The Work You Lose Money On
Why the civic, affordable, and community work that architects care about most is structurally unprofitable — and how to keep doing it without quietly subsidizing it out of your own margin.
First Principals
First Principals: business education the architecture and interior design industry never built for itself. Weekly essays on pricing, positioning, AI, and succession — written for principals running firms in 2026, not 1992.
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Nobody Is Funding Your Firm
Every other creative, high-value industry built financing structures to back its talent — venture capital, studios, patrons. Architecture never did.
The Best Design Rarely Wins
Why the architect who can shape a building but not a sentence loses to lesser work — and how the ability to make people see what you see is a craft, not a gift.
It Was Never Just About the Drawings
AI is not one more production tool to absorb like CAD and BIM before it. It is a general-purpose technology that rewires how value is created
You Already Know and You Still Won’t
Why the firm agrees with every diagnosis, resolves to change, and then does exactly what it did last year — and how to build the systems that make the change actually happen.
The Craft Guild in a World of Corporations
Industries made the leap from master-craftsman practice to managed enterprise — and captured enormous value in the transition. Architecture is one of the last holdouts, still running like workshops.
The Firm That Owns Nothing.
Why architecture keeps rebuilding the same intelligence for free — and how the firms that will win the next decade are turning knowledge into an asset that compounds.
You Are Negotiating Against Yourself
Why the architecture firm hands away its leverage before the meeting starts — and how to walk in with the one thing that actually moves a consolidated, sophisticated buyer.
The Apprenticeship Ladder Just Collapsed.
Why the industry's traditional way of turning young designers into senior ones is dead — and what the firms that build the next generation of talent will do instead.
This Is Not About Architects
The commercial recovery of the profession and the ethical recovery of the profession are the same project.
Your Portfolio Is Not a Positioning Strategy
Why the industry markets itself with the same tools it used in 1955 — and what a firm that actually narrates its value does instead.