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Today’s podcast is sponsored by BQE core the all-in-one firm management software core helps. You manage your projects and your finances to create a profitable and impactful firm, get a free trial at business of architecture, comm Ford, / demo. Today we welcome Arianna Leppard back to the show. Arianna is the director of marketing and public relations at SP architects, a firm with offices in Miami San Francisco and Shenzhen China.
In today’s episode, you’ll discover how to create a business development plan that includes strategy, as well as tactics, the difference between getting published in the press and true public relations and how marketing relates to business development, Arianna, Leppard welcome to the business of architecture. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be back yeah, I should say: welcome back so catch us up on what you’ve done since the last time you were here on the show.
Well, it’s been a few years. Currently, I am the director at SV architects and we are a global architecture – firm, headquartered out of San Francisco, but we have offices in Miami and Shenzhen and in this role I oversee all of our strategic business development plans, marketing and public relations. So tell me what goes into a strategic business development plan, first and foremost its defining your core practice areas.
When I came on board, we sat down and had planning sessions and decided, you know what do we do and what don’t we do from there? We have began to rethink our multifamily practice. What is mixed-use, what differentiates us from our competitors, such as CRT KL? What markets do we want to enter? We decided to put a more comprehensive plan together for entering the Asia market. He opened an office in Shenzhen in 2014, but you know it was sort of you know.
Touch-And-Go about you know what is China? What should we be working on? What kind of clients should we go after? What’s our core offering and a big part of this is always fee, you know how low do you go, what you know, what makes sense and what doesn’t so, that’s kind of what we’ve been doing from a business development standpoint and then from there transitions, naturally to Marketing you know: do you create a one size fits all plan, or do you have a different core marketing area, our practice plan for Asia versus Latin America versus them, the least? So when you talk about going after potential clients, tell me what that looks like first.
It’s doing your homework, you know a lot of people, we’re not a large, firm or a midsize firm, which makes it challenging in some ways, but there’s a lot of opportunity. We don’t divide our studios across the globe. All of our work comes from San Francisco or Miami, so you know we don’t have a studio director running Hongkong, creating Chinese specific collateral or articlegraphy or a business development plan.
So that said, we need to really define you know who’s, the team’s. How do we best operate? How do we service a client in China when we’re doing all the production work in San Francisco? You know Chinese Chinese clients love the fact that they’re getting an American architect, but we also need to be conscious of the fact that we’re working and operating on a different time zone. So how do we accommodate that and how do we make the fee? Make sense from our end, how do you find that these contacts are established when you don’t have any contacts to start out with? How would how would you recommend that a firm would go about breaking into a new market sector? Well, we do a lot of research on the projects that we’d like to work on know.
We have a team of let’s just take our mixed-use practice and we sit down weekly and review all the new projects we see in the media and what kind of aligns with our interests and our expertise and from there we reach out some of its cold calls. But you know it’s a it’s a small industry and it’s getting smaller and smaller with all the new mergers and acquisitions, especially in the hospitality space with the Starwood mergers.
The players are moving around, but they’re all under one umbrella. So it’s really keeping track of the people that you once knew and where they now the developer groups, we see a lot more projects being funded by private equity. Instead of REITs, we prefer to work with the private sector. So really it’s keeping track of your black book of business and keeping track of the recent murders and acquisitions keeping track of market trends and where the money is and then keeping track of the new projects that align with your core practice areas.
You know an initial phone call to establish this, a cold call to establish contact with someone who generally makes that call in the firm. I make a lot of the calls and our board of directors makes a lot of the calls. So you know we have a couple people who kind of spearhead our mixed-use, so it would either be myself or in this case marks off. If it’s hospitality, you know a phone call from our president moves the meter a lot more than I think anyone else.
But if that’s the case, I really like to prepare Scott here’s the background on the client. Here’s the projects that there are in the pipeline and maybe projects that aren’t published yet and clients really like to know that you’ve done your homework on them and not just fish through their website and then also knowing how all the players connect um. You know you might have a second-degree connection with the Director of Development, but you know you might want to actually reach out to the managing principal or the CEO of the brand directly.
So knowing where all the while the players are and where everyone matches up and then previous experience, you know a lot of times, people forget to Cole, they’re, architects, background or prior background experience. For example, we just opened up an office in Vietnam. Well, we don’t have a history in Vietnam, but we do have architects who do have five or ten years of experience working in Vietnam, so figuring out, who should be in on those initial calls is really important, and what would that and what would you say during An initial call like that arjan, if you were going to call up someone out of the blue, I start with telling them that I admired their portfolio and their leadership in the industry, and you know be specific people don’t like cold calls.
Everyone likes to buy, but no one likes to be sold so tell them exactly upfront how you would add value to their portfolio if there is a mixed-use project and let’s say Texas, Texas is very fruitful right now, but they generally don’t hire california-based architects so tell Them that you saw X Y & Z, launched in some kind of PR capacity, and this is you know, X, Y & Z, for my portfolio that aligns with your interests and exactly how you would add value.
So if you notice they’re in concept but and they’re just going through the entitlements, talk about how you might rethink their master plan and how you might create a more vibrant retail space or how would you you know if they’re looking at retail anchored developments? Well, we’re not we’re in kind of an anchor — less world right now. So how might you make a truly mixed-use space to create an 18-7 experience for their users? You know people like problem solvers, so that’s how we ourselves now is where strategic partners with their clients and we’re also problem solvers, not just designers.
Okay, now, on that phone call, are you walking them through some potential design solutions? Or what would you be saying personally Arianna? That is what I actually do, so I set it up with a qualifier of what as our experience and then I actually throw out some freebies. You know I’ve looked at your master plan online. You know there’s an absence of peekaboo moments. You have a lot of commercial space, let’s say an office space Class, A office.
But what are you going to do you know and all throughout the day you know it’s only busy in the morning during lunch and then when people are leaving, but then you have all this dead space and your real estate on the weekend. So why don’t we create a park setting? Why don’t we integrate some F & B into the scenario same thing with a hotel? You know someone may say: well we want. You know this amount of convention space.
Well, that’s great, but what happens to all those moments? On the off season, there’s nothing worse than walking into a mausoleum of a restaurant and having it empty people like to travel year-round, but there are offseason. So how do you mitigate these risks from the development side and for the brand side? You know they really look to us to maximize their ADR and their revenue capacity. So so on that phone calls, you generally have a little mini kind of elevator pitch that you give them.
How does how would the actual call go? Well, um. The nice thing about our firm is, we are established, so there is a brief elevator pitch. You know you should right off the bat tell them what it is that you know you do. I always start with the. Why I think that’s more impactful. Why do we do design? Why are we here? Why are we in this space? Then you can tell them how you do it, how you approach design and what are some of the design solutions, you’ve provided for clients, and then you tell them what you do the? What you do is really what a lot of different architects do, but I think what differentiates you is that why and how? So that’s what how I always position our elevator pitch.
So let’s say you had a good initial phone call. What’s the next step that you’re looking to take be proactive, I think a lot of service providers. If you will forget that your target client is busy so follow up and follow up frequently and keep them informed of new work that you’re doing and new relationships that you build, especially you know in these large-scale hospitality projects. You have your initial client who hired you, but then they’re, bringing on financial partners and development partners along the way, and you might not know all the different players coming on online.
But again it’s a small pool, so you know consider every relationship is going to come back to you at some point. We have a destination branded residential project right now and we’ve now one of the development partners. We’ve worked with probably three or four times, but he wasn’t on board in the beginning and we actually made the introduction, which is something that sets us apart. Is we actually try to introduce clients to other partners who add value to the project, so part of that is in elevator pitches? We know all these players and we can assist not just designing the architecture but helping you build.
Your brand identity help you with positioning of your project. We can introduce you to the appropriate brand for this, and, if you know, debt financing is something that’s needed for this project. We also know these different equity partners and how to negotiate those contracts with them. Sets us apart, okay, so you talked about following up over time staying in touch letting them know what your firm is doing.
Let them know you’re aware of what they’re doing, just in terms of that one. Let’s say that first cold outreach contact phone call. What is the is there an ask there from your side? Is there something that you’re asking for? Is it just sort of a get to know? You call tell me about that. I don’t think they get to know. You calls are that informative and everyone does them. My ask is for an in-person meeting, you know if you have a zoom call.
It’s great. I told you what we do. You told us what you do and then you send an email of hey. I love to work together. If that’s it there’s a lot of other design firms that are thirstier than you are. I usually, if I do a cold call email. You know I’m asking for an in-person meeting and then I and then you go to them. If that’s, if they’re, not in your city and it’s that, if it’s a project that you want or a client, you want to work with and if you are in the room with the client and you walk them through a brief presentation that shows you know kind Of the top five projects that speak to their portfolio and also go over a case study of a real project, you have on the boards and real opportunities and constraints that you are going through with a client and then you make yourself physically available.
Then you’ll get that client and you’ll close that deal and you’ll build a long-term relationship, because what people want out of their partners is communication, so we talked about this is very tactical, I’m just kind of getting that out of you already on it. Let’s jump back in the more strategic sense of marketing business development, what are you seeing as the foundation for having a really effective business development program? Well, good business development allows a firm to profit by doing something that is tangential to their core mission.
Sometimes the profit is so good, it becomes part of the core mission other times it supports the brand and sometimes just makes money. But I tell people that you know you need to really examine where you can be positioned in the market. There’s kind of two ways you can look at business development and your resources. You can spend your time and your money looking for new projects and you meet, but if you only focus on that one part of your core business, it might not occur to you to consider partnerships, licensing, publishing mergers or other profitable arrangements for a long time.
We look solely at architecture as our core business and and about a year and a half ago we launched what we call creative services. We actually offer brand and marketing services to clients. You know we’re going through the design, charettes and the workshops and all that helps inform the architecture. Why not assist them with creating their brand messaging? So we have staffed in-house, very talented, graphic designers, storytellers articlegraphers.
We actually help clients create branded lease and sales collateral. Articlegraphy virtual reality anything that they can do to help position their project. That’s a luxury condo. We help create all the sales collateral and those initial articles, so they can actually help pre sale their units while we’re building it. We help mixed-use centers, get their their sales and leasing strategies in place, so they can actually why they’re building it they can go to a conference such as ICSC, recon and actually secure tennis.
You know you never want to be a shopping center, that’s open and has no tenants. So we do everything with that. We we have our own in-house virtual reality service and that really helps move the meter with the branded hospitality projects. It’s all about storytelling and the experiences that you service will provide. I know you’ve you’ve pushed article. You guys do a great job doing article. What are you seeing there in terms of virtual reality article? How is that affecting the landscape for marketing and presenting architecture? I think media based marketing is the norm.
Now you know print collaterals. Fine imagery is fine, but everything’s becoming gamified. So you need to provide you know. People want to see, thought leadership on camera. They don’t want to just see an animation. They want to see people talking about exactly what you were. You were discussing with those sort of cold calls. You know first pitches. They want to see your face. They want to see a tour of your office.
You know for a lifestyle article for a hotel. A lot of these articles have nothing to do with architecture. You know rosewood has phenomenal articles, but little do you see an actual building? It’s about the lifestyle, how you’re going to feel when you’re there? What kind of experiences are you going to take home, and how are you going to translate that to friends and family and I think that’s changing same thing with virtual reality? People want to see feel touch the space.
It’s becoming much more experience. We driven much more animated and this is kind of it’s not a trend. This is just the way that the industry is progressing. The Rosewood articles are those online where we could post those and let our subscribers see those mm-hmm. Can you send me that link we’ll include that in the show notes, arianna awesome? So let’s, let’s talk a bit about the PR now you also, you also are involved in overseeing the PR efforts.
What goes into a successful public relations plan. Oh publicity is the act of getting inked. It’s getting unpaid media to pay attention right. You up point to you run a picture make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful. Good publicity is always good for your brand, but it’s not PR. Pr is the strategic crafting of your story. It’s the examination of your tactics, your services, your interactions in the world, and this determines how people are going to talk about you and my experience.
A few people have publicity problems, but almost everyone has PR problems, and this is something you need to work through. First and part of this is just the story, I think everyone knows what they do, but I think when you actually start to ask leadership teams, why you do it and how you do it? That’s where the message sort of falls apart and that’s really what clients are thirsty to hear, and they want to understand that when we go to these first client meetings, you know they want to understand your vision like how do you approach these designs? You know if, if you look at a lot of the mission statements on architects websites, they say we’re a global architecture firm and we do the these kind of projects and hire us, and that’s really not compelling, and it doesn’t tell me why.
You’re different from any of the other ten websites I just went on so that’s you know, business development is really defining what you want to do and how you need to do it. You know be true to your feet. Overheads are real concern for mid and large sized businesses so decide what you’re going after and what you’re not create supporting marketing collateral. For that and PR is your public voice. So you’ve made a differentiation between publicity and PR crafting the story, public relations, and you said that you see a lot of mistakes or missed opportunities in terms of the public relations walk us through that a little bit more.
What does it look like when the firm is telling a story are being differentiated from their competitors in the marketplace? We, I noticed a trend, it’s easy to call. You know biz now or Architectural Digest or Wall Street Journal and say hey. We have this new hotel. We have this new mall, will you write a story and they go sure great. You have a 15 minute call and then also then there’s a story and you read it going: that’s not our firm at all and that’s not even how you spell my name, and you know you put my rendering against someone else’s firm name.
So our strategy has really been to build relationships with editors. They need coffee and they need a lot. The churn and PR, especially with the advent of digital marketing, is high. So what they do is they send me the questions and we write the answers that way. You can really tell the story of your firm is: who is the team involved? What does everyone’s role? Why your approach to design is different? It takes a lot more time, but it’s a lot easier to do that than it is to have a misprint or just a blurb.
In a magazine you know we’re. Architects were in the business of building, but we’re also in the business of branding and placemaking. We tell stories and create experience and we design to create meaningful human experiences experiences with emotion, purpose. These experiences changed the way people think feel and play in our spaces, and I think, that’s very hard. On short, 15-minute calls or quick interviews of send me some images and a tear sheet on a project.
You need a lot more background to tell people why your business has been doing what they’ve been doing for 60 years and I’m intrigued to be working in a place where architecture is just one piece of the puzzle. We factor in branding communications, the digital technology, to create a more compelling and intriguing proposition for clients. When you talk about that more compelling proposition, are you referring to the the added value services of branding click, creating the sales collateral? All of that, or is it something else that plays into it I mean really placemaking is what’s moving the meter for our clients.
You know, brands are evolving to better compete and especially with all the mergers and acquisitions and new brands. Some of these major brands need to retarget who their consumer is. You see a lot more retail brands and F & B brands entering the hotel space. You know kind of the days of just ritz-carlton and Four Seasons being the ultra luxury or over. You see brands like Six Senses emerging in a Monde.
So how do you differentiate your brand and compete? What we saw is kind of an outcrop of the Starwood merger. Is this kind of redefining of luxury, and so, as brands are rethinking how to compete in this new space, we need to assist them with their stories. You can build a building a hotel tower, but if you don’t really think about how the landscaping the interior is the placemaking, how you’re moving people space to space and then the story that you tell about the hotel, it’s just going to be another structure and I Think I think the discerning traveler is looking for more, whether it be a hotel or a shopping center.
You know we’re seeing a lot of malls being demolished now we’re rebuilding them as lifestyle centers. It’s not about shopping anymore. It’s about what you do while you’re there. The entertainment component, the restaurant component, retail, is just one part of it, and so I think clients look to us to help them understand this synergy of well program spaces with the story of place making. What would you say has been your biggest challenge in terms of marketing and developing business in the architecture industry? I think it’s a it’s slow to evolve.
You know, architects are very good at architecture, but very few of them have any experience in marketing and public relations. It’s hard when you’re you’re profitable to change the ways of the firm it’s hard when you’re successful in one domain, such as design to change anything that you’re doing but architecture is just the building. You know you can create spaces. You can tell people why the program needs to be retooled another way, but when people are looking for more, I think marketing is less scientific.
In many ways you have to be flexible. You know when you submit your permit, set and you’re going into at entitlements. You know, there’s it’s very scientific and very logistical on how you put together a building marketing. You have a plan, you have your strategy, you have your tactics and then, in six months a brand goes under or it gets absorbed or something happens. You need to be able to maintain your strategy, but change your tactics and I think, that’s very hard for some people to pivot every six months.
If need be, what are the tactics that you’re seeing right now that are, shall we say, cutting edge or that you’re? Seeing that are working so one thing I did is a full audit of all of her marketing marketing collateral, and I noticed when I started. We had these very long kind of corporate internal brand articles and in in many minutes, and in many words they told you nothing. I did an examination and went well.
You know only about a quarter, only half the people that actually got any of the messaging right. So our signature stamps, for example, we always had a link to a article great well after a year only about half the people we emailed even clicked on the article link and of that only probably a quarter of them even finished article, so from kind of mining Through all this data for different things and our digital marketing and our print collateral, I realized our articles are too long.
They need to be 60 seconds. What’s the point of making something someone’s never going to finish, they need to be more compelling in the first 20 seconds. You need to tell people exactly why they should be reading it. You know they’re not going to wait a minute in and go well. This is nice, this is pretty. The music sounds good. You know people have a very short attention span. You need to tell them why they’re there and why it’s important to them quickly and you need to needs to be context appropriate.
You know people like kind of going back to the gamification they like to be entertained. They don’t want to have to seek the entertainment, so I think people need to rethink the imagery that they used. You can have a great project, no low resolution, imagery you need to get rid of any imagery photography renderings that are not compelling to a non architectural audience. I think that’s the big differences, a lot of Architects market to other architects and not the consumer world.
So we actually been going through our renderings now for very interesting projects, but they weren’t market ready, renderings. So now, we’ve actually worked with new renderers and we have very captivating vibrant renderings for our mixed-use sector and we’re doing the same thing with our hospitality. But you always have to remember who your target audience. Is I’m not looking for an architect. I are me, I’m looking for a developer or I’m looking for someone who’s, not in real estate, but they they are working in the real estate sphere.
You know we see a lot of tech money that wants to invest in real estate, so you need to speak to them on their level and for you, when you talk about the renderings, what does that look like speaking to those different groups on their level? How those? How do those, if you were to describe those for our listeners, since they can’t see them unless they’re reading the YouTube article? Of course, what would what would the differences be in those kind of renderings? Well, if you’re taking a mixed-use project, for example, we have a project in Omaha right now, it’ll be about 1.
9 billion dollar mixed-use redevelopment as a lifestyle Center. On one end, it’s anchored in sort of a retail power center and, as you move through you get into more of the lifestyle, pedestrian scape and then on the other end is residential. But if you’re taking a mixed-use projects, for example, you have renderings it’s not about the architecture, only that’s great, but it’s about the lifestyle. People need to see a person in the rendering and go well.
That could be me, so you, the lighting, that you use the people that you place they matter. People need to visualize, it’s like an aerial photograph of the place once it comes online. People need to look at it and go wow. I wish I was there. It’s amazing to see photography of restaurants and hotel lobbies with no people there bare and they’re stark and I’ve. Never. If I saw a restaurant like that in real life I’d never eat there it’d be strange to walk into a huge restaurant with no people.
So when we’re curating our photography, we do lower light. We make sure there’s people at the bar people are engaged. People are smiling. You know we’re we’re very cautious about the people that we put in our renderings again, it’s you’re telling the story about why someone wants to be there. Why should you should travel there? Then you show the worst representation of the project. So again you can have your noir renderings and your photography for a developer.
You can have them for an editor. You know certain Edie, you have to know your audience and who you’re creating collateral for awesome. What haven’t we talked about in terms of what you’re doing now, Arianna that you think you’re excited about, or you think that we should be talking about. I’m excited about launching this creative services and really helping our clients craft and execute on a brand positioning strategy for each of their assets.
You know it’s great to work with them in that sort of pre development feasibility stage, where a lot of times we’re in there helping them introduce be introduced to brand partners development partners. You know we’re helping them move the project into a phase where we can do the architecture, but then helping them bring that project to market in both the literal sense and the built form, but also in the story helping them craft, their press releases their collateral.
The articles it’s great to see a project article online we’ve created them articles for clients to show planning departments, so they can get approval for a project we’ve seen it on. You know the clients website, so they can actually sell a product, but for us carrying the vision from the beginning. All the way through the end is important to us and we’re excited. Sometimes we work with brand partners that clients bring on, but we very much like to be part of the entire nuts to bolts process all right.
Well, thank you, Ariane. It’s been fantastic, having you back here on the business of architecture. Thank you, and that is a wrap to discover more about the process for creating a better firm with less buyers and more fun. Go to business of architecture. Comm forward slash freedom webinar on that page you’ll be able to register for a free online training on how to create a firm that empowers your staff and is set to scale without chaining you to your desk to discover how to market your firm to win better Projects and clients you can sign up for my upcoming design, firm marketing training at architect, webinar comm.
Today’s podcast is sponsored by BQE core that all-in-one firm management software core helps. You manage your projects and your finances to create a profitable and impactful firm, get a free trial at business of architecture. Comm forward, slash demo. The views expressed on the show by my guests do not represent those of the host, and I make no representation. Promise guarantee pledge warranty, contract bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world.
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