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The Arrive Architecture Group team.
TEAM BUILDING, from page 7
worked since that time and are now 100 percent debt-free, including owning our office building. I hired a new business manager who will tell me the hard, cold truth about everything – not just what I want to hear. We keep clients on short leashes with their billings and invest in our staff and technology when times are good. I believe we came through COVID-19 strongly because of these policies. “Architects tend to be dreamers and a bit naïve to the ways of the business world. My mentor confronted us over and over those first few years with the cold hard facts. I have since paid it forward with so many young people who have worked for me over the years.” TZL: A firm’s longevity is valuable. What are you doing to encourage your staff to stick around? MT: We encourage our staff to stay with us in a variety of ways. Pay well from the start and give quarterly productivity bonuses and promote from within. This policy was started about 12 years ago and it has worked well. Our staff know we do this and are regularly encouraged to seek growth and advancement opportunities in the firm. We also promote a family environment. While we are not our staff’s family, we do try to manage and limit after hours and weekend work. We work hard to develop team morale and regularly have events that allow staff to bring friends or family. For our 20th anniversary, we took our entire staff and their families to Walt Disney World. Community and team building is something Arrive takes very seriously.
TZL: You’ve been with the firm since its inception more than 20 years ago. What are some of the greatest changes you’ve seen in the industry during this time and how has the firm stepped up to meet them? MT: Since we started the firm, we’ve experienced great highs and some great lows. The senior housing and multi- family markets tend to get very hot, over lend, over build, and then have problems. We have seen this cycle many times with assisted living and market rate apartments. Though we focus only on housing, we have kept ourselves diverse, continually being in as many sectors of the housing market as possible. We do all levels of senior housing, market rate and affordable apartments, student housing, and town homes. When one area slows, typically the others continue. Another change has been technology; 23 years ago, we were barely drawing electronically. It was still sort of a novelty. Fast forward to now and we literally do everything electronically. We render buildings in pre- design and use Revit to construct the building virtually. These advances have been costly in terms of time and staff. As a smaller firm we have had to discover and implement these drawings, renderings, and management programs from scratch. Part of my job as managing principal is to oversee how all of this works for our firm, then push and pull them into being at times. TZL: They say failure is a great teacher. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve had to learn the hard way? MT: The biggest lesson I learned in business was in 2008, during the Great Recession. I saw the writing on the wall of the downturn in mid-2008 but chose to stay overly optimistic and even deaf to it. We’d survived other downturns in the market sector, including 9/11. I learned to stay ultra-conservative in business. We have
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THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 4, 2021, ISSUE 1411
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