What Do Architects Actually Get Paid For?

Many years ago, early in my career in the building industry as a specification rep, I was talking with a very senior person at one of Australia’s largest architecture practices.

It’s a story I’ve retold numerous times to our clients over the years because it fundamentally changed the way I thought about specification.

We were discussing the prospect of him and his firm specifying our products in their upcoming projects.

At one point, he politely stopped me mid-sentence and asked me a question that I thought had a pretty obvious answer.

“Luke, what do you think we get paid for?”

I said something along the lines of, “You’re architects. You get paid to design buildings.”

His response has stuck with me ever since.

“I can design the world’s most beautiful building on a napkin. But that’s not what allows us to submit an invoice and get paid. What we actually get paid for is delivering and documenting projects.”

He went on to explain the commercial reality of running an architecture practice.

When they won a project, they had an agreed fee to deliver it. From the first minute someone started working on that project, the clock was ticking and the profit was being reduced.

Time was their commodity.

And he wasn’t just talking about product specification. The same principle applied to the software they used, the consultants they worked with, suppliers and other project partners.

The good ones saved them time. They made information easy to access, reduced unnecessary work and helped their team get things done.

Others created more work, more follow-up and more time that had to be absorbed within the same project fee.

It sounds pretty obvious when I explain it now. At the time, though, it was a perspective I hadn’t really considered.

So, what does this mean for building product manufacturers?

Architects need to make product decisions within the commercial constraints of delivering a project. Manufacturers that make their products faster to research, easier to evaluate and more efficient to document can reduce the time and uncertainty involved in specification. When several products are otherwise suitable for a project, that can have a real influence on which product gets specified.

How the economics of an architecture practice influence specification

We quite rightly think about architecture as a creative profession. But architecture practices, particularly those delivering large commercial projects, are also professional services businesses.

They have project fees, labour costs, software costs, overheads and deadlines. They need to deliver good architecture, but they also need to deliver it profitably.

That commercial reality has a very practical impact on how building products are researched, selected and specified.

The architect made another comment that has stayed with me.

“If you think we sit around for half an hour debating the merits of one product over another, you’re kidding yourself.”

His point wasn’t that architects don’t care about the products they specify or don’t spend time considering them. It was that they simply don’t have unlimited time to make those decisions.

Think about how many product selections can be involved in documenting a major commercial building.

There are products across the façade, flooring, ceilings, lighting, plumbing, bathrooms, doors, hardware, furniture, roofing, insulation, fire protection and countless other categories. Then multiply those decisions across different spaces, applications and project requirements.

If every product selection became a lengthy research and evaluation exercise, it would become very difficult to deliver the project profitably..

As he put it to me:

“We don’t get paid for making decisions. We need to make decisions quickly.”

For me, that was a pretty significant insight.

Your product isn’t the centre of the architect’s project

Building product manufacturers are understandably passionate about their products.

Ask a paint manufacturer about the importance of selecting the right coating system and they’ll tell you it’s critical.

Ask a plumbing fixture manufacturer about selecting the right fixtures and you’ll probably get a similar answer.

The façade manufacturer cares deeply about the façade. The flooring manufacturer cares about the flooring. The lighting manufacturer cares about the lighting.

And they’re all right to care.

The difference is that the architect has to think about all of them.

A manufacturer might spend every working day thinking about one product category. For the architect, that same category could be one of hundreds of decisions that need to be made to keep the project moving.

It’s also worth remembering that the architect isn’t the end consumer. They’re not choosing a product for their own home or something they’re personally going to live with every day. They’re making a professional decision on behalf of a project and a client. It’s a design decision, certainly, but it’s also a commercial decision — one that needs to consider performance, compliance, budget, availability and the time required to properly research and document it.

That doesn’t mean architects don’t care about product quality or performance. It means manufacturers need to be realistic and pragmatic about the amount of time a designer can reasonably spend evaluating their particular product.

Does the best building product always get specified?

No. And this was probably the most uncomfortable part of that original conversation for me.

At the time, we’d put enormous effort into the quality of the products we represented. We understood their features and benefits and genuinely believed we had a very good product.

Naturally, you want to believe that if your product is better, designers will recognise that and specify it.

But product specification doesn’t happen in isolation.

The architect explained that they might have three products they considered perfectly suitable for an application. They may even have a slight preference for one of them.

But if specifying that product takes significantly more work, why would they necessarily spend the additional project time doing it?

That extra half an hour or hour — and potentially much longer when repeated across a project — comes out of the same project fee.

There is another commercial reality at play too: specifying a particular product doesn’t guarantee that exact product will ultimately be purchased.

Projects move into procurement. Alternatives can be proposed. Contractors may have preferred suppliers. Budgets change. Clients can approve substitutions.

An architect could spend considerably more time researching and documenting a preferred product only for an alternative to eventually be installed.

So where several products satisfy the project’s design, performance and compliance requirements, being easier to select and document can become a genuine competitive advantage.

How easy is your product to specify?

Over the years, this has led me to think about a slightly different question:

How much does it cost an architect to specify your product?

I’m not talking about the purchase price. I’m talking about the cost in their time.

Imagine two manufacturers whose products are both suitable for a project.

The first has a clear website. Product information is current and consistent. Technical data and test reports are easy to find. BIM and CAD content is immediately accessible and well made. Specification information is clear. And when the architect does need assistance, there are knowledgeable people available to help.

The second manufacturer has an equally good physical product, perhaps even slightly ‘better’, but the experience around it is completely different.

Information is scattered around the website. Some documents appear outdated. Technical information is difficult to locate. BIM content is missing, gated, or difficult to use. Information differs between resources. Getting an answer to a question requires several emails or phone calls.

From the architect’s perspective, those products have very different costs to specify.

And when project time directly affects profitability, that matters.

Make your business easier for architects to work with

This was the light-bulb moment for me.

Initially, the conversation I had with the architect was a little disheartening.

We’d spent so much time thinking about the product itself. Realising that having a great product wasn’t necessarily enough wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

But it didn’t take long for me to see the opportunity.

If architects were operating within genuine commercial constraints, we could become a better supplier by understanding those constraints.

We could make our products easier to research, select and document.

We could provide better technical information and make it easier to find.

We could improve the breadth and quality of our digital product data and keep it current.

We could provide BIM and other design resources that genuinely saved designers time.

And we could back those resources up with knowledgeable, responsive people when someone needed help.

I started thinking about it in fairly simple terms:

Are we a commercial asset to the architecture practice, or are we creating more work for them, compared to our competitors?

That question has stayed with me throughout my career.

And many years after that original conversation, I still hear essentially the same frustration from designers.

“Why don’t manufacturers give us the things we actually need to do our jobs?”

Or, put another way:

“Don’t they understand how we actually work?”

I’ve heard versions of this conversation countless times over the years, and it was one of the reasons we helped bring together the Open Letter to Building Product Manufacturers – a letter from designers to manufacturers, explaining in their own words what they actually need from them.

A lot has changed in our industry since my conversation with that architect all those years ago, but the underlying commercial principle hasn’t.

Where does BIM content fit into product specification?

Given the work we do at IGS, it would be easy for me to turn this into an argument that every manufacturer simply needs BIM content.

That’s not the point.

High-quality BIM content can make a manufacturer’s products substantially easier for architects and other designers to incorporate into their projects. But BIM is only one part of the experience.

A manufacturer can have BIM files and still be difficult to specify.

The files might be poorly made. They might be behind a ‘gate’ or hard to find. The product information inside them might not match the manufacturer’s other spec literature. Technical documents might be outdated. Test information might be missing. Or finding the right product on the website might be difficult in the first place.

Architects don’t experience these things independently. They experience the manufacturer as a whole.

The website, product data, technical literature, BIM and CAD resources, specification information and the people behind them all contribute to how easy it is to confidently select and specify a product.

What do architects need from building product manufacturers?

In my experience, one of the most useful things a manufacturer can do is help a designer get to a good decision quickly.

Architects generally need to be able to establish:

• Is this product suitable for my application?
• Does it meet the project’s technical and performance requirements?
• Is the product information current and reliable?
• Is it likely to fit within the project’s budget?
• Can I access the testing, certification or other evidence I need?
• Can I efficiently incorporate the product into my design and documentation?
• Can I get knowledgeable support if I need it?

Manufacturers naturally want designers to understand every advantage their products offer. We spend enormous amounts of time developing those advantages, so of course we want to talk about them.

But making a product easier to specify isn’t about giving an architect more information to work through.

It’s about giving them the right information and resources, at the time they need it, in a form they can actually use.

Look at specification from the architect’s side of the table

That conversation happened many years ago, but I still think about it and mention it to our clients regularly.

It taught me something much broader than how architects choose products, which is:

If you want to sell successfully to another business, you need to understand how that business actually works.

Building product manufacturers understandably look at specification through the lens of their own products. We think about performance, features, innovation, aesthetics and all the reasons someone should choose us over a competitor.

Those things matter.

But so do the commercial realities facing the people we’re asking to specify them.

If you’re a building product manufacturer trying to increase specification, it’s worth occasionally looking at your business from the architect’s side of the table.

How quickly can someone access the information they need?

How confident can they be that it’s current and accurate?

How much work are you asking them to do that you could have done for them?

Are your people, processes and digital resources saving them time or consuming it?

And ultimately:

Are you making it easier for your customers to do their jobs?

Having a great product matters. That’s undeniable.

But understanding the business of the people you’re asking to specify it matters too.