2000-2001

In January of 2000 I formed my own company. A few months later, with only one house commission, I went off on my own. Before I did this, I sold my house and bought a tiny apartment on the Intracoastal Waterway to keep my bills down. At night I taught drafting technology at New England Tech to help pay the bills. Things picked up quickly and I was able to stop teaching after two semesters.

I liked teaching in the past but this time it was a chore. I had taught renaissance and baroque humanities at Valencia community college and Interior design at Southern college. Teaching drafting wasn’t much fun. The students at the college were mostly eighteen year old young men who thought they knew everything. Not only that, I was given the most advanced classes to teach. Given my growing workload it was hard to find the time to properly prepare for the classes.

Starting out I knew a great deal about architecture but not much about how to run a practice from the business end of things. My father hadn’t shared much on how the business ran and I learned little from the other companies I worked for. When you work for a firm they insulate you from the business end of things. I worked all kinds of hours back then. At the time my office was on the northwest corner of Harvey Building and it faced a busy bar. I remember slogging away on a Saturday night hearing people downstairs having a great time and thinking, “what am I doing this for?”

My first big commission was for an Island Caribbean style house on the intracoastal waterway. The clients, Mr and Mrs. Perez were wonderful people and they gave me the opportunity to work with them on the design for most everything in the house. We did scale models of key rooms, and worked together to create the finish details that gave the house a cohesive feel. We had fifty six sheets of drawings on that house. We think it is a far better house when we have the opportunity to work on all of the details. On that job we were fortunate to have worked with Ariane Parrish, president of A. Design at Sunninghill. For a link to her website click link. She is a designer who was sensitive to what the client was trying to do. Using the colorful Caribbean palette can be a challenge. She worked well with Mr and Mrs. Perez and finished things up beautifully. As a team we created a beautiful result. I'm still very proud of that house. They have a small plaque at the front gate that attributes the design of the house to our firm.

After about six months in business, it became obvious that I couldn’t do any more without employees. I had been working out of my apartment doing everything myself and while it had been efficient, I really needed an office. I took a one room office at the Harvey building and hired my first employee. I expanded after a few months when I felt comfortable I’d made the right decision. Learning how to hire, retain and manage employees is where you make or break it: If you can’t grow and manage an organization you can’t have a successful business. Most of my early hires were not very good ones. I didn’t have a great pool of prospects to pull from. The economy was doing well and nobody wanted to work for a small start up company like mine. Eventually I found people that were able to put the work together competently.

A big source of early work was retail tenant build outs at Cityplace. When I created my initial business model, I thought retail architecture would be a big part of the practice. Today it’s a fraction of what we do though we get an occasional store to design. We have not done much work for the big chains as they usually have their own corporate firms that handle all their stores or its cookbook design. I found it was better to work with the smaller mom and pop companies as there is more opportunity to do design work.

After Cityplace opened, the demand for retail tenant build outs subsided and we started moving up to larger projects. In 2001 We got our chance at some larger contracts. One of the professionals I met early in my practice was David Keir of Seminole Bay Land Company. David thinks outside the box and comes up with great designs. For a link to his website click link. He was doing planning for two large projects and introduced me to developer, Alden Mamann. We were retained to do a forty-four unit townhouse project and a 72,000 square foot medical office complex. These were big jobs and we were excited to be awarded the commissions. At this point I had two employees and we ramped up and started work on the Townhouses while I developed the design for the medical office building. Since we didn’t have medical office experience, we teamed up with Howarth “Hap” Lewis. We did the design and his office did the production work. I learned a good deal working with Hap as he is very knowledge about medical office buildings. Sadly once we were done the funding wasn’t available to build so the medical office project so it never happened. It is tough to see so much effort end up in a file cabinet.

In the mean time we had finished up the construction documents for a forty-four unit townhouse project but there were civil problems that hindered it from moving forward. The project was in the C-51 canal basin and South Florida Water Management was enforcing some pretty rigorous constraints. The civil engineer finally found a Hydrologist that was able to do some analysis to make the site work. At this point the project had been sold to another developer who finished it. We did a house for him a few years later in Highland Beach.

The World Trade Center attacks worsened an already faltering construction market. Many projects went onto hold until people could figure out if this attack was part of some larger destabilization of the country. I remember that day well. My mother called me and told me what had happened and I went down to this little greasy spoon restaurant across the street from my office to watch it on T.V. The room was hushed as we all watched in stunned amazement. All airline service stopped. It was strange to not hear any planes in the air. For many nights afterward I think we were all glued to our televisions, trying to make sense of what had happened. Cars everywhere had American flags on them. Everyone was afraid and unsure what was going to happen. Things ground to a halt but we had enough momentum from the work we had that it did not hurt us all that much.