The AIA Redefinition of the Profession calls for thinking like the client and becoming the client's trusted facilitator/integrator. A 60-person firm with offices in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan is doing just that and is reporting success. Three senior managers share their insights on gathering the marketplace wisdom their clients seek and creating a process of knowledge retention and transfer so that when their clients face new challenges, they immediately turn to their architect.

Performa is a different firm. Yes, we have our architectural/engineering shingle hanging outside, but we view ourselves primarily as a strategic consulting firm, which also offers design services. Put another way, we see ourselves as an extension of our clients.

We're focused on understanding our clients by understanding their businesses because that is the light in which they see themselves. Clients across the board are increasingly intelligent with regard to their business positioning and the strategic use of their capital assets. Unless you can identify the clients' sense of project priorities and make clear how your advice expands their business segment and enhances their financial game plan year by year, they are going to weed you out of the competition very quickly.

Further, the act of finding out what makes clients and their marketplace tick helps us enhance our own market position. We see their competitive issues on the horizon and are able to position ourselves accordingly in terms of office locations, new services and tools, the in-house talent and independent consultants we will need, and the best leads for future business. We also become aware of other reconnaissance we should undertake to continue realigning ourselves with our intended marketplaces. Rather than only trying to break into new marketplaces, we can expand the value-added services we provide to meet changing or growing demand in our established business segments.

A holistic view
We practice due diligence in studying the client's world from the client's eye. We have recruited people straight out of our target marketplace segments so we can internalize how the client works and determines return on investment. To look at only the physical facilities and not the other aspects of an organization's operation would be myopic. So we look at our clients' businesses or institutions holistically, encompassing their people, their place, and their process—especially in the early phases of our work. That's what distinguishes us in the marketplace and brings greater value to our clients.

The bottom line is that we're a firm that's trying to create high-performance environments in our respective marketplaces. In higher education, for instance, that means helping our institutions attract and retain students. And in manufacturing environments, it means helping our clients better serve their own customers. Our goal is to provide holistic value-added services that move the client to their operational and strategic goals.

It starts with communication
Being an extension of our client means we want to be a necessary part of their organization. That requires, first and foremost, effective communication. We use the client's vocabulary, not architectural terminology. Our clients have a lot of comfort with us because we act like them, we look like them, and we think like them. We make a conscious effort to try to get away from the verbal and nonverbal cues that say, "We are the architecture firm."

The individuals who have come into our firm right out of a specific market segment often serve as a consulting liaison between our architecture staff and our client base. It has been a very successful way to establish a link between the client and our entire staff. Communication is definitely one of the skills we emphasize in our internal processes of training, education, and mentoring. And we start by setting an example.

As with most of the processes we use to work with clients, we find that the need for effective and open communication is as key to our internal operations as it is to our client relations. You won't find any doors in the Performa office, from the CEO down. Workspaces are the same size. We do everything that we can to de-emphasize hierarchy and break the physical and psychological barriers that tend to create a sense of division among management, middle management, and junior staff. We have presidents and vice presidents rolling up their sleeves to work on assignments side-by-side with the most junior people.

This close communication is in tune with our core value—the betterment of our clients—and we're all having fun. It is no secret in the office that we promote an entrepreneurial attitude here. We want our younger people to thrive, grow, and mature, and we give them as much as they can take. That means including them in everything and allowing them to hear everything. We want them to hear our conversations with presidents of companies and colleges so they are learning and maturing as we all are.

We also commit to having regular communication meetings with our employees. Our financials are open to them, and they are closely in tune with how we're doing as an organization. We take a significant amount of time talking about where the organization is headed strategically and how we're doing against that strategic plan, both financially and operationally, in good times and bad. That helps build a trusting relationship with all members of Performa.

What client trust brings
Once you've built a high level of trust with a client by bringing them a quantifiable measure of success, you are able to broaden the scope of your consulting services, including bringing to the client other service providers you yourself know and trust. For instance, if we've gone through a strategic planning session with a higher-education client, we very well may find that facility upgrades aren't the real need. Instead, we might show that their admissions group needs shoring up. But we're not admissions experts for higher education, although we certainly know who is. So through the client's trusting the depth of our knowledge, we can make that recommendation as an operational consultant rather than an architecture/engineering firm.

As we enhance the client's position, we enhance our position as a consultant and as an architecture/engineering firm. Continuing our example, as an improved admissions strategy becomes a leverage point for growth in enrollment, the school will reach a point where they may need new and refurbished facilities. Knowing that Performa really understands their institution from the inside out puts us in a very good position for continuing to work with that client.

So another part of being an extension of our client base is that we can spend less time running after RFPs and more time developing these long-term client relationships through collaborative process development. We ask our clients for critiques, which are invaluable in continuing to tailor our service to their needs. Being an extension of the client is a dynamic, living thing. Again, we bring our client-development processes in-house. After an assignment we will get the Performa team together to have a "downloading session." We challenge ourselves: Have we brought true value to the client? Are the results measurable; do they have a set of metrics? The only way you evaluate your effectiveness is to get this client feedback and team feedback.

Capture knowledge
Of course, at the base of the Performa strategy is our collective knowledge. That is what clients pay us for. To that end, we structure ourselves as a learning organization. We've already touched on some of the strategies for that, including open communication and honest feedback. And, again, the distinction between the processes we develop for use in-house and the advice we provide to our clients tends to blur.

One of our competitive advantages in the manufacturing marketplace is how we help our clients become learning organizations. We have put a lot of time and effort into building tools and techniques that help our clients and ourselves capitalize on change. We've institutionalized those tools inside Performa, so young architects or consultants coming up through the ranks are exposed quickly to the cumulative experience of this firm. They get to live and breathe the methodology we use to facilitate change in our client organizations. That is the key to developing a learning organization.

In the manufacturing group, we go off-site four times a year to dissect our process, using specific client examples: What worked? What didn't work? What did we overdo? What did we under do? What were our clients ecstatic about? What were they disappointed in? Again, younger people in the firm really get to experience what makes a business grow and thrive and what's important to our customers.

In the higher-education group, we document—in a disciplined, step-by-step way—how Performa staff members work through certain types of analysis for a client. The results are the opportunity for process standardization and captured knowledge of the process for later use and subsequent refinement. We are continuously discovering new permutations or unique situations that need to be addressed.

One interesting result of this intense cycle of iterative analysis is that we now have clients who are asking to buy parts of our process. To fill this demand, we have recorded portions of the process on CD, with all the training education materials, documentation, forms, and step-by-step instructions. Our process has become another profit center.

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.