I knew that I wanted to have a family, and I think that would have been very difficult working in the intense architecture environment I was in. When I first started, I felt that teaching was important too, because it would provide me with more stability and benefits. Of course, we now offer these things in our office, but at the time, I was depending on my teaching position for that. It provided a steady income to balance the fluctuations of an emerging practice. There are always challenges to running a business. In the early days, it was about financial stability, hiring carefully and then growing carefully. We still think about that: financial sustainability by growing at a very careful rate. We’re proud to say that we’ve never laid anybody off in all the years of our practice. We don’t hire and fire. We don’t expand and contract with projects. We would rather not hire somebody if we don’t have a role for them long-term. We’ve always worked in the public sector because we knew that our clients would pay. They often take a long time, but their checks don’t bounce, and they pay regularly. When we were starting out in Los Angeles, the dot-com industry was expanding and then crashing. We saw many architects who were dependent on those projects go out of business. Talk about your decision to come to Utah. We decided to open a second office in Utah about 10 years into our Los Angeles practice. It really aligned with when I had my children. At the time, we weren’t sure if there would be work here, so we naturally continued working in Los Angeles. There was a lot of commuting. At the time, people weren’t really working as we do now, anywhere in the world. The public projects were more challenging to break into in the Utah market, so we began with more private sector work. We were well-established with public sector projects in Los Angeles, so it was a nice balance. There’s a benefit to being in two markets, as if the economy slows in one, we can stabilize it with the other. Is there anything you would have done differently? One of my early mentors, Norberto Martinez, said, “When you have your own business, the highs are much higher, but the lows are much lower.” I think that’s true. When you’re working in a large firm, sometimes you don’t even understand the lows because they’re shielded from employees, and hopefully, the highs are shared with everybody. There are inevitable lows and disappointments. However, sometimes things are beyond our control, such as the economy. Sometimes we don’t get projects that we really wanted to land, and those disappointments are just part of running a business and being an architect. How do you structure the responsibilities in your firm? We have a small practice; everyone does a little of everything. We have project managers who are architects who run the day-to-day, and then they have a team of junior people supporting them. People work on projects from conceptual development through production, delivery and construction. We have one team that follows the project all the way through. That has been really successful for us. The team likes it because they get to be involved every step of the way. We try to mix up the project sizes, stress loads and typologies so that people 10 REFLEXION
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