If you can articulate a vision for the future of your practice, then you can plan a route to make it happen. We have helped more than 60 architectural practices define their long-term business aims and plan strategies for then achieving those aims. For each practice, the process and the results have been very different.

Ways that we have helped include:

Facilitating away days
We regularly help practices to set up and then run away days. These might be intimate gatherings of partners and directors to mull over their strategic vision and reach consensus about their collective aims. Equally, they might be with larger groups, including Associates and key support staff, to agree the actions that will allow a vision to become reality. We also work with more junior groups or working parties that are tasked with delivering specific aspects of a broader business plan.

Defining and maintaining a practice’s ethos
What are your core values? What do you want people to say when they discuss your practice? How do you want to balance design excellence and commercial expediency? How can you inspire even your most junior staff to express your ethos? Colander can work with you to define and then communicate your core values, to help the people who work with you to reinforce these values and strengthen your brand through the way they behave and the work that they deliver.

Developing 3 to 5 year business aspirations: who, what, where, when, why and finally, how.
What do you want to be doing in 3 to 5 years time? It is important to start with a clear understanding of where your practice is at the moment (practice reviews). Then, we can help you to define the aims and aspirations for your practice and develop a strategy for achieving this vision, through viable goals and objectives, with appropriate actions and milestones.

Succession planning
Succession planning is not simply about dealing with the retirement of senior partners. As a practice develops so do the individuals that lead it; roles and interests change and there is a need for others to step up to the mark and take on new responsibilities. We can help define new challenges, identify the skills required to meet these challenges and ease the transition away from one set of responsibilities to another, for both the senior people and the more junior, aspiring individuals. staff development

Practice structures
Structure follows strategy, and our strategic work with practices leads on to creating effective organisational structures and clear job roles for architectural teams and their support staff (staff development). Colander has developed a generic matrix of tasks and skills to assist in this work (tasks and skills matrices).

These consultancy services dovetail with the training courses that we also run on this subject:
Business management for architects
Business planning for architects
Financial management for architects