Growth, Efficiency and Profitability: Insights from Architecture and Engineering Leaders

Architecture and engineering (A&E) firms face uncertain times. New client expectations, a changing technology landscape and continued socioeconomic disruption mean it's vital for firms to focus on growing sustainably and maintaining their competitive edge.

To learn more about how firms are tackling their challenges, we sat down with three industry leaders to hear about their experiences staying competitive, achieving growth, delivering operational excellence and ensuring financial resilience.

You can watch the full webinar here or read on for a summary of the key takeaways.

How Do You Stay Competitive in a Changing World?

With only so much work to go around, A&E leaders are concerned about maintaining a competitive advantage.

For our expert panel, the discussion quickly centred on technology and its vital role in helping teams work faster and smarter.

Ben Goode, CEO at LSI Architects, was the first to discuss the vital role of technology and the need to ensure its well-adopted across the business. "The adoption of technology is definitely cultural," Ben explains. “When we rolled out Deltek, we broke it down into little bite-sized chunks. So, every couple of weeks, people were getting something new."

The strategy has clearly worked for LSI Architects, as it delivered the first fully enabled 3D BIM project worth over £10M.

Technology is, of course, important. But what you do with it can have just as much impact on how competitive your firm is. Professor Sadie Morgan OBE, Founding Director at dRMM Architects, one of the first architects to use cross-laminated lumber, explains: "We developed our own sustainability tool so that we can actually work out our carbon consumption on various buildings. We see it as a really important part of our business, and we see it as a very important part of winning projects and having credibility, thinking about the climate crisis and being part of the solution."

Growth Starts with Talent Management

Growth is a key concern for all A&E firms. For some, the worry is how to grow in the first place. For others, it's how to maintain growth once they've achieved it.

For Mick Cairns, CEO at Black & White Engineering, meaningful growth meant tackling talent acquisition, retention and culture: "Our focus from the beginning is always to attract the best talent. And for me, if you attract the best talent, the big challenge is to retain it. Out of our 600 people, we all have a common goal: a one-team culture. A common goal basis has enabled us to grow very, very quickly. We also have a recognition system that focuses on staff retention. It gives confidence to the client that if an engineer starts a project, they'll be there at the end."

Sadie adds that team composition is also essential to growth: "It's really important to make sure that you have people who work well together and who aren't all the same. So, I would say diversity is absolutely key. People should feel that they're part of a bigger team, especially now, with lots of people working from home."

From an architect's perspective, Ben sees growth in a different light: "We've actually controlled our growth to make sure that it's sub-10%. We found our quality and culture starts to get affected quite badly when we grow too quickly. With that in mind, Ben's firm has focused on a different approach. "We try to grow our own," he explains. "We have some of the highest training hours per person in the Architect's Journal 100 Index (AJ100) – about 90 hours per person, which is about 4.5% of their total time. We also have amongst the lowest staff turnover in the AJ100."

The Many Paths to Operational Excellence

Technology, talent and innovation have a significant impact on each firm's performance. But often, committing to rock-solid operations can be the path to success.

While it may be tempting to hyper-focus on utilisation figures across your firm, Mick cautions against this. "I'm not ensuring everyone's a hundred percent utilised, but I'm making sure everybody's doing things that they're efficient at. People get more efficient when they enjoy doing the task. So, we're making sure people are enjoying what they're doing."

dRMM Architects takes a similar stance on operational excellence, with Sadie and her team focusing on overall well-being. "I always go back to this importance of making sure that your team is happy and that they have the time and space—and the support—to be productive."

Ben agrees but is clear on how LSI Architects takes a different path to well-being and productivity: "Connection's the first path to well-being, so our default position is that everybody's in the office all the time, as that's how people learn from each other."

Ben has plenty of other suggestions for delivering a holistic approach to process improvement: "It’s important to have a clear purpose, clear values, clear business objectives and good information systems and production technology. There's a touch of accountability in there as well. For those of you that go to gym classes, you might do that extra press-up if you know somebody's keeping their eye on you."

Fight Uncertainty with Financial Resilience

Because of the importance of growth, efficiency and staying competitive, no firm can last long without strong profitability.

However, profit must be balanced with other key factors. That's especially true for firms like LSI Architects that hold B Corp status, or other accreditations that celebrate a firm’s commitment to social and environmental impact. "We understand the importance of getting the balance right between people, planet and profit," says Ben. But without profit, we can't invest in our business. We make sure everyone understands how their role contributes, and we communicate the profitability of projects to all teams."

dRMM Architects goes even further, collaborating with other firms to reduce the impact of market uncertainty. "We share intelligence, we share salary bands, and we make sure those practices are similar in size and ethos," explains Sadie. "We had a busy period six months ago. And that coincided with one of our co-practices having a quiet period. We took four of their staff for a six-month period, and it was absolutely fantastic. Not only did we have four new wonderful people, but we were able to share experiences."

Different Strategies for Different Firms

Our panellists have all found success with different strategies and approaches to growth, profitability and operational efficiency. But we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible and of how these A&E leaders have steered their firms to continued success.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about Ben, Sadie and Mick's critical strategies for A&E firms.