Founder Insights: Andy Matthews - Architect - Andy Matthews Studio

Firm & Founder

This week’s case study is Andy Matthews - an architect and founder of Andy Matthews Studio based out of London, England.

At the moment, Andy and his firm focus primarily on residential and retail projects. He founded it in March 2021

Prior to starting his practice, Andy had 12+ years of experience as an ARB/RIBA licensed architect in the UK. He also ran his own architectural photography business for 13 years before stopping to focus entirely on his new practice. https://www.andymatthewsphoto.com/

Andy’s Key Takeaways

• Andy and his team work a 4-day work week for improved work-life balance and to break the culture of long hours in the design industry.

• The firm is selective about clients, prioritizing those who support the 4-day work structure, which has contributed to maintaining quality and employee satisfaction.

• The firm aims for growth only to meet work demands, rather than pursuing growth for its own sake. They typically manage 10 to 15 projects simultaneously.

• Investing in IT consultants and tools allows the firm to focus more on client work and personal development.

• All employees receive full salaries with benchmarked pay based on industry standards (RIBA), along with bonuses and non-performance-related perks, such as travel discounts.

• The firm is in the process of establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) like gross value add per employee, which will help in assessing business performance over time.

• In the next 5 to 15 years, Andy hopes for financial resilience, project growth, and personal achievements like building a house.

• Andy acknowledges the difficulty of taking vacations during the early stages of business, reflecting the typical challenges faced by new entrepreneurs.

Website & Selected Projects

Q&A with Andy

Where did you get the idea for the 4-day work week and how is it structured?

It was my previous business partner's idea. I worked too much, unfortunately, but it is a good idea, and it's all about, I think what's the point in starting your own firm if you're not going to make a change in some way? I talk about breaking the chain, so like a culture of long hours and overwork, so that was the original thought.

Previously, I'd worked at firms quite regularly doing 80-hour weeks for nine years and so on and I learned a lot through that. But at the same time, it could have been more efficient. So the idea is to change that. Also proving you don't need to work long hours to run a design-based practice. Not needing to compromise on quality or being an average kind of practice that doesn't maybe focus on design.

It's hard because you've taken 25, 20% of your work week away but most people aren't looking at anything on Friday afternoon anyway, really. There is some compromise I do with other studios though.

We do 32 hours a week, eight hours over four days. There are occasions where we might have to do a bit more, but the idea is not to then work up to 40 hours. Most of the clients that we work with do support it and we're very selective about who we work with. If they're not up for that, then we're not going to work. We are all still considered full-time employees under those hours here in the UK.

I mean, if you are running a job on-site, there is an expectation that you might check your email Friday and spend 30 minutes solving a query. Don't leave someone hanging, but generally, you shouldn't be doing any drafting or delivery work.

Another benefit of it is that London's a lot quieter on a Friday. People get very used to having a three-day weekend very quickly and then it's hard to go back.

How does your payout and billing work for the 4-day week?

We pay for a full-time salary, so there's no loss of pay. I mean, you can argue whether we're paying high, medium or low, but we try and benchmark those as much as we can. But the idea is you're not being penalized for that that day, and you're encouraged not to work on that Friday. It should be a day of rest.

What is your approach to firm/team growth?

I can't do it all on my own and really everything is about the team. Unless the team is really good, we can't deliver on anything that I want to do. Coming to realize that I needed admin support has literally been life-changing.

I think we're at a nice scale. We do need a few more people to give people a bit more breathing room because it's quite intense. We're all on top of each other, and obviously, we're trying to do a lot and set up systems and grow the business and so on.

But I think there is an advantage to a scale of eight to twelve people, where things hopefully get a bit easier. And you know, you've got a few more systems in place, and projects are bigger, they've got bigger drawdowns and so on.

But in terms of growth, I think we do want to grow. I do see the benefit in growth, but it's not growth for growth's sake and we will only grow to service the work.

How many projects are usually worked on simultaneously within the team?

We usually have 10 to 15 projects in play at any one time, and they can be kind of coming up and down. We do try and use other people to plug into that, such as freelancers for 3D modelling and visuals. The idea is to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible, that you don't commit the overheads that you can't then afford later if it does get a bit quiet. It's really tricky, at a small scale, you need cash. You just need cash all the time.

We have a proper IT consultant, it costs money, but at ~700 pounds a month, including our licenses for certain things, that's a day I save and would have spent on my own if we didn’t use that. So it's about valuing your time and the more of our time that we can free up to work for our clients or improve ourselves I think is the smart thing. Architects strike themselves too thin and try to do everything.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how technologically enabled is your firm?

Probably about a seven. I think we use CAD in a very basic way, just drafting. So we don't really optimize that very well. We use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) called Capsule to manage all our contacts, leads and work that comes in. We have a document management system and an email filing one, we just upgraded to a much more capable timesheet and business processing application. We use Otter for meeting transcriptions and Calendly for scheduling. We use Typeform to onboard clients, and get all their brief information and business details. And it saves me having to remember it and pass it on.

What is the biggest challenge at the moment?

Staffing is the hardest thing to get right, it takes a lot of effort and energy. Also making sure leads and things come into business, but we are becoming more established and having things that are being published which helps.

What is your interview process?

We are trying to improve that at the moment. It is tricky, in some cases we might end up having a two hour interview. We had this idea that you get them in for a first chat, and you see if that works and then on the next one, you have a two hour chat. And that seems like a lot, but the idea is that somebody can't bullshit their way past that point.

The two hours seem like a lot is a lot, but actually, if you think about it you're investing in that person, and if you get it wrong then there can be setbacks.

Onboarding tasks come in certain sections over four weeks. Basically, we don't just do it all on day one.

How do you decide how much to pay employees and what are some company perks?

Everyone is on salary apart from me, I take a basic cut in the dividends after we make any money. Then everyone is on a benchmark salary against certain surveys that are updated in UK and reviewed. We want to pay bonuses where possible, but obviously that's dependent on the success of the studio each year. We do try and do things like pay for rail cards. You get discounts on rail travel in UK, and give everyone 300 pounds on Christmas each year, which is a tax-free benefit. You get 650-pound vouchers to spend where you want and it is stuff that is not performance related.

What is one financial metric you prioritize?

One of the things is something called a GVA, gross value add per employee, which is something where we're working through and then we will set targets against that for the year.

The addition of our studio manager is helping in that area as well. I think those systems will continue to improve. We know what we need to do which is just improving bit by bit.

What is one long-term plan that you have? (5+ years)

I think in five years hopefully, we will grow in the size of projects and be more comfortable there, being more resilient financially, having more cash in the bank just to weather things through, and potentially buying our own studio.

Me not working so hard anymore, ideally. Then at some point, the longer-term plan is that I'd like to build my own house with myself and my partner.

Are you looking to expand project work outside of London?

We are doing quite well out of London at the moment, and not everybody is at the scale that we are. We're able to take advantage of that. Sector wise we've focused on residential and to some extent, retail as well. And the retail hasn't moved on as quickly as hoped, but we have an extraordinarily big back catalog of stuff, of all sorts of other different sectors and things going on.

We're working really closely with a press and comms person to help us get to that point in two years where we've got a different, different range of work on the back of what we're doing now. I see everything we do as a stepping stone to another project or another important thing.

How do you assess your firm's current level of progress?

So three years full time in September. In some ways, we've only just scratched stuff, and it takes a long time to get stuff built and published. I think we're quite young as a business. In other ways, I feel quite tired from the energy I put in over the last three years. And in other ways, sometimes I feel like we're quite mature. So it depends really. I think we're ahead of some other people three years in. I think we're behind in certain other areas.

At some point it's quite nice to step back and think, we created this, and these jobs didn't exist before. My job still exists at my previous firm. So we've made five jobs and that's quite rewarding in itself. I created this from nothing. I didn't put any savings in I just started working on small projects to earn money to pay for software licenses and computer hardware.

What's interesting about it as well is you don't see the everyday incremental improvements that you've made. You can't always see the chasm of where you've gone from and being able to step back and try and reflect on that I think is helpful.

Do you manage to get any vacation time in the year?

Not as much I as would like, but that is a priority to improve. But as you know, the first five years of starting any business are hard and we have to commit to that. The idea is that my reward is delayed. There is, ideally, if we get it right, delayed gratification, plenty of lifestyle, complexhopefully some financial reward and more flexibility. If you dig in, I strongly, firmly believe that the hard effort we're trusting in now will result in one great success.