to start a firm

cheers
Tue, 08 May 2007 22:44:35 +0000

No, I doubt the entire profession will switch anytime soon–Catia is too expensive for the average firm, ten times the cost of AutoCAD. I won’t be able to do it until this big project is released for contract documents.

I’m not sure if high end firms will switch or not–I’m not that plugged into the community to know. Ask rick or Marsden? I can tell you that my big firm engineers are feeling slightly nauseous about the idea–but the contractor–who already uses Pro-Steel–is stoked. Talking to the distributor for my area, I get the feeling I would be leading the charge–following Gehry and Mayne and others of course. From my perspective, the advantages are unbelieveable–but I will let you know if and when we do implement it and what the result is on the actual building process.

I opened my first office in Manhattan with a big additoin to a country house in Duchess County–a job I got after I told an influential friend that I was looking for projects.

I opened my second office after a family friend of my former sister-in-law (a woman who acted as our first realtor) recommended us for a large single family house. We also did a small commercial project for that family (and the woman became our second realtor). We focused on high end residential to give us the opportunity to work with substantial materials and high design. In doing this, believe it or not, I deliberately imitated the career of Corbusier and the New York five + Gehry. I did extensive research on all of them while at school. Corbusier and Gehry have had remarkably similar careers–in my opinion. Since I graduated, I wanted to get to the Ronchamp part of my career–and I admire Gehry’s success at getting to that point. Who knows if I will get there. It kind of feels like I have a shot at it–if everything continues along this path. There are a ton of variables but it appears that I have accumulated the skills and the clients?? We’ll see.

I’m not going to reveal how I opened my third office for privacy reasons related to my boys–but basically, I told a complete stranger, a young clerk, that I was looking for work for my new firm. My expectations were pretty darn low. I was thinking: kitchen additions here we come.

Instead, he introduced us to a colleague who had a number of clients who were interested in becoming developers. Three weeks later, one of those developers gave us a $2M commercial project. In a town where we literally knew no one. We went on to do several other projects for that client.

Never would have happened without that brand name internship–and grey hair perhaps?? LOL.

That $2M project had a number of tenants and we did some of their fit-outs. One of them happened to be a guy who represented a keen out-of-town developer. Before we knew it, we were designing $10M projects for that developer, one of which is under construction. We have managed to control the building costs and he has hired us to do a couple of much bigger projects. In the meantime, we have had lots of other projects roll in the office. We continue to tell everyone, and I mean everyone, that we are looking for work.