The 3-year guideline for architect-entrepreneurs, or why you shouldn’t quit your job just yet

Andrei Vasilief
Nov 6 · 9 min read
Photo by Garreth Sampson on Unsplash

You made it! After the long and arduous all-nighters to take your bachelor's degree, the stress riddled internships, the long and arduous master’s studies and the PTSD-inducing jobs after graduation, you’ve finally done it! You passed all the exams and are now a fully licensed architect, ready to change the world and build wonders unseen and untold! And just like Robbie Williams, you know you can do better, so you decide to ditch Take That and go solo! ’Cause deep down, you know you’re better than Barlow and the rest! The part about that story that might interest you more is the fact that Robbie was high like a kite when he made that decision.

Architects dream of this, opening their own firm, being the next Tadao Ando or Frank Lloyd Wright, in the same way crusaders thought about reaching the Holy Land and it’s not difficult to see why. In school, you learn about the architect, not teams or groups. Architecture is portrayed as an individualistic (sometimes called ‘’sacrificial’’) struggle in which a Creator gives the (perceived ‘’philistine’’) public the benefit of his art and skills. You’re not taught about the engineers that make sure that bonkers insanity some lunatic designer came up with is actually standing. You’re not taught about the armies of slaves (Sorry, what did you say? Oh, we call them unpaid interns now? Ok, got it), sorry the armies of unpaid interns, that help them realize the documents to get it built. You’re not taught about the permits, other professionals, urban code, etc that go into making a building.

So you leave after 6 years of stress-and-terror-inducing courses and go into the profession, where to find you are sitting in front of a PC for 10 hours-a-day moving bathroom stalls in AutoCAD and getting paid slightly above minimum wage. And if you’re wondering, no, I didn’t move bathrooms around, I folded paper sheets for about 8 months of my first job. In Romania, all sheets above A4 (A3, A2, A1 and A0) have to be folded to A4 size. So I would take the .dwg file from the architects, make the layout, print everything, fold it and make the dossiers for various permits. And this was what I did all day, every day, for 8 mother-forking months (until the office bought a machine that folds papers and automated me out of the job, when I finally got to design anything). So you cling to the hope of going solo and designing high-end homes while lounging on the beach of some fiscal paradise island in the middle of the ocean. And while that is a good goal to have, the transition to it is a bit more tricky than going into work one day, flipping the bird at your boss and walking out. This is the part where you might be thinking that I am going to preach that you ‘’get real and take some responsibility, you’re an adult’’, but no, this isn’t what I am talking about. This is about how the market works today.

Artistic rendition of how I felt during my first job | Still from Pink Floyd’s ‘’The Wall’’

The advent of BIM has shortened the design phase of a project considerably. If you work in Archicad or Revit or any other BIM-solution (such as Allplan or Digital Project; and you really should work in BIM by now) then you can kinda do in weeks, what would have taken months. If you keep working and getting better with the software, that time frame becomes even shorter. Dabble a bit in Grasshopper and Dynamo and you shorten it even a bit more. But the permit phase is either just as long as it used to be or longer. This might be a more euro-centric point of view, but based on where you live and the complexity of the project, it could take anywhere from a few months to a few years, to obtain all the permits you need to build. And as an architect, your cashflow is linked to the construction process. Sure, you can just design and not get involved in construction, but the demand for that is shrinking.

There is also the management of projects, but tools are advancing there as well. For example, in the past you might have had to meet with a client to present a proposal, which would have taken anywhere from 1 to 5 hours, with the whole ‘’How have you been?’’ and ‘’Would you like some coffee’’ small talk. But now, just send the model to the client via something like the BimX app, or the renders through Whatsapp, or the contract and other paperwork through GSuite and you are done. The client can look through everything and analyze at a comfortable pace and then set up a call. And for those rare occasions when you need to meet face to face, you don’t need a dedicated office. Most of the time a Starbucks will do, or if you want to be fancy, rent a meeting room at a coworking space. You are not even tied to your desktop anymore. If you have a powerful workstation at home, you can buy a cheap laptop and use something like RemotePC or Chrome Remote Desktop and boom!, you have your desktop on the go (both tools are free and don’t require installers, they can be accessed via browser).

Just your typical construction approval process | Pinterest

All of this, however, generates some massive discrepancies. Start working for a client today and it might be years until that project is finished and you get paid. Let’s assume that the project is a nice, somewhat pricey personal house, not average, but not high-end either. In the ideal case scenario, it can take a month or two of talks, discussions and whatnots until you get the client. Then a few months of permit chasing. Let’s assume you get the final approval during summer (if you get it at the beginning of rainy autumn, tough luck, construction just got postponed ‘till next year) and you can start building right away, so a few months of construction. Add another month or so until the final reception of the building is done and another month until the final paycheck comes through. And again, this is the best-case scenario. So how long does it take to design a house like this? Between 2 weeks and a month, of working at a normal pace, with a certain level of experience in design and good experience with BIM (it is very difficult to achieve this in CAD). This discrepancy between design and permit approvals is going to generate something I like to call ‘’The 3-year guideline’’:

You design projects for the next year, manage and consult for the current year and receive income from the previous year.

Artistic rendition of your first freelancing year | Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash

So, if you start working on your own in 2020, it could be that you start seeing real income from an architecture project in 2021. And that income won’t be amazing. Consultancy yields faster income, but the real revenue is from design and build, but that takes time to build up. And this is where we get to the whole quitting your job — going solo part from the title. In the first few years of starting out you can actively balance your job and your gig. This has several benefits. For starters, the fact that you have a stable paycheck aids you in not accepting any crap project just for monetary sake, meaning that you have the ability to choose your clientele, which can be a monumental advantage. Trust me, I accepted projects for monetary sake, you really don’t want to do that (when it was finished and I tabled all the earnings and expenses I realized I actually lost money)! Also, getting to those clients will require networking and socializing, two things that cost both time and money. The same can be said of investing in your skills, learning new software or tools can eat up your time and only bring profit in the long run. Yes, it can be tricky to balance the two, but with some good time management skills and using the latest tools, it is feasible, probably for the first time ever. Architecture was a time-consuming profession, requiring complete commitment. You had to go all out, but that is no longer the case. So, how can you work like this?

Fortunately, we have computes now | Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

If you are working somewhere just for the money, then it’s time to consider finding another office (ok, if you’re getting paid something like 4k euros a month or something, this doesn’t apply to you, this is more for the ones whose position ranks slightly above the slav…sorry, unpaid interns). The reason you do this is to keep your morale up, working just for the sake of money will start making an impact on you, and it will show in the quality and speed of your work. Then, the place you work at needs to have a stable structure with clear schedules and deadlines (none of that ‘’2 days of work is actually 3 days of work because you can just do 12 hours of work a day’’ crap a lot of offices pull). Finally, your boss needs to know and be at least somewhat ok with moonlighting. This is the big one, as a lot of places, probably won’t be. Now, this is the part when you come to me and say (in a Joe Pesci voice) ‘’Yo, I don’t need to tell them, I’m a stealthy mofo, like a ninja, they won’t know!’’. Unless the office is in disarray or they are not particularly bright, they will know, but that is not the real issue. I ninja-ed my way in the first year of freelancing, and while it can be done, the problem was that the environment was so crap that I hated working there. And in order for you to stealth it, the office needs to be in disarray as not to notice. You will achieve it, but hate every minute of it. And that crap feeling will become more intolerable as time goes on. There are a few more optional things to look for. Ideally, the office should be in a central part of town so you can quickly take a meeting during lunch if push comes to shove, maybe you can have a flexible schedule, maybe you can set your own deadlines, etc. But these are more of perks than necessities. The base 3: good environment, stable structure and understanding partners, are the main ones.

How long can you work like this is up to you and how you want to play out your career. Ideally, you do this for a couple of years and then only work on your own, but that is up to you. Eventually, you will find your rhythm and keep building from there. The world needs architecture entrepreneurs and innovators, but ensuring the long term survival of your vision is paramount, especially in a slow-moving field like construction. Buildings are slow to envision, approve and build and as such, there is very little room for doing things in the short-run. As such, you will need to be ready to play the long game.

Andrei Vasilief, Architect, founder of Animo Regis, a Bucharest-based design and research practice. Follow us on Instagram, Behance or Youtube for more!

Andrei Vasilief

Written by

Architect | Founder of Animo Regis, a Bucharest-based design and research practice

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