Architecture and its allied design disciplines of interior design, landscape architecture, and graphic design are an underappreciated component of the built environment, creating the spaces and places that shape our society and inspire our future. Winston Churchill famously was quoted as saying “ We shape our buildings, and then they shape us.”
If our design talents are so important to society, why don’t we make more money? The responses tend to include:
• We were not trained to be business people.
• It just feels a bit sordid to talk about money.
• We’re artists and our value should be obvious.
• In spite of the old trope that to be an architect/designer, you had to be good at math… most of us don’t really speak math.
Hogwash! You just don’t know, or want to know, how to deal with business.
Yet, you deserve the appropriate compensation for the value you provide, and so do your partners, staff, and family.
9K was created to help design firms to run their practices as businesses AND design studios. Our purpose is to help you be successful on the business side of your life. We can help you to structure your firm to realize the value that your talent is due.
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly … who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt
You’re in the arena. Let’s make the sweat worthwhile.
