by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: As COO and CFO of Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company, Nick Vlattas, AIA, has played a key role in the firm’s growth and development. He has been with the company for 30 years and participated in its journey from a 2-person firm with one office to an 80-person firm with three offices. Described as the Hanbury Evans’s “keeper of the heart,” Vlattas recently was named the Virginia Business/Virginia Society of CPAs “CFO of the Year,” an unusual occurrence for a professional without an accounting background. In 2004, the Virginia Society AIA bestowed Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company with its Firm of the Year award and AIA Hampton Roads awarded them its Firm Award in 1996. Hanbury Evans also was named one of the top 25 Best Places to Work by Inside Business Magazine in 2004, which noted a turnover rate of 5.7 percent, compared with the industry average of 24.6 percent.

Education: I have a bachelor of architecture degree from Virginia Tech, back in 1976.

Financial education: It’s all been self-taught, plus many seminars and consultation with professionals that have helped our company over the years.

Professional background: After graduating from Virginia Tech, I started looking for a job. I searched around Washington and Atlanta and some other places where I had made connections, but my first job offer was from a small firm in Newport News, Va., which is my hometown. It was just a small 7-person firm. One of the architects there, Mike Evans, was my mentor when I first started. He started his own firm about a year or so later, and when he decided it was time to start hiring, he offered a job to me so I was his first employee. He continued to have a vision for growth and being more than a sole proprietor. He wanted to create a corporation, so he invited one other person and myself to become shareholders in a new corporation back in 1979, so the three of us set out to build our company.

In 1985, we had grown to about 15 people. One of the things about our company is that we always did strategic planning and thinking. We would take time out of the schedule to invest in that activity, so we started thinking about mergers and opportunity growth. In the mid-’80s, our company had a fire that destroyed our offices and pretty much everything we had. Fortunately, we were into CAD and had backups of our drawings on the computer system, so we were able to recover. Shortly after the fire, we merged with another company we had been talking to, Hanbury and Company. We bought a building in downtown Norfolk, moved in, and started practicing together as a merged firm with about 30 people. Since then, we have continued to do strategic planning and thinking about our future and our markets and have grown to about 85 employees today. I’ve been blessed with a long partnership with Mike for more than 30 years, and he’s still one of my mentors and partners today. It’s been a good relationship.

Becoming involved in financial operations: When it was just the three of us, we thought about our individual strengths and interests and the practice of architecture and divided our responsibilities into three areas: marketing and winning work, design and doing quality architecture, and managing the business and the projects. I ended up choosing managing the practice and the finances, so way back in 1979 that became my responsibility. That’s where I started: with a very small firm learning about charts of accounts. I got a lot of information from the AIA, attended many of the AIA seminars on financial management, read the books, and started getting involved with computers. Back in those days, the personal computer was just starting to come out, so we invested early in those applications and software that would help us do those parts of the job. I grew with those responsibilities and did some projects and project management over the years. Now my responsibilities are not too involved in projects. I’m involved in negotiations and contracts and some quality issues, but it’s more split across the whole firm instead of focused on one project.

Keeping staff motivated during tough times: We’ve always tried to recognize individual goals and match them to the firm’s goals. We are a very open firm in our communications about finances, our vision, and our strategies. Once, when we had a slowdown in work, we cut hours back 10 percent across the firm as opposed to letting people go to try to save jobs to get us through. It was a sacrifice that everybody in the firm wanted to make because they felt so close to our colleagues. That ability to have a vision and communicate that vision is one way we’ve done it.

Employee-“nourishing” practices and programs: We have some programs in the firm, like our Academy, which is something we’ve created to help with continuing education. One that I’m really fond of that I helped start five years ago is called our Summer Scholars program. We bring in five or six scholars from colleges and universities across the country, and now even into Mexico and Canada. The scholars submit their portfolios, and then we select them. We have a house here in Norfolk and create a whole program for them during the summer. We involve many people in our firm mentoring. Our younger staff are able to mentor with these scholars coming in for the summer. We also have our Academy focus on programs with the scholars. It’s been a really wonderful program that has identified young talent to come into the firm and engaged the whole firm in teaching and being a learning organization.

We’ve also had a program called our design retreat that we’ve done in conjunction with Virginia Tech. We’ve been doing this for five years. We send 8-12 employees to Europe for a week with two professors from Virginia Tech. [Virginia Tech has a campus in Switzerland.] Our employees travel around and visit architectural projects and sites and do sketching, so they come back very inspired about what they’ve learned. We’ve sent a lot of people over the last five years, and everybody in the firm has the opportunity to get involved with that.

The last program is what we call our Virginia Medalist, where we bring a professor from the University of Virginia into our firm for three weeks during the summer. We have this convergence of the people who have gone on the design retreat to Europe, the summer scholars, and also the professor and it creates a real learning environment during summer that I think carries us through the whole year. That helps our people want to be part of this firm.

Core values: Our strategic planning has been an annual effort for many, many years. Sometimes we look outside at markets; some years we’ll look inside and think about values. Another thing the firm has done is ask the firm to read a book. We’ll buy everybody a copy of the book and ask them to read it; then we have discussions on it. Several years ago, one of the books we read that had great impact was Built to Last, which talked about the importance of having big goals and vision and the importance of core values. During our strategic retreat we started thinking about stories that illustrated what we thought were our values. Through a collaborative process, we identified the stories that were important to us and tried to express those in values and core value statements.

[One core value is] nourishment and that reinforces the personal and professional growth within our firm. Another value was collaboration, around which our whole firm is structured. We have offices that are completely open with architects, principals, and everyone sitting next to each other. It takes a very collaborative effort to reach consensus and create good design and create enduring spaces for clients, so collaboration is one of our values. A third value is curiosity, and that has to do with the very nature of design. It’s not really being satisfied with the first solution, but being curious about other solutions that might have greater impact on the issues at hand. Integrity is a fourth value and that has to do with having an excellent reputation with our clients, employees, consultants, and vendors and treating people fairly. The last value that we espouse is being fiscally conservative. This value has to do with being wise with our resources and in a way investing in the future of the firm. We very much want our firm to perpetuate and want to create a firm that lasts beyond the current owners. We’ve spent time on ownership transition. We’ve had partners retire from the firm and even with the retirement, the firm has continued to grow. We’ve brought in new partners and have a broad ownership within the firm. It’s also [about] being able to invest in our strategic vision [and providing tools] such as video teleconferencing and BIM as well as training programs and design retreats. If we can use our resources wisely, that will help us grow into the future.

Proudest professional achievement: I guess my greatest joy in my profession is helping others be successful. I’ve been a small part of helping to create this firm to support my partners who have had great vision and who are very talented in their relations with clients and in their skills and in doing design work. I’ve been able to help them do that through helping to build a foundation of practice in taking care of the business affairs and human resources and other management responsibilities within the firm so that they can really practice their great talent and skills. To me, that’s what I feel is my biggest achievement: having been a part in building this firm.

Current read: I spend a lot of time reading the Bible. That’s probably the book I spend most time in, but in business I’m reading a couple of books right now by Jim Cramer, The Next Architect and How Firms Succeed: A Field Guide to Design Management. Those are two that I’m reading right now, in addition to the Bible.

Advice for architects leading financial operations: I guess I would tell them to really think about the future to have an understanding of the vision of the firm and how important that is for the future. Once you understand that and share that vision with other partners, then you can go to work planning the financial requirements to meet that vision. That would be my best advice.