Entrearchitect Podcast With Mark R. Lepage

An Architect on the Inside at HGTV HGTV To many of us residential architects, that's a four letter word. Promoting unrealistic expectations for most projects regarding time, quality and budget, HGTV has made our tough job as architects even more difficult. This week's guest is a successful residential architect serving the southeastern region of Michigan. One day, about a year before we recorded this episode, she received a mysterious telephone call, which lead to her being the lead architect for the most recent HGTV Urban Oasis giveaway home. She shares the story of her experience of being on the inside at a HGTV project, how she landed the job and her quest to be a faithful representative of us small firm architects. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, An Architect on the Inside at HGTV with the founder of Studio Z Architecture, Dawn Zuber. An “Architect” Since She Was 11 Years Old: ) When Dawn was five, her grandparents moved to Florida from Ohio and they moved back when she was 11.

Public Relations Strategies for Architects You’re out there hustling, shaking hands and responding to all your RFPs, you’ve got your business development down. At the other end, you have a strong brand, your website is working and your marketing material is telling your story. Somewhere in between the two, lies a critical step to your success as a small firm architect: public relations. If you get it right, your phone will ring off the hook with your next best clients. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, “Design Evangelist” Julie Taylor joins Mark to share 3 Proven Public Relations Strategies for Small Firm Architects. With a background in art history and fine arts, Julie was always drawn to creative expression. As a secretary receptionist just out of college, Julie worked at an architecture firm in Chicago, learning various aspects of the industry. Following that, she worked for a magazine for interior designers and continued to pursue her own writing. When she decided to go into PR

How To Be Happy as an Architect Architecture is a tough profession. We work long hours for years with passion and dedication to become architects. We struggle to launch our firms without basic business fundamentals. We search for the best clients and then work to serve them to the best of our ability. Being entrepreneur architects gives us so many freedoms that we wouldn’t have if we were employed by another firm. It’s tough, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Still, sometimes we question whether or not we made the right decision. Would we be happier working for someone else? True happiness is the result not of your profession, but of the choices you make and the person you choose to be. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage shares his 3 Steps to Happiness as a Small Firm Architect. Love Love has a lot of meanings to a lot of different people. Love is about respecting and caring for one another. How can you be there for others and support them? Not just your spouse, kids o

How To Succeed as a Residential Architect with Dale Mulfinger, FAIA It’s a difficult choice to pick a target market and focus all your energy, resources and effort on one market. It’s a decision many small architects are afraid to make because we’re afraid of missing out on other opportunities and we don’t want to have all our eggs in one basket. When you pick a target market and become an expert on it, you’ll find that your next best client will find their way to you. Our guest this week has succeeded in making that decision and focusing on a target market early on in the development of his firm, and he’s thrived for over thirty years because of that. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Dale Mulfinger, FAIA of SALA Architects joins me and he shares his knowledge about How to Succeed as a Residential Architect. A Minnesota Farm Kid Dale grew up as a farm kid in rural Minnesota. After discovering his lack of desire to pursue farming, he excelled in a drafting program in hi

How to Build a Brand That Resonates with Your Most Valuable Clients Your brand is more than just your logo. Your brand is your story in the minds of those interacting with your firm. It’s about emotions and feelings. It’s the way people see, feel, touch and experience our firms. This week at EntreArchitect podcast, Declan Keefe of Placetailor joins us once again to discuss How to Build a Brand that Resonates with Your Most Valuable Clients. What is branding? Branding is the story that the people who hear about your firm would tell somebody. Branding can be associated with the story that you tell as a firm, but you want it distill it down to what the client is left with. That’s the essence of what the brand really is. You know your brand, your company and what you want your organization to be, but good branding is a matter of what the client believes and what they’re left with. Moving past the colors and fonts on your website, branding expands to how your client feels when they see one

How To Use Your Story to Find the Work You Want We all know that storytelling is a critical part of your success in business. We need to know our story and how to tell it to our target market. That’s how we find the work we love and the clients we want. How do we craft our story, to whom do we tell it, and how does our story help us find more work on a consistent basis? This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Jeff Echols of Echo Engagement joins us to discuss How To Use Your Story to Find the Work You Want. Jeff’s journey in architecture began when he moved from Atlanta to Chicago as a kid, growing up close to many Frank Lloyd Wright homes and watching This Old House with his dad every Saturday morning on PBS. He attended Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning and worked first in Chicago and eventually moved to Indianapolis working for firms ranging from 3-people firms to one of the largest firms in the country. After over twenty years in the traditional architecture world in some k

Living an Integrated Life As small firm architects, work life balance plays a critical role in the success of our businesses as well as the success of our personal lives. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage shares his thoughts on Living an Integrated Life as a Small Firm Architect. The integrated life allows us to live one continuous life with both our business and personal lives at the same time. Sometimes it’s crazy, and sometimes it’s wonderful. For those of us who work from home or who are trying to juggle full time personal lives and full time professional lives, it becomes a struggle: we’re either going to end up with a failing firm because we focused on our family, or we’re going to end up with a forgotten family because we focused on our firm. Imbalance in life shows itself as stress. When our attention and intentions are appropriately distributed, the stress is reduced. This doesn’t mean that the distribution needs to be equal. How do we balance our time,

 How to Design and Sell Modern Architecture as a Small Firm Architect When the world was in the midst of an economic crisis and there were no jobs, a young architect moved to a new town with one contact and a ton of ambition. Today’s guest built his own business flipping ordinary ranch houses into modern architectural works of art. Using their unique story, they built a brand and made a profit. This week on EntreArchitect podcast, Cavin Costello of The Ranch Mine shares How to Design and Sell Modern Architecture as a Small Firm Architect. Gavin was first introduced to architecture when his father, a civil engineer, designed and built the house that he grew up in just before Cavin was born. In high school, a teacher suggested he go into architecture because he excelled at math proofs. With no previous experience in art or drawing, he attended Northeastern University in Boston because he didn’t have to have an art portfolio and because it was a co-op school, meaning he was able to do schooling alon

Every architect has a dream of having their work published in books and magazines. For some, it's a right of passage a testament to hard work and years of focus. For others, it’s a marketing strategy. Publication is a form of social proof indicating that our designs are worthy of our prospective clients' attention. Do you want to get your work published? Well stick around… This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage will share How to Get Published as an Architect. 10 Steps to Get Published as an Architect 1. Design Interesting Details & Spaces // Many of us don’t have huge budgets to design at the level we want to throughout the whole building. While you’re designing, think about the spaces you may be able to design with no extra budget that will create a great photographs for publishers. 2. Photography Matters // Unless you have the skills of a professional, you’re going to have to hire someone. Even if you have great architecture or a great story, edito

When did you discover architecture? At what age did you learn that architecture was something you could do as a profession? When did you decide to become an architect? What was it that inspired you? Why did YOU choose to become an architect? Those are questions Mark asks every guest at EntreArchitect Podcast. Were there places; Were there people in your life that guided you or inspired you to make a difference through buildings? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, we dive deep into one entrepreneur architect's story. She shares her very early influences, her inspirations, her passions and her reconsideration of her entire life plan. This week, The Journey to Design the Thrivable Home with Architect Stacia Hood. Stacia knew in the second grade that she wanted to be an architect, inviting her friends over to draw and build playhouses complete with elevators and balance beam. When she moved to a small mountain town across the country, she created an amazing friendship with a young woman with disabilities w

How To Pass the Architect Registration Exam When Real Life Gets in the Way How long did it take you to become a licensed architect? How many years went by before you focused on your studies and passed the Architect Registration Exam (ARE)? How do you do all the things that are going on in your life and find enough time to study and pass the ARE? This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Evan Troxel of Archispeak Podcast talks about How to Hack Your Life for ARE Success and Beyond. Evan grew up in the mountains as a very outdoor-loving person, always building houses and projects out of rocks and sticks. He jokes that his dad must have had the longest-standing permit for an addition to their house in Tahoe where they worked indoors in the winter and outdoors in the summer. He learned carpentry and construction skills from working with his dad, loved taking this apart and putting them back together, and developed technical drawing and writing skills throughout his education. He went on to win a Regional Opportunity

Profit…Then Art: 12 Steps to Business Success in Architecture For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we focused on Personal Development and encouraged you to dedicate some time to building a better you. For our final installment, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage shares 12 Steps to Business Success in Architecture. For full show notes and a list of references from the original podcast, visit https://entrearchitect.com/podcast/ea092-profit-art-podcast/. FREE Special Session Webinar Want to learn about the 3 critical business systems you need to succeed as a small firm architect? Register for our FREE special session webinar on September 7th at 6 PM EST. Visit EntreArchitect.com/FreeWebinar. Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) Photo credit: Pixabay // TBIT   The post Profit…Then Art (Best of EntreArchi

Using Technology to Leverage a Powerful Idea for Predictable Revenue For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we’re focusing on Personal Development and we encourage you to dedicate some time to building a better you. This week, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage and Jared Perry, the founder of Paeven.com, discuss Using Technology to Leverage a Powerful Idea for Predictable Revenue. For full show notes and a list of references from the original podcast, visit EntreArchitect.com/EA125. Connect with Jared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and online at Paeven.com. Enrollment for the EntreArchitect Academy opens in September! To learn more and sign up for our early-bird mailing list, visit EntreArchitect Academy today! Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) The post The Quest for Predictable Revenue (Best of EntreArchitect

Risks & Rewards as an Architect Developer For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we’re focusing on Personal Development and we encourage you to dedicate some time to building a better you. This week, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage speaks with Jim Zack of San Fransisco-based Zack de Vito Architecture about the Risks and Rewards as an Architect Developer. For full show notes and a list of references from the original podcast, visit EntreArchitect.com/EA102. Connect with Jim online at ZackdeVito.com or find him on LinkedIn. Enrollment for the EntreArchitect Academy opens in September! To learn more and sign up for our early-bird mailing list, visit EntreArchitect Academy today! Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) The post Risks & Rewards as an Architect Developer (Best of EntreArchitect Podcast) appeare

Passive Income for Architects For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we’re focusing on Personal Development and we encourage you to dedicate some time to building a better you. This week, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage speaks with Eric Reinholdt of 30X40 Design Workshop about Passive Income for Architects. For full show notes and a list of references from the original podcast, visit EntreArchitect.com/EA089. Connect with Eric online at ThirtybyForty.com, or find him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. Enrollment for the EntreArchitect Academy opens in September! To learn more and sign up for our early-bird mailing list, visit EntreArchitect Academy today! Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) The post Passive Income for Architects (Best of EntreArchitect Podcast) appeared first on EntreArchitect // Sm

  Branding for Architects For the month of August at EntreArchitect Podcast, we’re focusing on Personal Development and we encourage you to dedicate some time to building a better you. This week, enjoy the Best of EntreArchitect Podcast as Mark R. LePage speaks with Emily Hall about the importance of Branding for Architects. For full show notes and a list of references from the podcast, visit EntreArchitect.com/EA065. Find Emily online at UnionStudioArch.com, and connect on Twitter @unionstudioarch, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Enrollment for the EntreArchitect Academy opens in September! To learn more and sign up for our early-bird mailing list, visit EntreArchitect Academy Visit our Platform Sponsor FreshBooks The easiest way to send invoices, manage expenses, and track your time. Access Your 30-Day Free Trial at FreshBooks.com/architect (Enter EntreArchitect) The post Branding for Architects (Best of EntreArchitect Podcast) appeared first on EntreArchitect // Small Firm Entrepreneur Archi

This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, we invited Declan Keefe of Placetailor back to share his knowledge about How to Get Started as an Architect Developer. To hear Declan’s origin story about how he was hired by a firm as a student and ended up owning it less than three years later, check out EntreArchitect Podcast Episode 130. Placetailor is an architecture firm that provides architecture services, construction services, and real estate development. They look at architecture as the genesis of ideas, and wanted to figure out how they were going to take control over the revenue and profit side of the business. After taking over a company that was in quite a bit of debt, the team decided they needed a “silver bullet” to pull them out: real estate development. They saw a conjuncture between architecture and real estate development in that they’re including an important piece in the middle of the relationship – the builder – where most of the revenue exists. Depending on how yo

Do you have an idea for a new product, service or business? Today, with all the tools available and so many of them free, you no longer have an excuse. If it’s something you really want and the only thing standing in your way is fear, just try! Mark R. LePage is talking with someone who’s been doing just that ever since he discovered a need in grad school and couldn’t find the solution, so he decided to create the solution himself. Learn how he started his many companies, how he’s managing each project, and the tools he uses to communicate with his virtual teams. This week on EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage is joined by Robert Yuen, co-founder of SectionCut.com  and Monograph.io, as he shares his thoughts on The Power of Trying.  Born and raised in Chicago, Robert was the son of Chinese immigrants who played with legos, imagined building and creating things. He took drafting and architectural classes in high school and competed city-wide in various contests. He had a great ment

The road to success is a long and bumpy ride. For us licensed architects, we all dealt with the challenge of passing the Architect Registration Exam. For those of you studying to pass the ARE today, you’re working through that challenge right now. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Mark R. LePage discusses How to Pass the Architect Registration Exam with Michael Riscica. As a creative child, Michael loved to draw, build model cars and create. After high school, he landed a job with an interior design school that told him he could have it if he learned CAD. He followed that with a few community college classes, and then attended the Boston Architecture College (BAC) at night while he worked full time. When he moved to Long Island, he finished his degree at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIY). During this time, he traveled and participated in various extracurricular activities. Where school previously hadn’t been one of his strong suits, the design studios in architecture school brought a

Most of us, when we launched our firms, we started solo, working by ourselves from a small private studio and wearing every hat required to run a successful architecture firm. We worked that way for as long as we could, but we finally reached a point when we knew it was time to get some help but how? Where do I look? What if I hire the wrong person? How am I going to pay them week after week. That first hire is a pivotal point in every successful architecture firm. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast residential architect Marica McKeel joined Mark R. LePage to talk about How to Overcome the Fear of Hiring Your First Employee. Marica’s journey began when she was recruited as a diver at North Carolina State University, where she decided to study architecture. After graduating, she moved back to Tampa to work for a commercial architecture firm. When she had a project for a multi-family space, she realized she loved the residential side of architecture. She pursued a masters at Parsons Fashion, Art and Des