to always pick-up on non-verbal communication, even on the phone. The first few seconds of interaction can make or break the rest of the conversation. Being polite and grateful, as well as training yourself to become good at small talk, go a long way to get people to open up to what we have to offer more quickly. A quick way to create rapport with a stranger is to ask them questions about themselves, it will make them feel valued and validated and will open the door to further conversation very quickly.

Ultimately, rejection is easier for some of us, but it isn’t easy for most people. Finding ways to cope with it in the short term is useful, but working on your own resilience and that of your business, by striving to develop services that have a lot of value and that people want, will lead you to be more successful in the long term, while facing fewer “nos”. When you become a master at your craft, people will come to you and beg you to work with them, which ultimately makes dealing with rejection irrelevant.

What about you? What are some of the tricks you use to deal with rejection?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaudrvltr.studio.

How old-school photography techniques are changing the digital game.

Reading time ~7 minutes

In the film days of photography, the possibilities of editing images were bound by the limitations of printing images on paper from a film negative, effectively limiting prints to narrow parameters of correctness. Photographic printing was a skill mastered by a few artisans, whose function was to bring the photographer’s vision to life through a lifetime of accumulated darkroom skills.

While photographers were more deliberate on set and did multiple tests of their envisioned shots, primarily through the use of polaroids to test their views, they had little more than an intuitive idea of what the resulting finished image would look like, as there was no way to instantly review images, the way we are able to now with digital photography. They relied on a combination of skills, accumulated knowledge and a good dose of luck. As film was an expensive commodity, nothing like the nearly free and virtually unlimited storage ability of digital media, the more one took shots, the more expensive a shoot would become, forcing photographers to find the right balance between shooting enough frames to ensure a good ratio of useable images and not going overboard, thus rendering the shoot prohibitively expensive.

While they were limited by the techniques of the day and their associated costs, a good photographer then would have to possess the ability to envision and plan a good shot even without the use of polaroids or cameras. That vision, a combination of the intuition-based “ability to see” and experience acquired through dedicated practice, is still what makes a good architectural photographer today, as the tools of the trade have little influence over one’s skillset. 

With the advent of tools to both shoot and edit images digitally, a whole new world of possibilities has opened to image producers. For people with large film archives, digital tools enabled the re-interpretations of old photographs through the lens of modern technology. 

The late Balthazar Korab, famed 20th century architectural photographer and lifelong collaborator of Eero Saarinen, had the opportunity in his later years to re-appraise portions of his archive, but this time acting as a sort of curator of his work and bring new life to old photographs, only revisiting the images that stood the test of time and emerged as exceptional. He did so with the help of his supremely talented son, Christian Korab. 

During their collaboration, while preparing a definitive edition of his father’s images for a monograph on Cranbrook Academy (one of Korab’s favourite subjects which he repeatedly photographed over many decades) in a new digital medium, Christian was able to execute his father’s vision in a way which was never quite reachable before the digital editing tools we have today came into being. These digitized re-mastered images were described by Korab father as:

 “The precise and nearly-flawless execution that I could never quite realize in darkroom printing.” 

Indeed, his son has parlayed a lifelong working relationship with his father into a set of skills that very few, if anyone else has. It is the ideal blend of technical and aesthetic vision for the finished project. He developed a way to digitize film and master it into digital files that not only allow for the most faithful rendering possible to date but also allow for nearly flawless, unambiguous reproduction and archival conservation.

What is image mastering?

Mastering is a term that’s been widely used in the sound and film industries to describe a process aimed at codifying complex and collaborative artistic efforts that involve a variety of talents. When it comes to photography, it means bringing a similar level of predictability and reproducibility, with a great degree of accuracy to finished images.

In sound engineering, mastering was born from the need to reproduce music with the highest degree of fidelity across many systems of unequal quality, from cheap speakers to hi-fi systems worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the sound mastering process, artists codify their vision of how their music should be rendered to ensure that it renders in the best possible way on any system.

In film, mastering allows filmmakers to coordinate sound and colour to create a coherent finished product, accounting for the varying conditions in which the movie was shot and recorded. It essentially takes disparate pieces of raw material and through the editing process ensures that they are coherent and aesthetically pleasing in the finished product. Once the colour grading process is done, the viewer should not be able to see any differences across the scenes of a movie, even though they may have been shot at different times with varying pieces of equipment (this Instagram account is a great way to learn more about the idea).

Ultimately, the goal of these mastering techniques is to ensure that the artistic intent gets conveyed as accurately as possible. Learning from these other industries, Korab developed this methodology while trying to solve the problem of ensuring the perennial survival of his father’s film-based archive. It turns out that the process is also supremely applicable to digitally-native photography editing and archival, as it enables photographers to produce more consistent images across their entire catalogue and oftentimes, turn decent images into hero shots.

Additionally, mastering allows artists to include in the master files information relevant to using the images in the myriad of possible formats, such as fine art printmaking, publication, electronic display, archiving and art conservation. It is, therefore, a unique kind of artifact that possesses both raw information and the final rendition of an artwork. In other words, a digital photographic master is to photography what an audio master is to the recording industry:  an unambiguous, infinitely reproducible original artifact that is used to produce all subsequent versions of an image.

If properly archived and backed-up accordingly, its stability over time is guaranteed, as digital files do not decay and can be infinitely reproduced, the redundancy making information highly resilient. Another advantage is that the artist’s vision if properly reproduced, cannot be unintentionally modified as the master contains all the information about accurate reproduction in as many types of media as desired. 

A well-produced master is non-destructive, meaning that the work can always be revisited at a later date by the artist and modified to taste. These multiple interpretations are included in the master, thus forming a one-stop-shop history of the multiple versions of the same work

“The negative is the score and the print is the symphony”

Ansel Adams.

If we are to believe Adams' words, a digital master thus includes both the score and the symphony, not only that, but it can also include many symphonic performances, all infinitely reproducible.

Why you should care about it.

Formatting the images that represent your work in a highly-codified, high-fidelity file, enables the representation of your body of work in the most refined of ways. Not only the rendering of your images will be better, but the files themselves can embody a multitude of variations ensuring that your work is always showing up at its best no matter which media it is showcased on.

I have yet to find someone who doesn’t want this level of precision and quality in the public display of their work. Ultimately, your work will not sell itself, but beautiful imagery, well designed and perfectly reproduced will certainly help you convey what your work is about and enable you to find the clients that want what you have to offer.

The work you’re most proud of deserves the best of renditions, don’t you think?

This piece was co-written and edited with/by Christian Korab. If you’d like to know more about how image mastering can work for you, contact us and we’ll walk you through the process.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud@rvltr.studio.

Double Whammy: Single Serves Ep. 104 in Building Magazine and podcast form!

Toon Dreessen, architect has been a relentless advocate for procurement reform in the architecture industry. While there has been some movement in the right direction, it's still not enough according to him and in some cases puts architects in very tricky situations. This is a debate that goes well beyond the scope of this interview, but listen in to learn more about the topic and be inspired to fight the good fight along with Dreesen.

Listen here or check our the interview transcript in Building Magazine.

Walking A Mile In Their Shoes

Reading time ~4 minutes

Every human being living on this planet is looking for something unique to themselves. Self-interested by nature, humans are always trying to fulfill their best interest first. Empathy, the ability to put yourself in one’s shoes, allows us to understand on a deeper level why someone would want to be a certain way. By doing so, it enables us to understand what these people need and want in order to help them achieve their goals.

Being good to someone is little more than that: having the ability to understand their emotional, physical, financial, spiritual and mental needs and being able to cater to those. The opposite would be to not acknowledge this and act regardless of someone else’s needs. We’ve all been in situations where we faced someone completely disregarding our wants, fears and needs. Remember how that made you feel, likely not good at all. Short of being a sociopath, most of us are not looking to be purposely be that way.

In a professional context, most people are situated somewhere on the following pyramid of needs, ranging from basic fears to higher level aspirations, described as follows:

1. “I want to keep my job”

2. “I want to avoid criticism”

3. “I want to avoid headaches”

4. “I want to feel pride in the results I produce”

5. “I want to leave a legacy”

In understanding this, it enables us to adjust the way we deal with people by understanding their need to grow professionally and being able to assess where they stand on the scale. You’re not going to convince a client to get involved in a risky, yet potentially very rewarding project if they fear for their job and need to play it safe. Conversely, a client who is working in a healthy and profitable business may not be interested in playing it safe and will be willing to take on bigger risks in order to fulfill the dream of leaving a legacy.

Because everybody is different and has different needs, dreams and aspirations, empathy is a great tool to help us understand people on a personal level and cater to their aspirations. Since everybody has different needs and aspirations, offering clients a one-size fits all service is likely not going to serve anyone well. For you, the service provider, it means attempting to fit the proverbial square peg in a round hole, struggling to keep clients on board with a solution that at best only partially fulfills their aspirations. For clients, it guarantees an endless suite of frustrated moments where they shake their heads and silently cringe at your inability to understand their needs.

I often get asked “What can you do for me?” before I have a chance to do a proper diagnostic of the prospect’s needs and I have had to train myself to not take the bait and start reciting a list of ready-made solutions to previously-encountered problems. Instead, I firmly but politely explain that I cannot prescribe solution until a proper diagnosis is done, even though I may already have gleaned sufficient information to have a pretty good idea of what it is that they need. Should they continue to press for a specific answer, that’s a telltale sign of them not being a good fit for the kind of work I do and therefore I gracefully bow out by saying “I don’t think I am in a position to help you at this time”.

As a designer, would you start designing solution for your clients without first spending time understanding, defining and re-framing the problems at hand? Clients hire us because they have a problem they don’t know how to solve and if we don’t try and solve this problem the best we can by jumping to conclusions, then we dilute the value of our thinking and undermine the quality of our work and reputations in the process.

As creative service professionals, one challenge we all face is that people who don’t share this mode of creative, non-linear thinking often confuse creativity and innovation with magical powers, where miraculously creative people pull new and innovative ideas out of a hat. As discussed previously, we are all inherently creative, the most creative of us being merely better at harnessing their creative abilities than others.

As a result, it is our duty to do whatever is in our power to “walk a mile in our clients shoes” in order to understand the problems they face from their perspective and being able to start formulating the best solutions to these problems. If that’s something you’ve been struggling with in your client relationships, what’s the first step you can take today to start taking corrective action?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Single Serves ep. 103 - Sobchak On Media Literacy And Criticism

In episode 103 I interviewed peter sobchak, editor in chief of canadian interiors, building magazine and lover of great design. Peter and I talked about criticism and media literacy or lack thereof in the architecture industry and the challenges that it poses. Listen in to learn more about peter's thinking on the subject.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: Produced by Révélateur Studio, ©2019 / Post-Production: Ryan Aktari

How to break up with shitty clients

Reading time ~10 minutes

For those of us out there who run businesses, we all know how stressful that can be. Ensuring steady revenue, dealing with the taxman, managing employees expectations, satisfying clients, etc., entrepreneurs are always pulled in a million different directions, which can be exhausting and in the worst of cases, very stressful. In the course of running a business, one will inevitably face challenges that need to be resolved. One challenge that I think is worth addressing, because in my opinion, not talked about enough, is how to deal with shitty, dishonest and unreasonable clients.

The first thing that may come to your mind when dealing with this topic is the old adage “the client is always right”. While this may be applicable to transactional businesses, say retail stores, where clients opinions and behaviours don’t really affect the transaction and where it’s beneficial for the retail outlet in the long term to have repeat clients, I think it doesn’t apply at all where professional services are concerned. When what we sell is intellectual capital and exponentially valuable solutions to our clients, where our best thinking will directly contribute to the client’s long term success in impactful ways, treating that provider-client relationship in a transactional fashion is at best wrong-headed. Clients are not always right and when they’re unreasonably giving us hell, we are perfectly justified to put them in their place. More on that below.

My experience tells me that most clients will be reasonable or at least open to exploring mutually satisfying solutions when problems arise. Once in a blue moon, however, a client may appear to exist solely to make our lives difficult and nothing can be done to satisfy them. Similar situations sometimes pop up in our lives. We encounter people for whom a peaceful co-existence is not possible and whose every action is meant to cause grief. I’m not going to expand on the reasons why this is, but simply base my argument on the fact that it is a reality and spell out what can be done to get out of a pickle when it arises.

I written before about the value of good positioning and how vetting clients helps us avoid the bad ones. Sometimes, though, we just get hired to do a job and don’t have the luxury to position ourselves or vet the client properly. Heck, sometimes we just need the cash. It’s a reality that we’ve all faced at one point or another, but I think it’s worth addressing because even though we would all love to operate in ideal conditions 100% of the time, the reality is different and it’s best to be prepared for disasters, even though they may never occur.

A good client is someone who understands what you do, its value and how it’s going to benefit them. These clients require little hand-holding and will largely leave you alone to do your work once enough trust has been established. They might occasionally call you out on a mistake, shortcoming or failure, but will do so by always being open to finding solutions to these problems. They are generally well-balanced individuals, adept at interpersonal relationships who understand that mutual gains are better in the long term than self-centered, selfish behaviours.

Bad clients, conversely, are the ones who complain all the time, blame others blindly and will consider you guilty until proven innocent. They cut you off in the conversation and never even give anyone a chance to rectify whatever it is that they see as a problem. Not to mention that they often act like a hammer in search of a nail, every little thing that doesn’t go their way becomes a problem or worse, they create problems out of thin air. In short, there is no reasonable dialogue possible because no matter what one does, they see others as adversaries who are in the wrong. The worst of them will use deception, dishonest tactics to gain the upper hand, often resorting to threats to get their point across. In other terms, they’ll act like elementary school bullies.

Dealing with bad clients requires that one becomes a bit of a psychologist in order to understand the motivations behind their bad behaviour. In the worst of cases, some clients are just out for blood and will not stop until they cause serious damage or are met with fearless determination, showing them that their behaviour will be met by a worthy opponent that will not back down at the first sight of them showing their teeth.

The best defence against this is to be irreproachable in behaviour. Honouring our word and fulfilling obligations is the best way to cover one’s ass, as it will leave clients with few things to latch on in order to make life miserable. Sometimes, no amount of contracts, written record of all interactions or any other form of accountability is sufficient.  When a mutually agreeable solution is not workable, we have to resort to more radical solutions. Detaching oneself from the outcome and acting like we don’t give a fuck is a powerful tool in our arsenal. When one doesn’t worry about what others will think about them, it allows for an unprecedented amount of freedom as we are now mentally free to tackle the problem with a cool head and think of a solution in terms of doing the right thing, as opposed to bending over backwards in order to try and defuse a time bomb that will go boom no matter what and lose our shirts in the process.

How to not lose sleep.

Doing the right thing will look different for everyone according to our own view of the world and moral compass. But the most important thing to keep in mind when trying to do the right thing is to think of it in terms of what solution will allow us to fix the issue and still be able to sleep at night. I believe it’s more important to find peace of mind than to try and satisfy everyone, which is by definition, simply impossible. For me, doing the right thing is ensuring that I respect and uphold my personal values, as these are extremely important to me and the foundation of my business. That means that sometimes, clients will be pissed off, but that is not really my concern, as I have no control over how people react to a given situation. We can certainly influence how people react in the way we conduct ourselves, but that influence is limited as I mentioned above, some people, no matter how much we try to make it right by them, will never be satisfied.

Understanding that is key to coming out of these interactions unscathed. I’d like to get a little more specific in how to deal with certain clients’ behaviours that you may encounter. Whenever a problem arises, and I am faced with someone who’s not willing to have a reasonable adult conversation, I paint them in my mind as an unruly child who doesn’t know better and still needs to learn how to socialize in a peaceful manner. I don’t look at it from the assumption that I’m better than them, but rather as a reminder that I can choose to lead by example, like a good parent, through my actions and that my actions will both signal to them what my intentions are and with luck, perhaps bring them back to reality.

Here are a few suggestions that often go a long way to resolving issues with bad clients:

• Empathize and sympathize: I always give the other person the opportunity to express themselves, it both gives them space to state the problem and gives me a chance to look at the problem from their perspective. It is also a powerful tool to defuse tense situations. Very few people would respond negatively to someone who’s openly and willingly giving them the opportunity to express themselves. If you’re lucky, it may work in your favour towards finding a solution.

• Never respond in kind: When facing insults and personal attacks, it can be very tempting to respond in kind and escalate the situation. However, a lifetime of interpersonal relationships shows us that it only ever makes things worse. When people launch into personal attacks, it is to get the best out of us and trigger a reaction. No reaction at all is more jarring than a response in kind as most people do not know how to respond to that. If you don’t respond to the abuse, a client escalating insults when there is no reaction on your side only contributes to make them look unhinged.

• Politely call them out on their bad behaviour: without resorting to verbal violence, insults or threats, it is OK to tell people that their behaviour is unacceptable. If they truly misbehave, you are perfectly within you rights to say so and explain why their behaviour is not warranted. It also helps managing expectations, especially if your expectations have not been made clear in the first place.

• Always remember that it’s just business. It’s very difficult to deal with an unreasonable family member, because most of us cannot just walk away from a shitty sibling or in-law. We’re often tied to them for the long haul and have to work towards long-term peace by making small sacrifices today. A client, conversely, is just that and once the relationship ends, we likely will never have to deal with them again. It means that as long as we come up with a satisfactory solution that enables us to sleep peacefully and soundly at night, we can go on with our lives and never think about them again.

• Always offer a way out: By taking the initiative to offer one or multiple alternative solutions that allow the client to save face while providing both parties with a mutually agreeable solution, clients are robbed of the ability to complain about not being satisfied as they will portray themselves as completely hermetic to negotiating.

• Always stay positive: keep your head and learn how to dissociate your personal self from the situation.

• Always have your contractual obligations on paper: Mike Monteiro explained it very clearly. Contracts are most of the time very little use as most client relationships will go without a hitch and contracts never have to be enforced. But the irony is that they become necessary only when problems arise, however without them, we’d be fucked. With them, there are a clear set of expectations from both parties laid out on paper, which can include how to deal with the most common of clients misbehaviours and call them out when they try to back out of their obligations. Don’t be afraid to stand your ground.

• Meditate: When life stresses us out, taking a metaphorical step back and learning to detach ourselves from day to day problems is a very valuable skill to have. I have been meditating for a while and I cannot recommend it enough, particularly to people that are generally stressed out. It definitely takes effort and time, but the return on investment is huge. It helps put things into perspective make us realize that a lot of the things we fret over don’t matter in the long term and that most problems eventually go away on their own. 

• Know when to say goodbye: If the relationship is destined to end, say thank you, wish them well and never look back.

I am fully cognizant of the fact that this may seem like a piece of writing with negative overtones, but I think it’s important to address, as these situations sometimes arise and we have no choice but to deal with them. Like you, I’ve been burnt before by terrible, dishonest clients and it took a lot of energy to get rid of them while ensuring my own well-being. Sharing this knowledge is important as we can all learn from other past experiences, so this is my modest contribution.

Remember to always stay positive!

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaudrvltr.studio.

What is creativity and why it is critically important for your business?

Reading time ~11 minutes

What is creativity?

All it takes for anyone to experience true, unapologetically unbridled creativity is to observe kids, say under the age of 8, in a state of deeply-focused play. The world around them ceases to exist as they build incredibly inventive and intricate narratives in their heads, all the while telling their ideas in great detail to whomever is willing to listen. They have no fear, no shame, even though these ideas, can sometimes be very, very silly. Socializing for the first 18 years of our lives takes care of making us feel ashamed for having crazy ideas, develop self-censorship and worst of all, make us believe that being unendingly creative is at best a waste of good ol’ productive time.

On top of that, 12 years of mandatory, conventional schooling, beats creativity out of many of us. In other words, we’re taught to become uncreative in favour of other so-called more desirable attributes that help us play well with others. Those that are rebellious enough to not let that creativity be sucked out of them, find themselves labeled “creative” later in life, in this instance the epithet carrying a negative connotation, as if creativity was an undesirable quality. 

My opinion is that the people who forgot how to be creative, label those who remained so as idle daydreamers purely and simply out of creative envy, as they were tricked into adopting someone else’s vision of success and achievement, which involved fitting a mould of societal expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand that, to live in a peaceful and productive society, some social norms are required, as unbridled creativity can become a hindrance if not tempered by a need to live harmoniously. But, the world we currently live in has seen the pendulum swing too far the other way and we are now submerged by a sea of milquetoast, bland sameness, because we are too afraid to stand out. 

Case in point: all the houses in my neighbourhood look the same, I can find the same chain retail outlets coast to coast and most new hospitality projects in  my hometown surf on that popular scandinavian-muted-pastels-simple-geometric-forms aesthetic that makes me want to puke my guts out. When creativity is considered a dispensable luxury, I truly believe that we are missing a tremendous opportunity.

Why is it important?

While some people are able to be more readily creative than others, the truth is that we are all creative at all times, every day of the week. It’s just that a lot of those creative acts go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Finding a way to prevent that pesky raccoon into your trash is a creative act. Negotiating peace for good with your asshole neighbour over who should clear that shared driveway - close to home for many of us - is another. Substituting that missing ingredient for something else in that favourite recipe of yours after the local grocery store has closed, yet another. What happens in the public’s perception is that the celebrated acts of creativity are the big, obvious ones. Just the same way we revere the biggest Hollywood stars without paying attention to the extremely talented local comedian, while forgetting that the big star was once a starving, unknown comedian. 

However, it’s these little creative achievements that we rarely take the time to acknowledge and celebrate, because they don’t appear to be significant in the grand scheme of things, that are the foundation of a truly creative mind. The reality is that a lot of small creative achievements often lead to major breakthroughs over time.

Because of that cultural misperception of creativity - the notion that creativity is a nice luxury better left to artists, us creative professionals can be very easily suckered into embracing that point of view. By letting other people define what we do and how we’re being creative, we relinquish the opportunity to fully express creativity by allowing the inherently messy, convoluted and sometimes lengthy creative process to be whittled down to the idea of a black box, out of which great ideas are thought to magically come out of. In the real world, creative professions have a critical need, to give themselves the time to be creative when facing a new problem that requires an innovative solution. 

I personally battle with this every day. In my role as a photographer of the built environment, people often assume that I can just show up and snap pictures of their latest creation and voila, their desired money shots magically appears. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the reality isn’t that clear-cut or even easy to understand. I can mitigate a lot of the random factors in the process of shooting architecture, by codifying some of the steps I need to take in order to document a project, but I also have to constantly ensure that I make room for serendipity and allow for random disruptions, thoughts, situations and interactions to affect the process so that I can come up with the money shots that my clients have come to expect. 

In other words, I have to make room for creativity by not constraining the process too much, in order to avoid making every single one of my shoots look the same. Invariably, a handful of shots, sometimes the best ones, are the ones that weren’t planned, noticed after I’ve packed all my gear and I am on my way out. Sometimes, what appeared to be a dud during the photoshoot, turns into a money shot with some clever editing.

Ultimately, creativity is important because it is the mechanism by which we solve puzzles and contributes to the progress of mankind. Granted, some creative ideas are literally and figuratively destined for the toilet, but Dude Wipes can’t be faulted for being uncreative, especially if you look into the way they market themselves. I would go as far as  arguing that ass wipes are almost as important to the progress of mankind as the design of the Apollo space program was, as they both require liberal amounts of creativity, in the form of original ideas that were never thought of before. Granted, the impact of these two creative extremes is clearly not going to be the same and history will judge them accordingly, but creativity is the fuel to innovation’s rocket. There is no innovation without creativity and unexploited creativity is wasted potential.

Creativity is a process

The aforementioned little creative acts that we perform everyday and that we often don’t acknowledge are great to practice one’s creative muscle, simply by remembering that we can come up with new ideas to solve old problems pretty much all the time. If one improves their creative output by 1% every day, after a year, it amounts to a 3700% improvement! By building a creative muscle and deliberately practicing a little creativity every day, one can train that muscle to flex on a regular basis. In short order, this skill can be leveraged to solve increasingly complex problems. It certainly requires discipline but the upside of doing this for a significant amount of time can be huge.

The creative discipline can be codified, through empirical experimentation, as it will be different for everyone. As an experiment of one, it needs to be nurtured and improved over time. However, it is challenging to teach it to others and share as everyone has different thinking and learning styles. Therefore, it becomes about finding out what works for oneself while being very aware of what constitutes a creative act in order to train our minds to identify and amplify creative thinking, a positive reinforcement of good behaviour. For example, one of the ways I train my creative muscles, is to answer a question every day and come up with 10 different answers to that question. The question can be anything and the answers don’t have to be good. After doing this for more than 5 years, I can confidently say that my ability to come up with ideas is far ahead of what it used to be before I started this daily practice.

How to make room for creativity?

Often, though not always, the workplace, much like K-12 schooling can be very stifling for creativity, as it aims to conform the workforce to set schedules, spaces and work processes. Some structure is necessary to run a lean, mean business, but one has to be careful to strike a balance between giving workers enough space and freedom to be creative while at the same time keeping the essential structures in place that don’t make a workplace total chaos. I’ve seen very positive improvements in workplace design of the last few years, where the environment is designed to create the space for serendipity and chance encounters, which are fuel for fostering a creative environment.

I recently came up on this quote by Simon Sinek that is the perfect aphorism to describe this issue in the workplace:

“Rule books tell people what to do. Frameworks guide people how to act. Rule books insist on discipline. Frameworks allow for creativity.”

The same way the creative process is unique to each and everyone of us, a workplace culture that makes room for creativity will be different for each business, as a big part of that environment will come from what the company is about and how it operates.

While ultimately each person has a different way of being creative and expressing it, there are some near-universal principles that can get us started on the path to creativity. First of all, a lot of creative ideas come from random connections that our brains make. That’s one of the reasons why more and more people live in cities, all over the world. Cities have the unique ability to create the possibility of random encounters and serendipitous connections that enable us to have creative breakthroughs. By the same token, it is well documented that a lot of major discoveries have been made completely by accident, such as penicillin.

Second, happy accidents being the fertile ground for creative ideas, it is always helpful to make more room for serendipity in our lives. Talking to random strangers at a party, daydreaming while bare feet in the grass (the skin to ground connection is said to enable certain thought patterns to emerge), taking long showers, going on a trip to an unfamiliar location or merely wandering aimlessly around your neighbourhood are all things that contribute to the emergence of creative thoughts.

How that translates in the workplace is both in the physical and cultural realms. In the physical world, it’s important to create literal spaces for random encounters to happen. There is a reason why the water cooler is so well known for facilitating these interactions, as it creates a social space for people to mingle and engage in small talk, which can lead to new and innovative ideas, we’ve all had that eureka moment that happens when someone says something seemingly innocuous.

In the cultural realm, it means that the organizational culture recognizes and encourages employees to experience different work environments that are suited for different tasks and that they be given freedom to play around and find what works best for them. Maybe that local cafe is where your top employee is the most productive. If that’s the case, why stifle them by making this impossible instead of seeing the potential of increased productivity and give them the freedom to work as they see fit, where they see fit?

In practical terms, what you need to do to foster creativity will look very different from what the next guy needs to do, but being aware of those issues and willing to do something is a great first step. As for developing a culture and implementing policies encouraging creativity and innovation, it requires you to take a deep look at the current state of affairs and find out which are the gaps in creativity that need to be filled.

Parting words on trust.

Being creative requires us to be in an environment where we feel safe to unleash our potential. To do so, we need to be able to trust the people around us that our expression of vulnerability, which is what creativity essentially is, isn’t going to come back to bite us in the ass. It’s up to leaders to create a trusting and trustworthy environment where we can fully express ourselves. It also begs the question: why are we still largely operating on a model where employees have to come into work everyday, to sit at a tiny cubicle and punch in the clock, when the work could just as easily be done from a jungle villa in Nicaragua? 

Perhaps it’s time to apply a little creativity in the way we work and develop our own idiosyncratic ways of working that make us more creative and innovative, instead of copying what everybody else is doing?

Special thanks to Pete VonDeLinde for bringing the joy of Dude Wipes into my world.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Conversations Are The Best Way To Provide Value To Your Clients

Reading time ~7 minutes

Imagine you’re sick and bed-ridden. It’s the worst time of the year for you to take time off, as the office is really busy and you’re trying to get your projects’ tender packages out the door before everybody goes away on vacation in a few weeks. You feel like crap, but you manage to drag yourself out of bed to see a doctor. You think you have the flu, owing to the symptoms you’ve experienced in the past, which are very similar to what you’re living through right now. You also know that there are a myriad of potentially fatally infectious diseases that produce the same symptoms and therefore defer to a doctor instead of trying to self-diagnose. You enter your doctor’s office and tell him “I think I have the flu” and he proceeds to write down a prescription without further examination.

Flabbergasted, you storm out and go to another doctor, the trust you have in this professional being forever and irreparably destroyed. You take your medical file with you, vowing to never return.

Why we tolerate behaviours in our industry that other professions ban outright

I’m having trouble imagining a professional occupation where the idea of prescribing a solution to a problem without a proper diagnosis is thought of as a good idea. Indeed, you would never expect your physician to prescribe any kind of treatment without a thorough diagnosis of the symptoms. The same goes of your lawyer, plumber, accountant and pretty much any profession whose job is to provide you with a customized solution to your problems. A problem that you’re sometimes not even aware you have.

How do these professionals diagnose your problems? They ask questions and listen intently and carefully to the answers you give them. Given what they’re told, the gathered information is then filtered through the lens of their expertise and can slowly but surely come to a solution to your problem. Sometimes, the solution is pretty evident and easy to find, sometimes it requires further investigation. These people are paid well, because their years of expertise and experience makes them very valuable. If you were to try and come up with a solution by yourself, you wouldn’t know where to start and it would likely take a long time to do so.

Yet, in creative professions, somehow, that logic flies out the window and our clients routinely think that creative people have an instant creative answer to every problem, as if creativity was an innate ability that was gifted to some and not others. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is creative, to a different degree and in different areas (the subject of an upcoming podcast). Creative professionals are merely likely to be more so than others, or even just better at being consistently creative.

As noted in my recent piece on procurement, asking service providers to do a whole bunch of work, sometimes covertly, in order to get “free” ideas from them is disingenuous, morally questionable and should be publicly denounced. What these procurement people are essentially asking us to do is to skip the diagnosis part and jump right to conclusions, which is counter productive and can be downright dangerous.

Instead, there is a much less time-consuming and costly way to go about finding the right clients, that allows for both parties to determine if they’re mutually a good fit and not waste a ton of resources answering to useless RFPs, that you are very unlikely to win. Since we can’t count on the fact that procurement people will magically change their minds and start acting like ideal clients, it is up to us to take control of the process by changing our own behaviour in a way that will elicit the right ones from our clients.

A very simple alternative

What’s the alternative you ask? Well, it is actually quite simple and perhaps even deceptively so. I’ve found (and I’m not the only one) that starting client relationships with conversations is a lot more productive way to effectively help clients solve the problems they actively need to solve. Often, people I talk to will want to hire external help to put together a social media strategy, when in reality it’s the entire positioning of the firm that needs to be re-thought. Time and time again, I encounter people who want to treat their symptoms when in reality a proper diagnosis would help reveal the cause of the problems, the symptoms either eventually taking care of themselves or being a much lower priority, will be treated down the road.

Conversations, in this context, make room for the clients to freely speak about what ails them and 99.9% of them reveal the cause of the problem in short order. All it takes is a few very pointed questions and the ability to actively listen to what your potential clients tell you. It’s the business equivalent of listening to your chatty friend talk about one of their problems out loud and coming up with their own solution as they talk themselves through it, while you’ve been listening silently, nodding occasionally and asking very occasional pertinent and pointed questions. I’ve been that chatty friend at times and it’s a very empowering position to be in. That’s the kind of trusting space we want to create for our clients.

In order to accomplish this, one has to give up the commodity mindset, thinking that they’re competing against a myriad other providers that are perceived as equivalent in skills and expertise. It requires a strong, specialist positioning, whereby positioning yourself as the top dog in a narrow niche, you increase your chances of being found by your ideal prospects and clients, because you actively work at deepening your expertise in that area. On the other side of the coin, it also requires to ditch the scarcity mindset by clinging to potential clients that are poor fits, just because you are afraid that they might walk away and feel like you need their dollars.

Every prospect should be treated as if we did not need them and have zero expectation of getting them as clients. By going into any meeting telling yourself “I don’t need this client”, you will slowly build your resilience muscle and be able to treat each prospect with professional detachment in service of a greater purpose, which sole focus is to accomplish great things for your clients and yourself. You will also create an atmosphere where clients sense that detachment and as a result will be much more willing to play the game by your rules, because there is no understanding on their part that you want this more than they do.

Ultimately, we can take one of two stances on the matter: 1. We keep bitching and moaning about the unfairness of the current state of affairs and always be mistreated by disingenuous clients who want to take advantage of us at every turn. 2. We can take charge of our destiny and change our behaviour with regards to our potential clients.

I see it time and time again. When I find a prospect who’s willing to make room for play and let me lead the conversation, It can lead to very fruitful and productive engagements in no time, where their business is significantly and deeply transformed because they were willing to take on another perspective on their seemingly intractable problems. Not every client is capable of being a good client and by changing your behaviour, you are making it your mission to find such clients and build deep meaningful relationships with them that will affect them for years to come.

Commodity providers do not effect deep and meaningful change, they patch a band-aid on their clients’ problems and ensure that they have to keep coming back for more. While as a short-term financial strategy, this may make you very successful, in the long term it’s detrimental to your client and your business, because you’re not meaningfully solving their problems, but basically providing a short-term fix. Ultimately, you want to do such a good job that you make yourself redundant. A small, short-term sacrifice for huge long term gains.

It’s up to you to control your destiny.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Procurement Sucks And What You Can Do About It

Reading time ~10 minutes

ACME Corp. procurement officer.

Procurement sucks. Having to bend over backwards in order to jump through hoops on fire over a trap lined with spikes while being chased by a hungry tiger is no cakewalk. Yet, many creative professionals put up with it as it is culturally accepted that, working for free and giving away intellectual property is a small price to pay in order to get work. And in certain cases, it may make sense. But in most of them it doesn’t and more often than not both parties end up worse off as a result of doing business in that fashion.

People in charge of procurement with public dollars have to do what they can, to ensure that the money is well-spent and that there is a high level of accountability within public institutions, for taxpayers to be able to transparently see how their money is spent. Whether this is what actually happens in the real world is another touchy debate that I won’t delve into here.

If one is procuring commodities, traditional procurement makes sense. Whether the Toronto police gets their cars from one dealer or another, they’ll basically get the same product. The main thing being negotiated is price, but the cars come from the same factory. Same for stationery, whether your paper pads come from Staples or Grand & Toy, any difference in quality will be too insignificant to notice and even if somehow you ended up with a subpar paper pad, you’ll probably survive the ordeal.

The problem is when professional services are being treated like commodities. If you listen to one of my past podcasts, Toon Dreessen talks about the absurdity of some situations he’s found himself in. One story that stuck with me is the conversation he had with a stationery procurement officer who did not understand why an architect was required for this project and treated it like she treated paper.

As providers of professional services in the design field, architects know very well that a solution cannot be prescribed in good conscience before a proper diagnostic of the client’s challenges has been made. A doctor practicing that way would be stripped of his credentials and likely sent to jail, yet, procurement processes expect architects to do exactly that. This is a maddening proposition that makes no sense and can actually be harmful.

It really begs the question: why are procurement departments acting so shortsightedly? I genuinely don’t have a clear answer so far, but if we look at how they are incentivized, perhaps we can find the beginning of an explanation. Procurement’s job is to procure something at the lowest cost, as their mandate is to save their employer’s money. Which makes sense if we’re talking about stationery. But when it comes to design services, it has been well established by now, that the cost of designing a building has little to do with its total cost over a lifetime both in terms of capital costs (construction) and operational costs (life-cycle and maintenance), as the design cost is a fraction of the capital cost, which can be itself a fraction of the operational cost.

If a building is designed to save 50% in operational costs over its lifetime, isn’t that worth a higher design fee? And the architect who can confidently deliver on that promise should naturally command a higher price, as his services are more valuable than that of the architect whose designs will cost more operationally. Yet, when procuring these services, these facts are often ignored and the lowest bidder wins. I’m not even going to go into how some firms bid at a loss to “stay busy” and keep their employees on the payroll, while counting on charging for extras, a.k.a. playing the “gotcha” game to stay profitable.

Due to their very mandate, keeping costs low at all cost - pun intended - procurement people are not your friends, as they are by nature asked to undermine you and the value of your services at every turn. Put yourself in their shoes, what would you do in their place?

Your mission as a designer is to solve problems and the more complex those problems are, the more you ought to be paid for it, as this is inherently valuable to your clients, until their procurement departments get involved…

What’s the solution? In the case of public money, I’m not sure there is a solution short of legislating on the matter in order to make the procurement process holistic, and incidentally the topic of an upcoming Single Serves podcast, also with Dreessen. As far as the private sector is concerned, this is where I see a great opportunity to break away from the uncompensated pitch, were we too often give ideas away for free in the hope of getting our pittance.

On one hand, professional service providers have to grow a pair and stop grovelling to their clients’ every whim and tell them when they’re being unreasonable with their demands of a 578-page proposal including a fully resolved building design, construction documents, their staff’s full employment history, including their immigration status - as applicable - as well as their grandmother’s birth certificate and their kids weekly school menu, and I’m barely exaggerating. If what they’re asking for has no relevance to the provision of the service, you are perfectly within your right to tell them off, politely but firmly as you now know they’re just dicking you around.

Imagine if you went on a first date with someone and they keep rescheduling, changing the venue, until you finally get to meet them in person after 10 reschedules and then they spend the entire date fucking with you, keeping you guessing and asking a lot of very deep and personal questions without revealing anything about themselve, wouldn’t you walk away? You would, because you intuitively know that it’s not gonna get better over time. The same goes for your clients. If they metaphorically fuck with you by being unreasonable, chances are they won’t suddenly change if they ever hire you and you’re better off leaving them to your competition.

On the other hand, private companies who feel like they “have to” go through a complex and byzantine procurement process to hire professional service providers, really ought to ask themselves how that’s gonna serve them in the long term. This is where there is a shift that needs to happen, from the cost of the service to the value.

A big part of demonstrating that value is, I’m afraid, your responsibility. It’s a tough job, but not impossible, it merely requires a concerted effort and the development of a long term view of your business’ growth. In this age of crazed and insanely fast (too much so in my opinion) startup funding, venture capital and IPOs, in the vein of the “break things and move fast” credo of Facebook, one really has to sit back and ask “What am I really trying to accomplish here?” Maybe “slowing down and mending things” isn’t such a bad idea after all.

From there, it is possible that the answers will start coming to you and with a healthy dose of courage, one can dig oneself out of this hellhole that is procurement. The alternative is to remain a commodity who’s being mistreated at every turn by clients who are total dicks and are not even apologetic about it.

Which do you want to be?

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Launching Single Serves Podcast... Important Conversations About Design!

I’m launching this podcast in order to bring the world’s foremost experts on specific topics relating to architecture and design. These are the important conversations that I think we’re not having enough of within the industry. It’s meant to be educational, sometimes funny and above all, get us to talk about serious topics without taking ourselves too seriously.

Single Serves Ep. 101 - Sharp On Social Media For Architects

Dave Sharp may be a youngster, but in a short time he's built a respectable business around helping architects navigate the world of social media and marketing. Dave and I talked about social media for designers, its pitfalls and untapped opportunities. Listen in to learn more about the topic.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Listen here.

How To Present Your Ideas Without Boring Your Audience To Death

Reading time ~15 minutes

I’m not breaking new ground by saying that public speaking is a critical tool of the professional. It is how new and innovative ideas are presented, exchanged and an excellent way to share these ideas with peers, while getting immediate feedback in the process. It also something that terrifies pretty much every single one of us.

The most seasoned public speakers, of the kind who speak for a living are very often adept at giving talks that appear effortless and easy to understand. What people often don’t realize is how much work goes into preparing a high-stakes talk, like you would do for TED. TED is the pinnacle of public speaking, so it makes sense that the people who are asked to talk at these events work really hard at making sure that their talk is the best it can be.

What of lower-stake public presentations? Like a local industry conference or a university? Should you prepare as much for those? Yes, without question, one should prepare as much, if not more for these. I’ve witnessed too many otherwise respected professionals turn a promising talk into a nap-inducing snoozefest. They wax technical, stumble through their disorganized notes or worse, crime of all crimes, read verbatim off of a script. Needless to say that it’s not good for their image or their prospect of being invited again to speak in front of that audience.

Being a poor speaker will limit your chances of being invited to future speaking gigs, while practicing a bit to become a better speaking can have a dramatic upside. It can help you make your next deal, find your next client or graduate to being a paid speaker. This is why you cannot afford to mess up your next talk. I’ve put together a list of things to consider when putting together a talk in order to help you navigate through the process.

If we break down public speaking to its essence, it is nothing more than storytelling. That story might be highly technical, but it is a story nonetheless. I would even argue that the more technical it is, the more you have a duty to make palatable and easy to digest. No one, ever, has been interested in sitting through a two-hour long presentation detailing the engineering of mass-timber structures, described via a series of graphs and diagrams. Not even the most nerdy of structural engineers would make it out of such a talk unscathed. An engaging speaker taking on the same topic would find ways to weave all these data into a storyline that would take the audience on a journey, a fascinating trip into the history of mass timber, why it is making a timely come-back right now and how it’s going to save the environment.

Take a second to think about the best public presentations you’ve ever witnessed. What were the attributes displayed by the speaker? Did they present their ideas in a way that made you understand them right away, as if they understood intuitively how you thought? Did they announce clearly what they were going to talk about and what you could expect to get out of the presentation? Did they present their ideas in such a way that you were able to relate to it on a personal level, being emotionally involved, as it were? Was their presentation tailored to the audience, talk time and topic? Did they give the right amount of information for it to be understood? Was their presentation well put together and feel natural?

Let’s break down the attributes of great talk and see what’s at play here:

1.Announce it loud and clear

The best presentations always start with the spoken equivalent of a table of contents. The speaker starts by announcing what he’s going to talk about, why it is important and what the audience can expect to get out of it. While this may seem obvious, more often than not, it is missing. The reason it is important is because it sets expectations for the audience. They don’t have written material to refer to, so giving them a mental breakdown of the presentation helps them navigate what is being said down the road.

It is also a mark of respect for people’s time as they often don’t know what is being talked about in detail and allows for the few out-of-place laggards who randomly stumbled into the lecture hall to leave if somehow this topic isn’t interesting to them. It’s better to have a few engaged audience members than twice the amount of people with half of them asleep.

By knowing what to expect, they are not distracted trying to figure out what is being presented and therefore can focus on the subject of conversation.

2. Put yourself in their shoes

In order to give an effective talk, one has to cater to their audience. While a given talk topic may be presented many times over, each occurrence should take into account the audience’s specific needs. Empathizing will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of what it of interest to them and therefore enable them to feel more connected to what is being presented, as it appears more personal.

Designers are hopelessly notorious for using archispeak to describe their ideas, with no consideration for who the recipients of these ideas are. The problem with this one-size-fits all approach is that only a very narrow segment of the population is equipped to understand you. Nevermind the fact that using an obfuscating and jargon-laden language makes you sound pompous and instantly chips away at your credibility. Heck, I studied architecture and half the time I don’t understand what architects are blathering about when they are in full archispeak mode. It’s telling that books have to be written on the topic to help people understand. Forget the Archispeak-English dictionary and just use plain english instead.

Real people (a.k.a normal people outside of your industry) want nothing but to be spoken to in a human, authentic and intelligible language. The best litmus test is to try and make your presentation intelligible to your 10 year-old kid or your 90 year-old grandmother. It will force you to distill your ideas down to their essence and in the process not leave anyone behind.

Short of having access to your audience and get direct feedback on your topic of presentation, spending a little time thinking about what these people may want to hear should be enough to give you an insight as to what might be of interest to them. You can infer a way to present your ideas that is likely to make sense to your audience.

With some practice, you’ll be able in no time to adapt your public presentations to each audience and have success every time by giving audience members an easy way to enter the world of your ideas.

3. Appeal to the audience’s emotions

In order to make a point and persuade people that your ideas are the best since sliced bread, it is important to appeal to your audience’s emotional side. As Simon Sinek explained in Start With Why we all have a tendency to describe the benefits of our ideas with rational arguments, facts and figures, but it’s our deep purposeful commitment to a purpose that is the most effective at enrolling people to your cause.

With that in mind, it is imperative to relate your talk to a broader purpose that gives them some context as to where you’re coming from. In other terms, if you very factually and accurately describe your latest building, you run the risk of sounding boring. Conversely, if you describe its genesis and why you designed it the way it is, while relating to how it serves its users the best, you have the potential to build a narrative that will make your building sound much more interesting.

I remember attending a talk by Joshua Prince-Ramus 10+ years ago, while I was studying architecture. It was shortly after he broke away from OMA and renamed his practice REX. He came to my school to give a lecture on his work, but much to my surprise, he ended up talking more about his take on the architectural profession, how he came up with a different business model for his practice.

The way he described in great detail how that business model would impact all the stakeholders, was the most compelling argument as we could now relate to how his work would impact its environment in a positive manner. The projects he talked about were simply the demonstration of that philosophy. Not surprisingly, the REX name means “re-appraisal of architecture”, what a brilliant way to walk the walk.

Bjarke Ingels is known to do the same when talking about his projects. He always starts with the main design challenges that were identified during the analysis phase and then breaks down how his designs solve each of those challenges. Watch him here tell a very brief story of his most innovative projects and explain very plainly and simply why these projects make sense. In every case, the arguments appeal to our emotions, not our rational brains. In these examples, both Ingels and Prince-Ramus show how masterful they are at taking complex ideas into easily understandable concepts that are both appealing and engaging. They put us in the shoes of the users and make us want to be part of whatever it is that they are up to.

I will knock a few points off though, due to their inability to shake off the bad habit of using archispeak. Again, if your 8 year-old nephew cannot understand what you’re talking about, you’ve failed.

4. Just the right amount of detail

You’re given a certain amount of time to present your ideas. Would you just go and present in the way you want to and hope that it fits the format? I hope not, because you’d be running the risk of presenting only half of your ideas, and not necessarily the best half.

A presentation should always be tailored to the time given and the audience in order to ensure that you deliver the right message. I would go as far as saying that each presentation on the same topic always has to be different, not unlike two buildings with similar programmatic requirements would always be different based on the site and its users.

By doing so, you will show your audience that you respect their time and particular needs, which in turn will make them a lot more engaged with your presentation. Having the right amount and kind of detail in your talk is essentially building on principle #1 above and ensuring that it is carried through the whole presentation. It’s perfectly OK, encouraged even, to regularly go back to your verbal table of content when jumping to a new section, as a way to keep your audience on board and make it real easy for them to keep track of where you are in your talk.

Oh and please, please, please, make sure to time your presentation during the rehearsal, until you can nail 100% of the time your target length. Which leads me to the next point:

5. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse… Then rehearse some more.

I think the most effective presentations are those that look and feel like a natural conversation. It might be a one-sided conversation, but the flow of speech and ideas should feel natural. Well rehearsed, definitely, but I would caution against striving for perfection as it will make you sound like a robot and most people don’t like robots.

There is really no substitute for preparation. The best speakers prepare to death, until they know their material in and out, at which point they can ditch their notes altogether and just present without a safety net. Watch any TED talk to see how it’s done.

The best way to prepare is to work off of a bullet-point-style set of notes, with abbreviated annotations that serve as a reminder of the key points you want to talk about, without getting you stuck with an inflexible script. The reason for that it to prevent any possibility to get lazy and start reading off of your notes. Reading a script is the worst kind of presenting one can ever do and should be avoided at all cost, unless your goal to put your audience to sleep.

With enough preparation, you should know your talk in and out and be able to deliver it on command. You can go as far as ditching the notes altogether if you’re feeling adventurous, but keeping them nearby to act as a loose reminder of what you need to say is perfectly OK and can save your bacon in case of a brainfart. A good sign that you’ve rehearsed enough is when you can give your presentation without looking at your notes. At minimum, you’ll want to rehearse a handful of times to have a good working knowledge of your talk. If this presentation is really important, I would rehearse as much as is humanly possible in the weeks leading up to it, with and without a test audience in order to iron out the kinks.

I would also recommend against just writing out bullet-points and not rehearsing, a.k.a. going freestyle, as if you were to run into a disruptive element, you will not be familiar enough with your material to roll with the punches. Make no mistake, you will be disrupted at one point or another, and having the ability to handle it while getting back into the groove quick, is paramount to keep your presentation flowing and interesting.

You may ask, when do I know I’m ready? Well, a good indication of your preparedness is to be able to deliver your presentation comfortably and confidently while keeping your audience on the edge of their seats. As you do more talks, you’ll be able to fine-tune your preparation and determine how much of it you need to do, as it will vary according to one’s varying degrees of ability. A little apprehension is perfectly normal, and I doubt even the most seasoned public speakers never have a little knot in their stomach before going on stage.

Bonus tip #1:

Breathe. For those of you who practice yoga and meditation, you will naturally understand the benefits of mindful breathing before going on stage. If you know what to do, just set aside some time a few minutes before the big stage to breathe and calm yourself down. If you’ve never breathed intentionally, you can just sit down for a few minutes and breathe deeply and intentionally. This will calm your nerves and help you relax, while boosting your confidence.

You may get a little dizzy if breathe particularly deeply and that’s perfectly normal, it just means that your brain is getting high on oxygen. This will help with the stress and will disappear as soon as you get back to normal breathing.

Bonus tip #2:

Work your voice. A well warmed-up and trained voice will project far more than an untrained one. Preparing for a talk by doing basic vocal warmups is a great preparation. For the more dedicated of you, learning how to sing and use breath to project your voice is a fantastic long-term way to improve your speaking skills. The more casual speaker would also benefit from simple things like singing along in the shower and going to the local karaoke bar with friends. I’m serious.

Bonus tip #3:

Look at your audience in the eyes. There is nothing more unsettling than a speaker who is not engaging visually with the audience. While you don’t want to stare at the same person for 2 minutes, as it would get awkward very quickly, it’s always a good idea to randomly look around the room and make eye contact with a variety of people for a second or two.

A neat trick I’ve learned is to visualize an imaginary triangle pointed down, where each point of the triangle would correspond to an audience member’s face and go back and forth between each of the triangle's points. Do that a couple of times and then imagine another triangle and repeat. The key is to make sure that you cover the entire audience and make eye contact with a large portion of it.

Bonus tip #4:

Use your body. Too many times, I’ve seen people standing behind a lectern and stay there for the whole presentation. This is as much the fault of the organizers as it is that of the speaker. The stage setup is far too often designed to be static and presenters often are not even given a wireless mic that would give them the ability to move about.

That’s a shame because body language is one of the easiest and most overlooked ways to make your talk come to life. It’s OK and highly encouraged to use your hands, move about the stage and exaggerate your gestures. There is no magic trick for this one as everyone moves differently and we all have varying degrees of comfort with being metaphorically naked in front of an audience. There is no doubt, however, that a little movement is better than none. Practice will also help you get better at this.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to it than public speaking that the few distilled ideas I’ve just covered, as this is a fascinating topic that can be discussed for days without ever getting boring. I will say that if you practice and apply what was discussed in this article, you will almost certainly dramatically improve your public speaking skills, and who knows, perhaps unleash the Ken Robinson within you. Good luck and send me a note if you were able to successfully implement some of these ideas!

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Why Aldens Are Better Than Air Jordans

Reading time ~7 minutes

Dealing with a growing portion of their workforce composed of demanding millennials, often leads companies to take seemingly easy shortcuts in order to attract the best and brightest talent with lazy corporate gimmicks. But these pale in comparison to what a great organizational culture can do for your business in the long term, namely create a more loyal, engaged workforce that feels their thirst for a meaningful workplace has been quenched.

Yes, free lunches, nap rooms and foosball tables are great benefits and fun to play with, but thinking that these alone are sufficient to retain people in the long term is a dangerous mistake. Once people get past the novelty of having access to those things, they’ll get frustrated and complain that they’re still unfulfilled and unhappy, the same way they were at their previous job, the one before that, all the way back to their first job. That’s because these jobs did not bring more meaning and fulfillment to their lives. The same way they’ll get bored of that once-shiny pair of flashy Air Jordans, that they grossly overpaid for, they’ll get bored with a company that does nothing to help them find meaning in their work but to provide temporarily exciting distractions, while ignoring the deeper issues that are the root causes of a disengaged workforce.

More Alden, Less Nike

To continue with the shoe metaphor, a company with a great culture is more like a quality pair of Alden dress shoes than Nikes: When well taken care of, the leather will age gracefully and even acquire a nice patina that only time can provide, while taking care of your aching feet for decades on end. When put through difficult situations, they may temporarily lose their luster, but with some TLC, can always be brought back to life. Small blemishes will give character and make for some interesting stories. Only serious, long-term neglect has the potential to damage it irreparably, as they can be damaged with scratches and cuts which no amount of care will fix. Its sole may eventually wear out, but a good cobbler can always re-sole them and give them a second lease on life. It will never look cutting edge or worse, fashionable, but it’s not meant to. It has a timeless quality that will make it relevant at any time and acceptable in any situation. It is built to last and will outlast any pair of sneakers by decades.

Conversely, a new and shiny pair of the latest Air Jordans, looks fresh as hell out of the box, but loses all its value as soon as you start wearing them. Because they’re white, the slightest trace of dust or mud, will make them look terrible and to keep them looking good you have to neurotically clean them to try and bring them back to their former glory. But no amount of care will do so as they are not built with materials that can be easily mended and replaced. If worn with any regularity, one can hope for a year or two before they start looking terrible and you’d be ashamed to be seen wearing them in public. They’ll soon be replaced by another new and shiny pair that will give you a short burst of satisfaction before they’re discarded because they don’t look good enough anymore.

Like dress shoes, a great organizational culture is a big undertaking that takes a lot of work to build, and a constant effort to maintain, but it will lead your employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders to a more fulfilling life. While too many employees dread showing up at work every day, wouldn’t you want to have employees who are happy to show up and have fun every day?

How to foster a great culture.

I wish I could put a red pill in your hand and tell you that taking it will magically make a great culture spring into existence. Unfortunately, there is no such solution. A great culture is an expression of your company’s purpose and as such, what works for another company will not necessarily work for yours. Therefore it will take great effort and time to determine what it could be for you and your team. Not an easy task by any means, but in my opinion a risk worth taking as the potential upside is tremendous on many levels.

At a basic level, a great organizational culture is a set of rules, behaviours and etiquette that represent the character of that entity. It should make it easier for  the company’s stakeholders to lead happy and fulfilled lives. I believe there are a couple of metrics that embody the success of an organizational culture:

1. Are people fulfilled as a result of taking part in the business?

2. Is the business more profitable as a result of positive organizational changes?

This is where the greatest opportunities to make a difference lie. The culture-savvy people that I’ve had the pleasure to talk to over the years all see their leadership role in a very-specific way: They are acutely aware that the people working for them are not just employees working for a paycheque. Rather, employees are people with responsibilities, families and obligations. How they are being treated impacts them and a shitty workplace will make them miserable at work, but also at home and could negatively impact their family, friends, spouses and kids.

When we pay attention to our employees needs, we are not in a transactional relationship anymore, where employees earn money in exchange for getting something done, but a transformational one, in which the better the employees are doing on a personal level, the more they are likely to feel happy, fulfilled and perform better at work, leading to a more profitable business as well as happy customers and suppliers. I’m sure the shareholders would eventually get their due as well.

The first step is always the same: recognize that change is necessary. It may be because the company is struggling financially, or that the dictatorial leadership and its historical “my way or the highway” approach to leadership is no longer working or, for a myriad of other possible reasons. When the need to change has been established, this is where leaders have an opportunity to change themselves, their way of leading and be willing to involve all relevant stakeholders in taking part of the process. If you envisioned what your ideal business looks like, a good way to go about it would be to reverse-engineer that vision into existence.

Here’s a fun challenge for you: You can try it. Yes, right now. Pick one of your employees randomly. Think about what you know of their personal life. Where did they grow up? Do they have a family? What are their hobbies? Do they have pets? What kind of personality they have? What are their biggest challenges outside the workplace? Are their parents still around?

Keep digging. You can’t think of anything? Now you know where to start. Relationships are the foundation of a great organizational culture. Only by learning to listen to people’s needs, wants and aspirations we can empower them to achieve those. Get to know one (or several) of them. Take them out to lunch and listen to what they say, what you’ll hear may surprise you.

Congratulations, you planted the seed of a better culture. What will you do next to make it a reality? There is no way you can lose if you truly believe in a better future for yourself and your business.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

How To Find The Right Hire In A Seller's Market

Reading time ~14 minutes

Introduction

In the course of my work, I get to learn about particular aspects of our industry. I’ve recently had the opportunity spent a lot of time talking to people about hiring practices in the AEC industry as part of a research project. The overwhelming conclusion I’ve come to is that hiring is a very challenging process for employers. It takes a lot of time, costs money and there is never a guarantee that your newest employee is the right fit for your company. A lot of company founders and principals sing the same tune: the challenges they all face are all very similar. Every step of the process is a challenge, especially in a seller’s market where there is more jobs than candidates (more on that later). Don’t believe for a second that you are alone facing these issues.

Big or small, most firms go through the same process and employ very similar tactics to hire people. Bigger firms will tend to have more budget and being more willing to spend money to find the right employees, even when it comes to junior positions. By and large the way architecture and design firms hire are very similar across the board.

One distinction across all firms is the difference in hiring processes for Junior vs. Senior employees. More money and effort is understandably spent on filling more senior positions, as these employees have a greater impact on the health of the company.

The Challenges:

Finding the right people: from finding the right fit for your company’s culture, to simply finding people who actually have the qualifications they claim to have, recruiters have to do an incredible amount of legwork when it comes to doing their due diligence. This is not helped by the fact that we are currently in a seller’s market, where there is more job offers than qualified candidates. This makes the search for that unicorn, the candidate with the trifecta of qualifications, cultural fit and availability, all the more complex. It is not rare for recruiters to receive applications from people who do not have the desired qualifications, whether it be from a skillset perspective (juniors claiming to have more experience than they do) or even things like the lack of immigration status (people applying from overseas). Most recruiters waste a lot of time sorting the good from the bad.

Then there is the budget issue. How much money should one allocate to recruiting efforts? How much of that budget do you allocate to different tools and resources? Things like job boards, the interview process and legal fees all cost money, but how do you know how to allocate proper resources to each item? Do you not spend any money at all and dedicate only time (which is also costly by the way)?

Recruiters are expensive but also effective as they put their money where their mouth is, because they don’t get paid if you don’t hire their candidates. Therefore, they have an incentive to do a good job. Since they cost about 20% of your hire’s first year salary, it can be a tough pill to swallow, but they tend to make more sense for more senior positions.  

Job boards are great and free (or very cheap), but the main challenge is that they advertise your opening to the world, attracting all kinds of poor fits and forcing you to go through a long and painful curating process. The problem with job boards is that the a large portion of candidates are the bottom of the barrel. Most good employees never have to look for a job and more often than not they get recruited through their network and therefore never peruse the classifieds.

In his classic book, “What Color Is Your Parachute”, Richard Bolles claims that most companies recruit internally or within their network, only using more public means of advertising a position when they have no other option left. That’s because we tend to trust people in our networks much more than strangers so it makes sense that we tap into familiarity before we look for employees more widely.

If a colleague you know and trust recommended someone warmly, would you not make them your primary candidates? I know I would. When I look for people to work with, I always tend to naturally reach out to my network before advertising and when I do advertise it’s with very specific resources. There is a local college that I particularly like because they are known to produced skilled grads, namely people who have skills in demand in the marketplace. Every year I reach out to them to get a co-op student for summer, keeping in mind that these co-op students will eventually look for a job. When they do, we will be in each other’s network and will naturally tend to gravitate towards one another.

I never advertise on standard job boards, because I don’t want the aggravation of dealing with substandard candidates who don’t even take the time to research the company they are applying to and send generic cover letters. I once received an unsolicited application from an overseas candidate who CC’d about a hundred other people on his generic - gasp! - cover letter letter. Needless to say I had a little fun replying to that one, as I took inspiration from these guys to write a spirited response.

Industry-specific job board tend to be a little better than general recruiting sites (Monster and the like), as they attract a smaller subset of candidates, usually of higher quality than generalist boards.

One of the most common complaint is that people really struggle to find a good fit in terms of skill set but even more importantly, from a cultural standpoint. The most qualified of employees will not be comfortable working for a firm espousing values too different from their own. Worse yet, working for a firm who has no established values. In my opinion too many firms spend too much time focusing on skills and experience, as opposed to ensuring that a candidate will fit right into the office culture. Skills can be learned, knowledge can be acquired, but the right attitude, mindset and work ethic is a given we all have to work with. Better find the right candidate with respect to those soft social skills.

Opportunities to do things differently

Now that we’ve laid out some of the biggest challenges recruiters face, I’m going to expand on some ideas that will give you an edge when looking for employees.

Find juniors before they get out of school and keep your network alive:

Since we’ve already established that networks play a huge part in recruiting effort, it pays off in the long term to maintain and expand that network on an ongoing basis. Keep tabs on current and future cohorts of new grads and identify the best of them as much as you can. By the same token, an ongoing internal internship program is a great way to test people out in the wild and see how they mesh with your culture. Other tactics that will help you in that regard are as follows, in no particular order: attending design crits at local school, job fairs, attending industry events, etc.

Outside of the post-secondary education system, it’s good to identify promising prospects and keep tabs on them. Stay in touch once in a while and ask them what they’re up to. You’d be surprised how much a quick check-in once in a while can help you find the right candidate when time is of the essence. That graduate you’ve kept in touch with for years may very well be your next hire if the stars are aligned. A friend of mine maintains a list of people she would like to work with and has coffee with them once in a while, when a position opens at her firm, they are the first ones to get a call.

In a similar fashion, don’t hesitate to have meaningful conversation with your peers on your challenges, successes and good candidates that have showed up on your radar. The sharing of knowledge contributes to everybody’s efforts and makes it a little easier for everyone. It’s also a good idea to sift through the mass of unsolicited applications to keep the interesting ones for later reference. Bonus points if you can have mini pre-screening interview with the candidates that showed interest and look promising. It will give you a good idea of what they’re about. You can always purge that pile of applications more than 6 months old as these tend get out of date quickly. A quick coffee date with a candidate can go a long way and make the interaction a little more human and personal, which never hurts.

Outsource it:

Sometimes it makes sense to hire a seasoned professional to help you with your recruiting. They have the network, resources, expertise and experience that you don’t and can really make a difference when it comes to narrowing down the field of candidates. Some people mistrust recruiters as they are sometimes seen as ruthless mercenaries that will poach people from their current jobs with little or no scruples.

While I can see that being an issue, and I am sure you’d find unscrupulous people out there doing unsavory things in just about every industry. Let’s not forget that these guys have a whole lot of skin in the game as they don’t get paid if you don’t make a hire through them. As far as incentive alignment is concerned, it’s difficult to make it more favourable than that for you. When it comes to ruthlessly poaching people, I would argue that this is the hard law of the marketplace. But if you’re experiencing people routinely leaving your office for greener pastures, I would highly recommend looking past the financial and emotional aspects of such transactions and take a long, hard-look at your culture. The best way to prevent people leaving your firm as soon as something better presents itself is to define, refine and constantly strive to improve your office culture. A great culture creates loyal, fulfilled employees to whom a job is much more than just a salary. I know first hand of such companies: their staff routinely decline other better paying jobs because they’re having way too much fun. Which leads me to my next point:

Work on your company’s culture and constantly refine it:

As a keen observer of the marketing industry, Terry O’Reilly likes to observe and analyze a company’s touch points to see how they interact with their stakeholders (employees, suppliers and clients). O’Reilly says that there are innumerable untapped opportunities for improving any of these touch points: from the way you sign-off your emails to your on-hold phone recordings, via your website and your social media presence, to name a few. The same goes for recruiting: how would you like your potential employees to perceive you and how would you go about them going “I want to work nowhere but there” upon leaving their first interview.

If you don’t know your company culture well enough to explain it in 1-2 sentences, on the spot, you probably have what I call a “by default” culture. A strong culture is your best bet to attract the right talent as it helps in creating an environment where everybody is valued and treated well. Every single company with a strong cultural foundation that I have observed first hand, has happier, engaged, loyal employees, often that wouldn’t leave their job for a salary substantially higher than their current one.

A great culture, as my friend Stephen Shedletzky puts it, equals values x behaviour. In other words, it means that you have to be clear on your why (purpose) and have well-established values. Not only that, but you need to live those values on a daily basis. Values that are not constantly used as a framework for decision making are useless.

GREAT CULTURE = VALUES x BEHAVIOUR

Don’t recruit solely based on skills and experience, and make the hiring process a family affair:

By the same token, a strong cultural foundation will help you focus on what matters most in prospective candidates: their personality, work ethic and ability to integrate an unfamiliar environment. Vitsoe has become a master at hiring slow and firing fast. They are so keenly aware of the need for new recruits to fit in with the culture that they notoriously dismiss candidates that would be perfectly fine for most of the rest of us, mere mortals. A story that stuck with me over the years is that of a technician that they were trying out on the job. On paper, the candidate was a great fit, but on day one, at the end of the work schedule, he tossed his tools in the toolbox and left. The fact that he did not carefully place his tools back in the order they belonged was a deal breaker for them. Needless to say that they collectively decided against hiring him.

I recently got wind that the email address “iwanttokickfearinthenuts@rvltr.studio” I have listed in a summer internship posting that I put up at a local photography school, turned off a potential co-op student who was apparently offended by its attempt at humour. Instead of feeling bad about it, I realized that I had probably dodged a bullet by avoiding someone who would not understand our company’s culture and values. Better to have no fit than a poor fit.

While this kind of pickiness may seem extreme to some, I believe it shows that a company who knows what they stand for to such a degree, will not hesitate to make such decisions because they know the weight that a wrong decision can carry down the road. And being so picky is another way to turn off people that wouldn’t be a natural fit, so the people you’re left with at the end are the best fits for your company. Which doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for anyone else either, by the way.

On a side note, fire fast doesn’t mean rudely dismissing people without empathy. It just means letting go of the bad fits quickly. It’s certainly not a free pass to be an asshole about it. We still all have a duty to be humane, even in the most uncomfortable of situations.

Additionally, the hiring process shouldn’t be just a HR process. People you hire will work with others and most company with a great culture make hiring decision while involving all concerned parties from the Janitor to the CEO. It does make perfect sense to ensure that one’s coworkers can get along with or your run the risk of mutiny.

Ultimately, a resume and cover letter are a quick and efficient way to separate the good from the bad, but to determine fit, you have spend the time with the candidate and test their mettle, better yet: do it under pressure, as it’s when everything goes to shit that problems arise. Try them out in the real work environment and see how they respond to challenges, big and small and more importantly how they treat other people. You probably want to avoid the person who’s going to think that the janitor doesn’t deserve even the smallest of acknowledgement.

Once you’ve made that hire, keep watching them during the honeymoon period and at the first sign of trouble, address it immediately.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, recruiting is a lengthy, challenging process, in which we all tend to be be way too emotionally involved with. While a great culture will help with making interactions more human and personal and ultimately, hire people that feel at home in your company, it is important to remove as much emotional attachment to the decision making process. In other words, trust your gut but don’t become emotionally attached to the outcome.

In Vipassana meditation practice, this is called “Anicca”: the ability to not have any aversion for negative situations, feelings and sensations as well as for the positive ones. Meditation is a great tool to be able to reach that level of zen master self-control, I highly recommend it.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Archinect + Rvltr = Power

I’m very proud and humbled to announce that I’ve started contributing editorial features for Archinect as a regular contributor. The first article is a revisit of a past article that was posted here a while back on the importance of vetting your clients. Check out it here and leave us a comment!

Stay tuned for our next feature on one of the world’s oldest internet architecture platform.

Spaces, The Final Frontier. These are the...

Reading time ~10 minutes

I’ve recently dived into the world of commercial interior design, both out of sheer curiosity and also as a form of informal research to understand better some of the challenges my clients are experiencing when tackling complex, large interiors projects. This writing is the result of multiple interviews and conversations with interior designers, both from large and small firms in order to see where commercial interiors are headed in the near future.

I’m going to present the most inspiring of these ideas and expand a little bit on them to give them some context around three main themes:

1. The importance of human to human interaction and human-centric design.

While we constantly hear about the impending doom of the approaching singularity and the resulting rise of our AI overlords, for the time being, people still don’t like to interact with machines, mainly on account of the fact that we haven’t been able to design machines that convincingly replicate a human to human experience. The uncanny valley makes our interactions with machines mostly weird and uncomfortable. In other words, it’s not anytime soon that the majority of workers will be replaced by machines, especially to replace human-to-human interactions.

This is why designing workplaces that foster face to face, wholesome relationships is critically important for our well-being. There is increasing evidence that a holistic approach to life where we don’t spend all our waking hours working, but rather strive to live fulfilled, balanced lives with a healthy dose of play is beneficial both inside and outside the office. There is more to creating such spaces than bean bags and foosball tables, as the best spaces are the ones that truly reflect a given company’s culture while accommodating the latest findings in workplace health. So bean bags and foosball may be a fit for one company and not another and should not be used as a formula just because they’re cool.

In her article about workplace design, Lois Wellwood further defines the idea of human-centric workplace design, where innovation and productivity come not from prescriptive work environments and scheduled interactions, but rather from visual and physical access to other people (Gensler’s research tells us that levels of  interaction decrease exponentially as workers are further removed from one another), which in turns allows for unplanned and casual interactions. In other terms, there is an increasing body of research out there that has identified some universal principles that can help us design better workplaces.

However, these principles are not prescriptive of how a space should be designed, but rather act as a sort of guideline for which attributes will make the space better for its users. On top of that, it is a designer’s duty to to deep-dive into their clients culture in order to come up with a design that reflects said culture and contribute to make a workplace that embodies the organizational values of the client.

This is where a skilled designer will be able to artfully blend a scientifically-sound approach, backed by research, with a creative ability to design spaces that actually improves the worker’s experience and therefore their productivity.

2. Loose fit, long life.

This is a really interesting idea, in an age where we see a lot of custom work being done for companies so that they can have a cool office with all sorts of gizmos integrated in complicated millwork. Companies such as Gensler understand that technology is rendered obsolete in less time than it takes to say it, and therefore design their spaces to accommodate technology, without making its upgrading overly complicated e.g., having to rip out an entire wall just to replace a projector. This makes office spaces somewhat future proof, and easy to upgrade or retrofit for a new tenant.

The main idea behind this is to design for the common denominator and not the exception. Take for example someone who loves camping in the wilderness and goes on average camping once a month for 3-4 days. When looking to buy their next car, they are naturally inclined to buy a big, off-road capable SUV, because the trunk space and the ground clearance will come handy once a month. At the same time, they spend 90% of their time driving around the city, routinely parking in garages or squeezing in between a hydrant and another car that’s taking 50% more space than it needs to. They essentially buy their car for the once-a-month exception, when they should really consider a small, hybrid or electric car that will get them easily around the city, save them a lot on gas and maintenance and be much easier to park in tight spots. Then, when that person needs a big truck to go play in the mud they can always rent one for the weekend (not to mention that if it gets destroyed you only have to cover the deductible - I speak from experience, ask me about the time I destroyed an SUV in Costa Rica).

The same goes for designing workspaces. If 40% percent of an office’s desks are empty at all times, why not implement a hot desk system where people settle with their networked laptop for the day wherever is most convenient to them at that moment in time? I discovered such a set-up on a recent visit to a large Toronto architecture firm that recently significantly downsized their office when they realized that out of their 70+ employees, they only ever had 50 to 55 of them in the office at any given point in time.

Taking the idea further, we can imagine many a set-up for how an office should work for its employees. That’s where design comes in to determine solutions that are tailored to each situation. The aforementioned hot-desking policy is not a solution for every company, but it made sense for that one when they were looking for efficiency gains, which allowed them to move from an office that was somewhat tricky to access by transit to a downtown core office near practically every major transit option in the city. This, in turn, allowed them to retain employees that were increasingly moving out to the suburbs as a result of being priced out of the downtown area.

3. Experiences.

Designing great looking spaces used to be enough to get people in the door. You’d dazzle them with spiffy finishes and thick carpet and the novelty alone would be enough to make them walk out the door with a smoking credit card and a bunch of stuff in their hands. Nowadays, people can find stuff cheaper and faster on Amazon and have it delivered the same day for practically nothing (thanks amazon prime). Consequently, retail spaces have to provide amazing experiences where people come for more than just shopping. Whether it’s a hands-on experience, coupled with unparalleled customer service (Apple stores), or a local café where the space is designed to cheer you up in the morning on your way to work (Milky’s), the spaces we frequent every day affect us. Working extra hard at making those experiences positive is a great way to differentiate oneself from the competition in markets where the product/service is commoditized. Even a notoriously commoditized brand like Samsung has started to recognize that with their latest Canadian flagship store. It is not a place where people go to buy stuff (they can do that from anywhere), rather a place where people get to experience the products and learn more about them, which is not a bad thing when you’re going to blow 5K + on a kitchen appliance.

However, experiences are increasingly becoming continuous, multi-channel experiences, where one may go to the flagship store to touch and feel the product and then go to the manufacturer’s website to read more, look at specs and make a final decision, before engaging with the brand on social media only to finally buy it from a reseller. This is where brands like Apple, Tesla and IKEA demonstrate the value of being in control of all steps of the experience. Samsung may control some of these steps such as the flagship store and their website, but since their products are sold by many different retailers, that’s where the experience breaks down, because they are not in control of what the experience is like at many of these retailers. Conversely, Apple controls 99.9% of its users’ experiences, from the website, to the Apple Store, to the customer and product service. The only time they relinquish control is for small, local, third-party retailers, but you can bet that they put a lot of contractual conditions on authorized resellers for them to retain their status and ensure a great experience. That’s also one of the reasons why Tesla doesn’t rely on conventional dealer networks to sell their wares. They are smart enough to know that car dealers variable geometry ethics would not serve them in the long term.

It is the companies who master all aspects of a customer’s experience, are willing to look beyond the obvious and tackle the most seemingly insignificant touch points with their customers who will come out ahead in the future, even Terry O’Reilly says so.

Conclusion:

We’ve covered 3 interesting ideas that are currently shaping commercial design and architecture: the human need for connection, designing adaptable spaces and providing users with unparalleled experiences. In my opinion, they are all deeply related to organizational culture and a reflection of how businesses think about about and present themselves to the world. They all challenge our preconceived notions about design, but are also essential to achieve the highest caliber of design. In such an uber-competitive landscape, firms who want to attract and retain the best talent not only need a solid cultural foundation, but also work out of spaces that embody that culture.

Firms who do not pay heed to the latest development in corporate design are destined to remain second-rate players, because the smart ones will continue to work really hard at improving themselves in every area.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Truth is Golden - 301 | In Praise Of Craft w/ Fraser Greenberg

Fraser Greenberg and I spoke at length about his Toronto upbringing, how he stumbled into family business and transformed it to thrive an ever-changing market as well as his latest endeavour, the coffee shop Milky’s in Toronto’s West End. What struck me about Fraser is the consistency with which he bring passion, purpose and an amazing sense of craft to everything he touches. A fascinating guest with great ideas, check out Fraser’s interview to learn more about him.

Hello, World!

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:

Post-Production: Ryan Aktari

Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.

Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret

Ténor Sax : Toine Thys

Drums : Gautier Garrigue

Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :

https://weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/small-streams-big-rivers

More info and music here :

http://www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic

http://www.matthieumarthouret.com

https://www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/

The Truth On Architectural Imagery

Reading time ~10 minutes

Introduction:

The latest developments of evolutionary psychology teach us that our sensory perception of reality is not the window into the truth that we’ve assumed it was for a long time. Rather, it’s more like a metaphorical desktop on a computer, where the reality of the computing power if hidden behind symbolic representations of reality (e.g. the file folders on a virtual desktop). That helps us accomplish our tasks without being burdened by the minutiae of the computer’s inner workings, which would never allow me to easily and effortlessly write this piece as I was able to do, if I had to literally try and understand how everything works in a computer, down to micron-sized transistors.

What that means in concrete terms, is that evolutionary psych. tells us that we don’t see the world as it really but rather that we interpret it, these interpretations being a reflection of our evolutionary fitness. I.e., we have evolved interpretations of reality that allowed us to survive and thrive.

By the same token, since there is no such thing as an accurate perception of reality, the same goes for how we create visual media that represent the world around us. I would go as far as saying - in the example of a photograph or video of a space - that the very act of creating and designing an image of a space or building is in itself an interpretation of the object itself, influenced by the mind creating it. Not to mention the fact that we lose the 3rd and 4th dimensions (the 4th being time) and reduce the representation of the space to a 2-dimensional plane. Therefore, there can be no accurate representations of the physical space, as it’s always going to be incomplete, due to the missing dimensions.

As we just demonstrated that we cannot by design, perceive - and therefore  - represent the world around us in a truthful manner, we cannot expect an imperfect representation, or rather approximation of reality to be truthful. Not to mention that visual media in architecture is further removed from reality due to the subjective interpretation of the creative mind crafting the media, reality and truth is a myth that can never be reached.

Now that this is out of the way, what does it mean with regards to the truth and narrative in architectural media? Well, I’m glad you asked and we can proceed to answer to this question from two different perspectives, each considering a discrete aspect of the architectural documentation process.

The commercial aspect:

Architects are professional service providers and as such, have to be able to show their work in its best light, in order to convince prospects to hire them. To do that, a portfolio of images is a critical tool in the sales process. Much like any other kind of commercial photography, one can make a case that doctoring images in order to rid the iconography of the things that don’t convey the vision of the architect is fair game, and that’s the opinion of one of my peers. If you look at food or automotive photography, these guys routinely cheat in order to get images that represent the ideal of the product they’re selling and not the product itself, as you and I would experience it.

Even though what other industries are doing can be pretty dramatic in term of how far they’re willing to go to make a product look better than it actually is, nobody is ever accusing them of lying or being dishonest. That’s because if you go buy that burger or that car as a result of seeing an idealized version of it in an ad, you will still get the same thing, it just won’t look as good in the physical world, but it’ll still taste the same or perform as promised.

The same can be said of architecture and in this context, I think it’s OK for architects to fairly dramatically alter images if the end result is not quite what the original intent was. For example, I have more than once digitally “stained” wood finishes on a building’s exterior that was initially supposed to be a very dark stained finish, but had never been finished and was therefore showing up as a much lighter tone of wood than the architect intended. In that context, I personally have no qualms making such a change.

We also routinely remove electrical outlets, smoke alarms and exit signs that are both unsightly and create visual clutter. What we end up with is a clean, more focused imagery that better conveys the sense of space in my opinion, which in turn serves the commercial intent of these images.

All those changes do not fundamentally alter the physical experience of the space and do not speak to its performance. Again, let’s keep in mind that we are talking about 2 dimensional interpretations of a space the we experience in 4 dimensions and that there is no substitute for an in-person experience. In that sense, any image, doctored or not, is always going to be a somewhat deceitful representation of the space.

The ethical aspect:

Now, from an ethical perspective, one could convincingly argue that doctoring images is dishonest and does not represent the project as it is. Ignoring for a moment that a photograph (or a movie) is an incomplete representation of the physical space because it lacks 1 or 2 dimensions, an argument can be made that architectural media should take on a more documentary-like approach to the craft.

Supposing that this is feasible and realistic, I think it’s a weak argument because even a documentary medium -especially film- tells a story that is a representation of the author’s thoughts and opinions. While the media may not be altered per se, it’s the narrative that expresses an inherently biased opinion. And I think that’s the crux of the issue, that short of directly experiencing a space or a building, any other form of representation, doctored or not represents the artists’ biased view through a narrative. It is therefore very difficult to say that a photograph (or movie) is a truthful representation of reality

A few years ago, and incident with the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) made the news when it was revealed that an award winning building image set had been doctored, where unsightly (and very visible) air handling units on the roof of the building were removed in post production at the behest of the architect. In the article quoted above, Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s architectural critic described the oversight as follows:

“So the honor award puzzled me. How could a jury of respected architects from out of town have missed this glaring misstep? Easily, it turned out.

Unlike the AIA's national awards, which require that at least one juror visit a short-listed building, or the Pritzker Architecture Prize, whose jury travels extensively, jurors for the Chicago AIA honors typically don't inspect buildings firsthand. There simply isn't the time or money. The jury meets for just one day. In the distinguished building category, there are scores of entries (134 this year), and they consist of projects from all over the world. So according to people who administer the contest, the jurors consider required materials (design statements and photographs) as well as floor and site plans, which are optional.”

To me, the issue is only partially the responsibility of the architect and/or the photographer. In this case, it’s clearly the jury process itself that created conditions for a doctored image set to allow for Juan Moreno’s building to win an award.

The AIA has since issued new rules for their award submissions regarding retouched images, although I couldn’t find these rules in my research. I think it’s great change, because when it comes to awards, we step outside of the realm of strictly commercial photography and that we can and should reasonably expect images to not be purposely deceiving. It can easily be speculated that the building wouldn’t have won the award, had the images not be photoshopped. Since awards don’t have as much of a commercial component (although some privately-owned award competitions are huge money makers for the organizers, but that’s a debate for another article) and are supposed to be an objective assessment of the entries and determine the winners based on the merit of the work, there should be an expectation that images not be modified and in my opinion, it falls on the organizers to demand more truthful imagery.

Similarly, publications reporting on architecture, have a moral duty to ensure that the projects they publish are not overtly deceiving as it erodes the reputation of both the magazines and the designers, especially when it comes to publicly accessible architecture that can be experienced by the general public. It would be very damaging for a magazine to talk up an innovative building only to find out that half the innovations are being impeded by some unsightly design element.

Conclusion:

I don’t believe that the conclusions we can draw from this topic are either black or white. Ultimately, each player in the process, be they photographers, architects, publications, award organizers or critics have a duty to ensure that they’re not purposely deceiving their public.

I think the amount of doctoring that should be tolerated should fall on a spectrum from heavily retouched, to very slightly retouched and that were the imagery falls on the spectrum is dependent of what one is comfortable with and what is appropriate for the intended usage of the images.

Some architects and photographers will have specific opinion in favour for the more honest side of the spectrum while others will unabashedly put out images that have less to do with reality and more with the commercial aspect of their practice. Azure published a very well thought-out article on the topic last year and their conclusion was thoughtful and fairly accurate representation of the variety of opinions that are out there.

I personally do a fair amount of retouching but I do draw the line at doing work that would alter the architecture and represent the space in a way that could never happen in reality. Outlets, exits signs and smoke alarms are all fair game and so are blemishes on a wall, reflections in glass, etc. I am also a little more liberal for residential work as the issues we fix are often a matter of the construction process not being faithful to the original vision or the client making changes without the architect’s knowledge.

I would generally say that restraint and common sense are ultimately our best allies. I’m a big fan of trusting my gut when it comes to making decisions that aren’t easy and the science backs me up on this.

I think the biggest takeaway from this discussion is that we ought to be very conscious of the impact the decisions we make will have down the road and act accordingly within the boundaries of what each of us is comfortable with. The rest is just noise.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

Truth Is Golden ep. 210 - Stepping On The Soapbox w/ Toon Dreessen

I had a fascinating conversation with Toon Dreessen, principal at Architects DCA in Ottawa and past president of the Ontario Association of Architects. During our conversation, Toon spoke about his upbringing in the Netherlands, his early life and how that influenced his very early decision to become an architect around age 10, a decision he does not regret to this day. Toon spoke about his love of travel, cooking and his unstoppable drive to change architecture's perception in the public's consciousness.

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

The 15 deadly sins of architecture firms' websites

By Arnaud Marthouret ~ 25 min read (perfect for the holidays and better than arguing with aunt Shirley drunk on Eggnog!)

Photo by ahmed adly

My dear readers, I like you and deeply care about your sanity. So much so that I am willing to subject myself to mind-numbing experiments on your behalf. I recently inflicted my own self an agonizing, lengthy ordeal in order to help you build better websites and more generally, communications (anyone knows a good therapist?).

I perused dozens of architectural firms websites, picked at random, based on my own personal knowledge of the field. I did so in order to see if I could distill some trends out of my empirical observations and pinpoint to common mistakes architecture firms make when presenting themselves and their work on the web.

Do keep in mind that this is by no means a data-driven, factual research report, but more of a subjective sweep of what’s out there, coated with a thick layer of opinionated commentary. Feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt. You are of course welcome to vehemently disagree, but I hope this will at least help you think of your work and how you talk about it in different terms.

This non-scientific study parameters:

The websites were picked at random, based on my personal preferences, from tiny, local firms that I know personally, to Starchitects’ websites. All have in common that they do good, intelligent and thoughtful work in their own way and that I have a lot of respect for each of those firms’ body of work. Their websites? That’s another story.

In order to protect the innocent, I am also intentionally keeping these firms anonymous, because the point of this exercise isn’t to point fingers. Instead, I will pick among them, detailed and specific examples of naughty behaviours, that in my opinion set them back when it comes to promoting themselves and attracting new clients into their world.

Onto the sins:

1. The “I’m too cool for school” vibe

Some of the larger firms I surveyed, amongst which are a couple of starchitects, go into lengthy, obscure and frankly, boring descriptions of their philosophy and work, in a language that is at best obfuscating and at worst, purposely misleading. I don’t personally believe that one can have a clearly defined vision when employing such unclear language. Here’s a telling example, including all oxymorons, grammatical errors, clumsy metaphors and ivory tower naïveté:

ACME’s* architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical [sic] flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. We believe that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored. A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Like a form of programmatic alchemy we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit contemporary life forms.

The fix: write in a style that your 3rd grade nephew or 90 year-old can understand instantly. If they don’t understand, nobody will bother reading through the whole write-up.

2. The gamified website (a variation of #1)

Looks like a 1980’s Atari video game, with tiny buttons, no hierarchy and a very confusing navigation. If a website is meant to convey information efficiently and quickly, this type of website is purposely designed to achieve the opposite. As a strategy to make people work for satisfying their need for information, it works. As a way to get people to engage with your firm, work and ideas, it’s an epic fail.

The fix: clear, understated and well organized information in the form of an easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing website, beats cute and clever any day. Additionally, cute and clever doesn’t work well with the idea of a professional services firms. There are other, more subtle ways to show originality and quirkiness that don’t scream “I’m a four-year old trapped in a 50-year old body”.

3. The poorly translated website

On this kind of website, in the case of firms whose first language is not English, one will find major spelling mistakes and grammatical errors worthy of a 6th grader in his first year of learning english (refer to #1 for a example of this subtly rife with weird english). Not a good way to make a great first impression on a potential client, especially if your firm’s goal is to produce high-end architecture. A timeless example of this is one firm listing their hard-earned “prizes” under the header “prices”. Priceless. Pun intended.

The fix: hire a professional translator and then have a native-speaking copywriter rewrite your website’s copy in the desired language, ensuring that they keep the spirit of your ideas alive.

4. The website so bad that you leave without looking at it

One can tell that it probably started 10-15 years ago as a half-decent website, but a lifetime of poorly managed updates done internally by some intern who learned to code on the fly and an outdated layout make for a terrible experience. If the bounce rate is really high (say higher than 80% - if you don’t know what that means, time to hire a web guy) and the average session duration is under a minute, then that’s a pretty reliable indication that most people are being turned off by your homepage, let alone any other page on your website.

The fix: invest in a new, up-to-date and well-designed website. Never hire the cheapest guy and make sure that your web guy is equally comfortable with the technical aspects of building a website, as he is with the design and creative side. If you don’t have the budget, sign-up for a template website service like Squarespace or Format and use one of their beautiful, ready-to-use templates. There is no excuse for a 2007-looking website.

5. The endless list of prizes and awards

This one is tricky, because awards and prizes most definitely contribute to the reputation of your firm and are a great way to validate your work via third-party endorsements. But, most people don’t care about the awards you’ve earned as they tell your prospects nothing about your ability to solve their problems. It’s OK to mention them as a form of positive-reinforcement of your expertise, after you’ve told people who you are, what you do and who you do it for. I believe it is misguided to use an awards list as a opening salvo.

The fix: put them somewhere inconspicuous and only as a way to reinforce your expertise and use it as a third-party endorsement. Be subtle about it and ensure that you don’t come off as bragging or overly egotistical.

6. The publication whore

Similarly to #5 above, nobody really cares about how many publications you’ve been in. Don’t get me wrong, being published should be a critical part of your communication strategy and you should actively try to get published, but a list of publications does not communicate to your clients how you’re going to help them assuage their fears and reach their goals. Use them as a third-party recommendation for your clients, in a way that helps them validate their decision, but it should never be a sales argument as being published has no bearing on your ability to deliver for your clients. It merely indicates that you have good relationships with publications or a really good publicist.

The fix: Keep a running list list of publications on your website if you wish to, but do not put it front and center and do not use it as a way to sell your expertise, or you’ll be selling the wrong expertise (unless you are a PR firm). I would go as far as saying that you should only keep a list of publications internally (that’s very important) and perhaps occasionally promote the really important ones, especially if they help in demonstrating your expertise. I’d bet my lunch that no client will ever ask you to produce such a list.

7. The generic “about us” and other self-descriptive statements

This one speaks for itself, as the majority of architects describe themselves in a similar language. While said statements may not be inherently bad, it’s the fact that virtually every firm uses the same verbiage that’s a problem. Your prospects end up being confused as to what you do differently from the next guy and end up comparing you with other architects solely on price as they have no other significant metric to separate you from the rest in a sea of similar-sounding firms.

My friend Nikita Morell recently talked about this, expressing disappointment at a firm claiming they had “an appetite for design”. You’re a professional, I sure hope that you have an appetite for design. Would you buy a car from a dealer just because he says he “loves cars”? I hope he does!

The challenge with this is that it requires more than just revised copy, it is often also an indication that the culture of the firm is a “by-default” one and that the founders never took the time to really challenge themselves to think of their work in ways that makes them unique. While possible, it is incredibly challenging to take an established firm and change its culture after years of operation. The situation is not hopeless but it requires a lot of courage in order to re-position the firm in way that makes it one of the top players in a narrow niche. See mistake #1 for a corollary to this one.

Below are some real-life examples:

“ACME* Architects is a world-renowned design firm with a multicultural team of 140 people from more than twenty countries. ACME* combines the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, interior design, landscape design, graphic design, and product design into a single integrated practice. ACME’s* award winning designs and reputation have attracted many prestigious commissions.”

Translation: There is nothing about us that makes us unique and our expertise is very broad, yet shallow. We are just like about every other firm of our expertise and size and we use wordy, yet meaningless language to make it look like we don’t.

“We use contextual and confident design to add value to the communities and clients we work with. We are committed to finding the right solution for each project, responding to a scheme's physical and cultural contexts as well as the aspirations of our clients.”

Translation: We do the work that every architect is trained for and expected to do, but we’re using flowery language to pretend we’re different.

“ACME* Architects is an award-winning architectural practice. Our focus is creating thoughtful, well-crafted environments that articulate a clear idea and a heightened sense of place. We believe collaboration is essential to the making of a successful project. We respect and engage a process that is organic and iterative, governed by the principle that every client and site is unique. We strive to create inventive, beautiful spaces that are available to everyone and for any budget.”

Translation: We’re very expensive and do beautiful, highly customized  work, but we are trying to convince you that we can work with your no-budget project. Also see #5.

“We passionately believe that inventive, beautiful form should be available to everyone, at any budget. Our designs aim to reflect contemporary lifestyles, values, and our collective imagination. As part of our design process we pursue concepts that are explored and expanded project after project, to suit individual client needs, particular site conditions, densities, etc. It is in the idiosyncrasies of each design solution that the project comes to life.”

Translation: We’re dreamers and even though we’d very much like to be affordable to the masses, our very design process itself puts us out of mere mortals’ reach. If you hire us, we guarantee you an emotional roller-coaster of a project.

It is important to note again that I am not criticizing the body of work of these architects, but merely critiquing the way they talk about it. My interpretation of the above statements, does not imply that this is how they work, as I have no first hand knowledge of their work process. Rather, it just gives examples of the types of reactions, or subconscious interpretations, some of their prospects may have when reading their verbiage. While I write this with my tongue firmly in cheek and tend to exaggerate a little bit in order to make a point, I truly believe that there is a lot of room for improvement.

The mistaken belief that architects can be all things to all people is the underlying philosophy behind these confusing statements. However, facts tell a different story as the most successful architecture firms in the last hundred or so years, are those that have embraced a very clear positioning in the marketplace and ruthlessly adhered to it over the years. My friend Dave Sharp recently wrote an article about this on our blog.

(In the very slim off-chance that you’re from one of the firms I quoted above, I have genuine respect for your work, please don’t take this personally. I would be delighted to have a conversation with you on how to improve your communications).

The fix: Be bold and original. If your office description uses similar language to 10 other randomly-picked architects’ websites, you’re not being bold enough.

8. The freely accessible assets and intellectual property

You work hard to produce content that is of value to your clients. PDF portfolios, white papers, articles, lectures and seminars are valuable to your clients and are a tremendous way to establish your expertise in your area. Why would you give it away for free? Behind any of these pieces is an opportunity to connect with new and exciting prospects. I’m not necessarily advocating to ask people to pay for it, although you’re certainly encouraged to experiment with that. But the law of reciprocity (a classic sales tactic rooted in psychology) says that if you give away something of value for free, you can reasonably be expected to get something in return, in this case, the contact information of the people who access your assets.

It is a tremendous way to capture new prospects in your lead pipeline and it would be a wasted opportunity to not engage with people that have already expressed an interest in what you do and let your competitors sweep them away from you.

The fix: Decide which of your assets are freely accessible and which you want to put behind a sign-up wall or even a pay wall. At revelateur, all our articles and podcasts are completely free and publicly accessible. Other valuable resources, however, are behind a sign-up wall (talks, videos, webinars, etc…) so that we can connect with people who interact with our resources and explore the possibility of them being a potential suitable client.

9. The sub-par photography

Many websites have either a portfolio of terrible images or a mix of good and bad photography, which in either case isn’t good. I completely understand that you may not be able to afford a $5000/day photographer who will take pictures worthy of Architectural Record. However, many cost-effective tricks can be employed to make you look better quasi-instantly for a very reasonable cost. Bad imagery is the first thing people will look at and without that, your website will look cheap, no matter how good your projects may be.

The fixes:

• Remove older projects from your portfolio as you complete new ones and have better pictures for the newer ones

  • Cost: absolutely free.

• Get your old images professionally retouched. You can get very decent images out of it for a fraction of the cost of re-shooting. However, the best of retouchers cannot perform miracles, so don’t expect one, but some exposure, color and perspective adjustments can turn a dud into a half-decent image.

  • Cost: ~$50-$200 per image, free if you’re lucky to have a photoshop-savvy intern.

  • Pro-tip: hire a co-op student from a local photography school and have them spend a semester on your existing imagery.

• Define guidelines for your photography: what to shoot, how to shoot it, what to convey, how to stage it and how to put people in your images. Then send your photography-savvy intern to shoot them (don’t be cheap and rent a proper camera and lenses for the day for better results). Then repeat #2.

  • Cost: gear rental ($200-$300/day) and your intern’s time.

• Find newly established photographers who are hungry for portfolio pieces and will work for nearly free. There are people constantly popping up on the market who will work for a fraction of the cost of established photographers and will produce very decent images. Established photographers always like to bitch and moan about these, but we’ve all started that way, yes myself included. And also yes, I’m giving you a free pass to go cheap, but do keep in mind that you get what you pay for. If you’re lucky to find a unicorn who’s incredibly talented and cheap, take advantage of it as they will raise their rates as soon as they realize their worth. If they’re a decent shooter but not great at retouching, hiring a third-party retoucher will cost you a little more, but produce great images.

  • Cost: Cheap-ish, but you get what you pay for.

• Hire visual communication professionals who know what they’re doing and gradually replace your starter portfolio (or re-shoot it) and make sure you budget your photography accordingly. If you can afford it, you have no excuse for skimping on photography.

  • Pro-tip: You don’t need to shoot any and every project, so if photography is too expensive for your entire portfolio, shoot your very best projects and only promote these.

  • Cost: Variable.
    
    

10. The comprehensive, un-curated portfolio

A corollary to mistake #9, your portfolio should be a combination of your best projects as well as projects that are representative of the kind of work you want to do more of. Anything else is a waste of time and space, especially if the photography is sub-par and indicates that you cannot decide what your firm is about, which is a very confusing message to send to your prospects.

The fix: Decide the kind of positioning you want for your business (what you do and who you do it for) and ruthlessly cull the projects from your portfolio that do not support that vision. Remove any emotional attachment, or better yet, have someone else make the decisions so that your portfolio can objectively and clearly reflect your positioning.

11. The unrelated endeavours

You may do very interesting things outside of your professional life, like painting, jewelry or furniture design. While it is very relevant to talk about these casually in order to show your prospects that you’re an interesting person and have a life outside of architecture (people like to find common interests, it makes you relatable), presenting them as an offshoot of your professional occupation and making them as much a part of your portfolio as the rest of your professional work is a critical mistake. They are unrelated and irrelevant to your clients, which sends a confusing message and could work against you. Tesla’s website does not expound on Space X’s accomplishments and vice versa, yet we all know that Elon Musk is the brains behind both endeavours. They are both focused on their respective areas of expertise.

The fix: Don’t sell your jewelry line on your architecture website. Write about it all your want on your blog, speak openly about all your passions in interviews, but do not present it as an integral part of your professional activity. If you really want to link the two, put a discreet link and a few words about that side business in your “about us” page or mention it in your bio.

12. The manufactured culture

Conveying a culture is a really hard challenge as it is constantly straddling the thin line between trying too hard and representing oneself in a manufactured, insincere way. Everybody these days has a “Chief Happiness Officer” (a.k.a. office dog), a very, very tired gimmick if there is one. Put simply, having a dog in the office does not make your office cool or attractive, much less giving it a C-suite title, it just means that someone in the firm likes dogs. The same goes for bean bags, foosball tables and bottomless beer taps, these are nice thing to have, but it’s dangerous to conflate cool design features and furry friends with culture (disclaimer: I love dogs). Trying to convey a culture that doesn’t exist is a very transparent move and your potential clients will see through it very quickly.

Leave the stock images with endlessly happy people and a very bland, trying-too-hard-not-to-offend-anyone language to faceless, giant corporate conglomerates. They’re only fooling themselves into thinking that their corporate culture is anything but not what it’s portrayed to be, when it’s in reality just a top-down hierarchy of disposable people. Conversely, being too quirky is childish and will turn prospects off (see mistake #2).

How does one convey a unique culture without making your website look like the digital equivalent of a clown, with red nose and oversized shoes? Well, first of all, actions speak louder than words, so make sure that whatever you claim to be, will remain true when you’re put to the test. That applies to your offline behaviour as well. As for the website, it’s OK to demonstrate that through minor quirks, easter eggs or unique personality traits (save that for the staff bios), but it should never, ever come at the expense of a clear and concise navigation. Remember that your website is meant to vet and convert visitors into leads. Anytime a feature on your website distracts visitor from its main goal, you’ve eroded a little bit your ability to generate new business. By the way, if you still have a flash-based website in 2018 (yes, yes, I assure you they exist), you’re a terrible person.

Ultimately, there is no hard and fast rule for that one and a firm with a highly-developed and off-beat culture will inherently be able to get away with more quirkiness than a straight-shooting professional services firm. It really depends on how much you’re willing to push the boundaries and how well you know your audience. If you know your audience really well, it’s easier to push the boundaries to the limits.

The fix: There is really no simple solution for this one. It’s a mix of trial and error and depends greatly on how much of yourself you are willing to put out there, for everyone to see. The better you know yourself and your audience as well as having confidence in your culture, the more you’ll be able to put out there in a way that doesn’t look fake or disingenuous. Look around and see what people are doing to find inspiration or examples of what not to do.

A sidebar on the instagram culture: Instagram has transformed all of us in always-happy people living the high life and going through the day merrily hop-skipping on our way to the next meeting. Obvious satirical views of social media above aside, I believe there is a real danger in giving into this curated lifestyle display, as it disconnects us from the challenges of day-to-day reality. It doesn’t mean that we have to go around every day bitching and moaning about life, but it’s important to recognize that life is not always perfect and acknowledge our challenges and how we overcome them, it makes us more real and relatable. I’ve witnessed so many people online pretending to be something they’re not, and I speak from experience as I’ve unwittingly participated in this charade before. It’s now starting to pervade how architects present themselves online, with many of them presenting a highly curated content stream online. Knowing some of them on a personal level, I can guarantee that their day to day life is a far cry from this glamorous facade. Always keep that in mind and take what people say about themselves with a grain of salt.

13. The confusing navigation

A variation of #2 and #4, where the navigation is just not clear at first glance. Quirky names, menus buried into sub- and sub-sub- menus, confusing titles, as well as a lack of organizational and visual hierarchy are among the common culprits.

The human mind is wired in such a way that it looks for certain patterns when looking for information in an unfamiliar environment, be they visual, organizational or linguistic. A website with a navigation that goes against those patterns when presenting information will confuse your visitors and make them much more likely to leave the site sooner than later. Cute and quirky are likely to get in the way of your prospects finding what they need, so if you do, make sure that it doesn’t impede navigation.

The fix: Do a comprehensive audit of your current website to ensure that there are no major hurdles to people finding the information they need right away. Many web professionals know how to do this. If it can be tweaked, tweak it. If it can’t, time to consider a new website.

14. The buried opinion

All the most-compelling taglines and commentary are often buried deep in an architect’s website, if at all, as if they’re hoping that they won’t be read for fear of offending their audience. On the contrary, expressing strong opinions and ideas is a tremendous way to attract the right clients and repel the poor fits. I see too many architects - frankly, the vast majority - who will express strong opinions and views in private, but will cower at the idea to put those very thoughts out for the world to see and enjoy. Most firms, big and small, have incredibly milquetoast descriptions (see #7) of their practice and their approach to practicing architecture, that don’t convey anything but a desire to fit a cultural mold of architecture practice, as if they were saying “Look at me! I too, sound like the rest!” One does not grab attention by claiming to be like the rest, but by making bold moves and grand declarations that nobody else has had the balls to make before.

The fix: Put your thoughts front and center on your website and elsewhere, write a manifesto of what you believe in and do not hesitate to be polarizing. You can be wrong and misguided and will always be forgiven for that. Being bold and wrong is better than being tame and silent about your deepest convictions. One can always recover from a misguided opinion, but one cannot recover from a lifetime of not having the guts to express themselves. One caveat though, having a strong opinion is not a license to be an unadulterated asshole, so please do your best to never cross that line. Some people can get away with a lot more than others, as a function of their culture, so if you’re unsure whether you’ve crossed that line, ask a few friends what they think how your ideas are expressed

15. The unclear positioning

Unless people flock to your door and you are so in demand, that you can afford say no to 90% of the people who want to work with you and charge rates that allow you to generate a healthy profit, you cannot afford to not have a clear positioning that your prospects will understand right away. As explained in #7, a description of your firm and its work that sounds like the majority of other firms places your squarely in the commodity box. That’s where your clients take control of the relationship (something you would ideally never, ever relinquish) and start pulling all sort of nasty tricks. Because you’re now seen as commodity, they have a lot less respect for you and your work.

Conversely, if your - ideally narrow - area of expertise is crystal-clear, from the first time your clients and prospects hear about you and you work hard at maintaining that perception throughout the sales process, then you’ll have a much easier time charging commensurately with the value of your expertise and quality of service, without worrying about scaring people away (that will still happen, but that’s a good thing).

The fix: Make it very, very clear (on your homepage) what you do, who you do it for and how you do it. Spend time whittling down your expertise to a very narrow and deep niche and resist the temptation to try and being all things to all people. Think of your homepage as a billboard, something that can grab people’s attention and a few seconds and will want to make them spend more time on other parts of your website. Bonus points if you can lead your prospects to case studies, in the format brief > problem > solution, that demonstrate said expertise once they’ve landed on your website.

Conclusion

If you made it through this entire marathon of an article, I personally want to thank and praise you. I am well aware that it’s a big commitment to spend 25 or so minutes reading a piece such as this one. However, I like to think that it’s more valuable than 25 minutes wasted on Instagram, or worse, Facebook, don’t you agree?

We’ve covered a lot of ground and there are many more mistakes out there but these were a compilation of the most egregious and/or common ones. If the article has gotten you to think about your website and communications in a new way, then I have reached my goal.

For each of these examples, there is a lot more thinking behind the reasons why I think they are mistakes, some of them are pretty established and widely accepted marketing and communication principles, others are less obvious and would require further writing.

If you have questions about this piece, you are invited to give me a shout here. I’d love nothing more than an engaging conversation on any of these topics!

*ACME, an obviously fictitious name to protect the innocent.

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.

The moral obligation of a designer

By Arnaud Marthouret, ~5 min reading time.

Image courtesy of @kaboompics

Let’s get a little personal, shall we?

Years ago, I attended a world-famous design school, which shall remain nameless, that had just completed a brand-new shiny building the year before I enrolled. Said building was designed by a Tier-B starchitect. Not someone of the caliber of a Frank, Renzo or Zaha, but rather the architecture equivalent of a minor TV celebrity. Well known in the design world, but a virtual stranger to non-architects.

This architect was notorious for designing buildings which were colorful, playful and whimsical, but also equally painful to inhabit. From difficulty to maintain, to poor construction, without forgetting being highly uncomfortable to their occupants. At the time, this new design school building was the talk of the town and the reason I even knew the school existed in the first place. It was an exciting time to be part of a cohort of students who were pegged as a pioneering class in a visionary school. This new shiny building that I was to spend two years of my life in, alas, was no different from the architect’s previous designs, as my experience would later demonstrate.

It turned out that all the hype about the building was just that. The visionary culture the school seemingly demonstrated, was but a thin layer of shiny but fragile varnish, much like its flagship building was but a vacuous shell, colourful and playful on the outside, with nothing of substance to show for inside. The designers had spent so much time, effort and money into making the building look unique and radical, that they had completely forgotten some of the most important stakeholders in the process: the users, who were living in the building day in and day out, burning the midnight oil on a regular basis. We had to put up with suffocating, generic spaces, poorly lit and even more poorly climate controlled, too hot, too cold, too bright, too dark. It was never to be comfortable.

Up to code or up to snuff?

Needless to say that the building was up to code, but like many, many other buildings before it, it turns out that up to code is hardly a gauge of quality when it comes to the way we, little humans, inhabit space. It begs the question: what is the responsibility of the designer in those matters?

It is understood that when it comes to executing something as big and complex as a building, there are many moving parts to oversee and that some of it is bound to fall outside of the designer’s responsibility. Contractors, consultants and sub-trades all have a part of responsibility in the ultimate success of a building. However, when a building turns out to be a monumental pain in the ass, for reasons which can be traced back to the way it is designed, then the moral responsibility of the building’s failure to perform falls squarely on the designer.

This is where, we have the moral obligation to take ownership of the work we do. Mike Monteiro wrote about it when speaking about visual designers. I believe designers of buildings have the same responsibility. The responsibility of ensuring that what is being built is not only going to stand up for a long time, but is going to have a positive impact on its occupants. We now have a pretty good grasp of what constitute good, healthy environments for their occupants. Natural light, colours, acoustics, temperature, social interactions, access, vegetation, air quality, textures, materials, etc., all play a part in the way we perceive and gauge the quality of an environment. The science behind each and every one of these factors is by now well established. How is it that buildings that cannot accommodate their occupants in ways that are if not positive, at the very least neutral, are still being built?

Less Facebook, more Bruce Campbell.

Facebook has a history of causing damage to some of their users, because they fall between the cracks and are considered statistical outliers. These statistical outliers are people and what facebook does to them affect their lives. The same goes for architecture. There are examples of places where certain categories of users are completely forgotten and left to deal with spaces that make their life and work miserable.

This is not to say that there aren’t good buildings out there, because there most definitely are. But, I believe the tendency to cut corners because budgets are low and clients want their project completed yesterday. I get it, we’re often squeezed between a rock and a hard place and it’s quite stressful. However, there is hope.

By taking ownership of the value of your work and start pushing clients back when they insist on cutting corners and doing short-sighted or even indubitably dumb things, there is an opportunity to build an expertise in a particular niche where you can over time, become comfortable with defending your ideas and expertise, which in turn will be more valuable because now you stand for something and can demonstrate the value of your thinking tangibly. While it may turn some people off, it will also attract people that are aligned with your values and willing to pay a premium for your services.

Deep expertise in one area comes at the expense of unfit clients, a good thing to thrive for in my opinion. Not unlike a good horror b-movie, it’s not for everyone but those who like it are usually very engaged fans.

Strive to be the Bruce Campbell of architecture.

Further reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/oct/14/communities.arts

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/jul/21/architecture

Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.

If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.