Business coaching transform your architecture practice.

That's exactly what we are going to be discussing in this episode

of architecture business club, the weekly podcast for solo and small firm

architecture, practice owners, just like you who want to build a profitable

future proof architecture business.

That fits around their life.

I'm the host, Jon Clayton.

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Now let's discuss business coaching with Kris Baxter.

Kris is a chartered architectural technologist and the founder

of Studio 11 Architecture, a collective of creative designers

that produce distinctive functional architecture right across the UK.

The team specialize in bespoke home design, has won a string of awards and

had their work featured on the UK's most popular property TV design show.

Visit studio11architecture.

co.

uk.

to connect with Kris and the team.

Kris, thanks for joining me today.

Before we dive into things, I know you're a big Formula One fan and I just

wanted to ask how has this Formula One season compared to previous ones for you?

Well, I'm a massive McLaren fan, so from my

point of view, it's fantastic.

Lando and, um, Oscar are right up there.

Have you, uh, have you ever been to watch the Formula One?

Yeah, we went, um, used to go with my brother quite regularly.

Um, I actually have splashed out this year again for tickets

next year, uh, Silverstone.

I think Monza's on my list.

Kris, so we were going to talk about today, um, not just Formula

One, we were going to talk about business coaching and you've had some experience of

business coaching and being coached, but business coaching is something that most

business owners have at least heard of, but many may not understand much about it.

So we're going to talk about your experience of being coached and

how coaching can transform an architectural design business.

So firstly, Kris, I want you to ask really what, what business was like,

um, before investing in coaching.

So, I started the practice back in 2008 and I started by myself in

my spare room, probably like most, um, most guys that start their own practice.

I got to a point where I needed to make a decision.

I was getting so much work in that I either needed to start to turn stuff away

or I needed to take the step forward and set an office up and things like that.

And, um, I took the view that I was young enough to do that and

I had the ability to do that.

I wasn't, I didn't have a family at the time.

Um, so I could take the risk.

Uh, and I took that risk and took that leap, but it kind of

snowballed very quickly after that.

And we got to a point where we were probably an office of 12.

I was completely separate from the projects.

So I ended up managing the team and managing clients, but I

didn't really do any of the stuff that we kind of trained to do.

Um, and the bit of the job that where we probably all most enjoy, which is the

hands on stuff of drawing and designing and all of those sorts of things.

Um, and I started to get to a point where I was thinking.

Is this what I want to do?

It's quite stressful because, you know, the numbers at the end

of a month to, to, um, make sure payroll is delivered and overheads

are covered and things like that.

Quite high.

Um, and I wasn't getting the day to day enjoyment of, you know, putting

life aside and being able to, um, Just sit down and come up with a

concept and draw something in essence.

Um, so ironically, we never really looked at business coaching.

Um, we were chugging along and, um, my wife had joined the practice

by that time, um, to help me out.

And, uh, we had an HR company that helped us out on little HR things.

Um, I have this thing where...

If I don't know about something, I won't go anywhere near it myself.

So I, I make a point of employing the right people to do that.

So at a very early stage, we got this HR company into to help us

sort contracts and things like that.

And they were a husband and wife team.

And, um, We went to one of their seminars and sat through three quarters

of the seminar and, um, they work very, very well together as a team.

Uh, and we ended up having a conversation with them at the end of them, whereby,

um, the husband had said to me, you know, I'm looking to do some bits outside of HR.

Um, does any of that as a business owner sort of, um, fit in with you?

And, you know, could we help you out kind of thing?

And we said, Oh, actually, yeah, some of some of the things would be

and they were more holistic things.

They were not, um, kind of the usual business coach kind of approach, uh,

which for me was a little bit more, um, resonating because I know profit and loss.

I know how to run a basic business.

Um, what it turns out I didn't know at the time is I didn't know myself that well.

And that was the thing, really, that.

that started to help me to move the business forward.

So what, what did you know about coaching before

you actually invested in it?

The only, the only coaching I knew about was the people

that dropped in on LinkedIn and said, would you like to triple your turnover

or triple your profits in nine months?

Well, and I'm, I'm a skeptical person naturally.

And I was, yeah, what, right, whatever kind of thing, but also.

Architecture is a very, very specific type of business and there's some

really basic rules you can do in business, but they don't always

apply to an architecture business.

And I never came across anybody who, who had sort of successfully run

an architecture business and was coaching because that's, that's where

we all look for, for the guidance.

And I still haven't come across one of those people, I don't think.

Um, I think.

To some degree, it's so niche that the people that are running it

actually who are doing a good job are peddling away doing a good job.

They're not, um, they're not running a sideline of a coaching business or they've

not stepped away from architecture.

They're still loving architecture and still doing architecture.

I've got it.

So the, um, the types of, I guess, like the bro marketers that you would see

popping up on LinkedIn, um, and those business coaching promising the dream.

Um, that wasn't something that really resonated with you.

No, not at all.

I think that's the true for a lot of people as well.

I think actually that for many people, there are some sort of negative

connotations when they don't really know much about business coaching and what

they do see of it doesn't inspire them to go ahead and invest in it because they

don't, it doesn't resonate with them.

And the approach that a lot of the coaches and marketers take

isn't relatable for a lot people.

Um, so Kris, could you tell me a little bit about then...about

your first coaching session.

So you'd found this person to work with.

They were taking a holistic approach to things.

Can you tell me about when you first started working with them?

What that first session was like?

We took a deliberate...

Approach to be away from the business.

So we set aside a day, uh, we went and, um, literally hired a meeting

room in a local hotel, had tea, coffee, lunch, that sort of thing.

And we just chatted and we chatted about certain things, but everything that

we chatted about related really to us and not necessarily to the business.

And I think.

One of the, the big things that I had missed the point of was that to own a

business, it has to work for you and it has to work to achieve your end goals.

Otherwise, you're just going to work.

And it suddenly dawned on me that I was just going to work.

I wasn't really creating a business that delivered.

where my aspirations were.

And to some degree, that's kind of, cause at that time, I didn't quite

know what my aspirations were and what I wanted to do with my personal life,

my family life and things change.

Uh, and Suddenly, I'd kind of gone from, my wife had joined the business

to, to having a family and my family's grown there and my priorities from

being a single guy running a business to being a family man and running

a business are entirely different.

And from my point of view, I started to then look at myself

internally a little bit more about my personality and how that affected.

day to day interaction with staff, how that affected clients.

And we did a whole load of analysis with the team and started to bring the

team into doing certain things around understanding their personality types

and all of this is stuff that kind of is nothing new but it's, it's stuff

that's kind of important to begin to understand yourself a little bit more.

And...

On that first day, uh, well, uh, I've never shared this with anybody outside

of that room, but I'm happy to share it with you now being several years later is

that I cried in that session and I cried because I suddenly realized that I don't

have my parents with me and my dad died when I was quite young and one of the big

drivers for me And my ambition and being the best and trying to be the best all the

time without having an end goal actually was to get the approval of my parents

because I wanted them to be proud of me and It took a it took him a fair while to

get that from me he knew what the answer was I didn't know what the answer was when

we were just discussing things and things like that and Yeah, I sat there and cried

Because I suddenly realized something that was so simple and so in my face.

But yeah, I couldn't see it at the time.

Wow.

Kris, thanks so much for sharing that.

Um, I mean, it sounds like that session had a profound impact on you

personally, not just the impact that it had on the business, um, and something

that you, you touched upon there.

Um, this idea that.

When you're working in your business and, and you can get, um, blinkered.

And often we don't take the time for that self reflection to actually kind

of think about why you're doing it.

Why did you start the business in the first place?

And where are you heading with it?

Why are you doing it?

Why aren't you just working at another practice?

And I think often that's something that happens when we start off

maybe with this idea and dream of, of maybe being a business owner

or creating something special.

And then often we end up just creating ourselves another job.

Yeah, exactly that.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

So, um, again, from what you said that I think I was going to ask about

if there's any things that surprised you about being coached, is there any

other things that, that surprised you about the experience of being coached?

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I think the surprise for me was how it affected me on a personal level

almost more than on a business level.

Um, it...

It made me look at how I, I am as a person, how I behave, how I can modify

that behavior because I'm aware of it now to achieve things that probably would have

gone by the wayside if I hadn't have took a step back and went, okay, well, if I

approach this in a slightly different way.

Am I actually going to get a better result?

And it's the old analogy of, of losing the battle to win the war.

That's life, isn't it?

It's, um, it's something I think you probably, as a parent, you learn when you

have kids very quickly, the, the games you play with kids to, to get what you want.

Well, that applies to life in general for everybody.

We're all big kids, small kids, uh, business kids.

Trainer kids, all of those different types of people and you can

approach things in such different ways and being adaptable as well.

Um, because the one thing I've always been really proud of is I'm really

adaptable in how I deal with people.

And in being adaptable, you can almost talk to people

individually at their level.

And what In terms of what they're seeking out of a relationship, because

everybody's seeking something out of a relationship, whether it be a

personal relationship, a business relationship, that's again, part of life.

And if you can step back and know and understand that a little bit

more, that can only help you.

And, um, you know, communication with people is always the key.

There's, you know, it's not a surprise that people who are, um, Very,

sort of, good at communicating, are generally quite successful people.

And it's not a surprise that there's some people out in the world that,

you know, are not particularly good academically, but they can communicate

well, they can work with people well, they can be very successful people.

I think that's commonly known as the gift of the gab.

I think it is, yes.

Classic Del Boy, isn't it?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Um, so, so.

I can see the experience of being coached.

It's had a profound impact on you personally.

How did that translate to, um, once you'd had that experience, how did

that translate to the impact on your architecture business moving forward?

So what happened after you'd started doing the coaching and you'd had

that moment of self realization and self awareness about all these things

that you had going on personally and how you could adapt things there.

How did it impact the architecture business itself?

So we made this, the decision that actually the direction that the

business was going was probably not the direction that we wanted it to go and

it didn't really achieve our end goals.

And, um, one of the things that the coach said to us is to have, have

an end goal, but it doesn't matter that the goal is a moving target.

You can, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be a straight line.

You can take off from here and go all the way around the houses and come

back and still get back to there.

But have that end goal as to what you want as a business owner

and what you want as a person.

So we took the view that we would change, effectively, the work that we did.

We were doing, I would say, 85 90 percent residential development, mass housing.

Um, Big numbers, but small profit margins.

And certainly from a team point of view, we were struggling to retain

staff because they were getting bored.

The good members of staff were saying, okay, well, we want, we want

to be, um, pushed a little bit more.

We want to do something a little bit different.

And I certainly, from my point of view, is sitting there thinking, I quite fancy,

you know, designing some buildings again.

That would be quite nice because that's kind of what we do.

Um, So we took the view that we were going to slowly start to reorientate

our market of where we were going to go and we obviously had had a few

projects relatively locally that were Self built one off houses and we were

lucky enough to be, um, featured on a TV show with national coverage of a,

um, sort of a modern, modern house.

And everybody in the office loved working on those projects, including me.

So it seemed a no brainer for us to, to try and move to the business to,

to take more of that into account.

Um, And we, we thought it would be a slow process.

And we thought, you know, if we get it to, you know, 60, 40, that'd be great.

But in reality, what happened was lots of how things happened

outside of our control.

So we went through a pandemic that had a big effect on cashflow and how we dealt

with staff levels and things like that.

But ultimately what's happened is the.

The ratios flip the other way.

So we predominantly now do bespoke one off houses.

We do limited amounts of residential development for old clients, um, very

select clients that we like to work with.

Um, but what has happened is the turnover has pretty much stayed the same.

The overhead is almost reduced by half.

So...

Overall, in terms of profit, then there's, there's much more

significant profit to be made there.

And I've got a team that are enjoying the work that they're doing.

They're not churning out things.

They're working through things, designing solutions to things,

engineering solutions to things.

Um, and we're now in a position where we're thinking, okay, well.

Beginning to get too much work.

So we're starting to think, okay, well, we need to recruit and we've

taken the view that we're going to recruit bottom depth, bottom up.

So we'd be really successful in bringing trainees into the business, training

them and some pop off to other practices.

That's natural.

Um, but most stay with us and they enjoy being with the practice.

They've learned the way we like to do things, the way

we want to approach projects.

And, um, we're now basically talking to the local college and say, okay, well,

you know, you've got guys, give me your best three to send to an interview.

And we'll look at, um, offering them experience, work experience with a view

to an end goal of a position, full time position once they're fully qualified.

that sounds fantastic.

Um, I love, I love the way that things have transformed for you in the practice

and the fact that You know, it's not necessarily about growing financially

with, with revenue and turnover, it's a bit of a vanity figure really, but

actually the fact that that ratio, the split of the projects has changed, that

that's had a positive impact on, um, reducing overheads and everyone's much

happier working on those projects and the fact that you've got that plan in

place to, um, recruit from the bottom up and to bring in some, um, some fresh

talent into the practice and help.

Train them and support them.

I think that's amazing.

So brilliant.

I'm so glad to hear it.

Um, Kris, what I was going to ask was, what would you say to anyone

that's curious about being coached?

I think find the coach that works for you.

Do a bit of investigation work.

Do a bit of, um, speaking to people that have worked with that coach.

It's all about finding somebody that can work with you.

If you're not going to get on, then it's just not going to work.

But if you think you can work with them...

Um, and be really open and honest and frank in the conversations you

have between each other because, you know, as business owners, nobody

likes to be told you're being silly and you're missing something out and

you know, there's some obvious things you could do to make a life better.

Nobody likes that, but that's probably the truth.

And you know, we all need to hear those, those things sometimes.

And equally on the flip side, coaches want to hear how they can do things better.

They want to understand businesses and the differences in businesses.

And I think that's really key for us is that we are a very specific type of

business and you need to have a coach that has the right mindset to actually

take a step back and go, okay, well I know all the principles, but I've got to

apply that to something that is outside of my comfort zone in the minute and

almost work together in doing that.

That's great.

I love that.

Um, Kris, is there anything else that you wanted to say that we, we haven't

covered in the course of the conversation?

I think just be open minded about things.

Set yourself some end goals.

Make sure those goals are for you personally and how you want

to, to take the business forward.

Don't put yourself in a position where you're just going to a

job because that's pointless.

The stress is far too high for that.

And, you know, be open minded to, to talking to other people.

I, I, I talk to people now.

I think, nah, that's not for me.

I know myself well enough now that, you know, I can push things to the side.

But equally, I think, oh, I really like that.

Little nuggets of information from people.

And equally, you know, work together.

Don't always assume that the architectural practices around you are competition.

Don't look over your shoulder.

Don't worry about what they're doing.

Worry about what you do, what you do well.

And stick with that.

That's great advice.

Thanks, Kris.

Um, I wanted to ask you a last question.

That's actually not anything related to being coached.

Um, I, I love discovering new places and travel, and I wondered

if you could tell me about, well, tell me one of your favorite

places and what you love about it.

So this could be anywhere nearby, far, wherever you like.

Ah, well we have a bit of a family tradition.

And we started this, um, when I first met my wife and we were dating.

And, um, we love the Norfolk coast.

Kids love it.

We love it.

The beaches are fantastic.

The only place I've been in the UK that is quite as nice is, is the

Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, to be fair.

Um, but we love the Norfolk coast.

And our tradition is on New Year's Day, every single year

without fail, we go to Wales.

And, um, we love that because you've got the beach there, but the kids love

the forest and like climbing the trees.

We've got pictures of our 11 year old hanging off branches and things like that

and it's just a happy place, I guess.

Um, and we, on New Year's Day, we go there every single day,

no matter what the weather is.

It could be pouring down with rain, it could be sunshine.

Um, we go there every single year and it is just a happy place for us as a family.

And it's a place where we can all take a breath and reset.

I guess we're thinking about, okay, well, what are we doing in the year ahead?

And that's kind of how we view it.

Oh, that's lovely.

And that's a fantastic place.

I love Wells as well.

Um, that's a bit of a bit of a family favourite for us too.

Um, Kris, thanks so much for your time today.

Really appreciate it.

Um, can you remind everyone where they can go online to, to connect

with you and find out more about you?

Sure.

Yep.

So, um, our website is studio11architecture.co.uk

You'll see team members on there.

You'll find contact details on there.

I'm happy to have a chat with anybody, um, following this.

If I can help other business owners, um, obviously, especially

architecture business owners, then that would be fantastic.

Awesome.

Thanks so much, Kris.

Next time, I'll be talking about side hustle, architectural services,

and sharing a bit about how, uh, why I started my own side hustle.

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Remember running your architecture business doesn't have to be hard.

And you don't need to do it alone.

This is Architecture Business Club.