On the 30th October Ben Smallwood, our Site Director, attended the Archimentor Summit. This included a talk from 30x40 Design Workshops, Eric Reinholdt, who gave a talk on how to start up and run an effective and profitable architectural practice.
Ben Smallwood when asked about his experience said, “The talk was honestly eye opening and inspiring. Eric took us through his personal experiences, challenges and achievements he encountered throughout his time training to become an architect and moving into starting his own practice. Eric explained the challenges that are inevitable with a new practice but how to ensure this is a foot in the door rather than a concreted path. An example that was used was, how to use someone else’s audience to gain exposure and traction for your new business, potentially through university programmes, writing segments for larger blogs, websites and magazines, or entering competitions.”
The key points that were discussed were:
-A successful website is easy to navigate.
-SEO should be based around the questions people will ask.
-Websites should have only these navigation tabs: Portfolio/ Experience, About, Contact. These should then have sub menus.
-Find a style and typology so clients can see their imagined design in your portfolio.
-Expand your product range from just client projects to resources you can sell multiple times without any additional effort. For example masterclasses, books and stock images.
-How to affectively use time not spent on clients.
These are just key points from a very informative talk by a well-known architect who has successfully grown his business through generally unexplored methods by architects. These methods we will look to implement in our practice to diversify our skill set and stabilize our income.
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