Founder Insights: David Skelley - Lighting Designer & Architect - DJCoalition

Firm & Founder

David Skelley is a lighting designer, trained architect and founder of DJCoalition. Part of his time as an architect was spent working in New York City in the late 80’s where he found out about lighting design.

Upon eventually returning to Australia, David worked at an architecture firm where in some cases they had to hire a lighting designer. He couldn't find anyone, so he ended up doing lighting design himself within the practice.

DJCoalition operates out of 3 offices in Sydney, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok. The first office was opened in 1991 in Sydney. Since then David has grown and expanded the firm to 19 team members. DJCoalition has completed projects in over 30 different countries.

David’s Key Takeaways

• The company's growth was initially unplanned, taking opportunities as they came along, particularly during the 2000 Sydney Olympics which provided exposure to international clients.

• Southeast Asia proved to be a more receptive market for hospitality lighting design compared to Australia, leading to expansion in the region.

• There's a difference in perception of lighting design between Southeast Asia (emotional/experiential) and Western countries (engineering/quantitative).

• The company focuses on educating the market about the value of lighting design beyond just technical aspects, through formal teaching, talks, and one-on-one consultations.

• The main challenge in acquiring projects is a lack of market awareness rather than competition from other lighting designers.

• The company's current growth phase is focused on expanding within existing offices, particularly in Vietnam, rather than opening new locations.

• The organizational structure is relatively flat, allowing direct communication between David and all team members.

• Emphasis on being intentional about business growth, seeking specialist advice early, and hiring administrative support to focus on core competencies.

Website & Selected Projects

Q&A with David

I see that your team is currently 19 (including yourself), Do you plan on growing it or remaining at this size, and was it your rationale for growth?

Initially, there wasn't any planned approach. A big thing that happened near the start of our business in 2000 when Sydney had the Olympics. That meant that the city had foreign investment, and also foreign skill consultants coming in and helping with the preparation for the games. And a lot of that wasn't just the games venues. It was also upgrading the city, you know, the public realm in the city, but also upgrading all of the accommodation opportunities.

There was a lot of hospitality work that we were focusing on anyway, and that exposed us to a group of developers and consultants who were based in Asia. We formed some great relationships there, particularly with people in Singapore. So that built a bridge for us into Southeast Asia. We then found that there was actually a greater acceptance for what we do in Southeast Asia than in Australia.

Australia is still a very young, unsophisticated market for hospitality design, whereas Southeast Asia has a great history of awesome properties, places to stay, and destination venues. There was a much bigger understanding of what I do and acceptance of what I do and the value of what I do in Southeast Asia.

Thailand was one of the places where we started to win some projects, and we quickly found that to be effective in that market, we needed Thai speakers. In Singapore and India and the Maldives and places like that, it's relatively International, but 25 years ago or so, in Thailand, you really needed to speak to Thai, particularly with contractors and guys on site. So we started hiring people in Thailand, which just led to setting up a business in Thailand.

No great plan there. It just happened (growing the practice). It was a response to opportunities that I took. But since then, there has definitely a plan to expand within Southeast Asia. So Thailand (Bangkok) is now our central office. It's our main office, and we have opened another office in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh) and Australia (Sydney) is still going but much smaller, our smallest office now.

Do you expect that the work in Australia will slow down, or are you hoping to maintain it there, while most of your focus is going into the Southeast Asian market or other locations around the world?

I feel generally in Australia, there tends to be an understanding of lighting design as purely engineering in terms of light as an element that you can measure in a quantity, and that's how you determine a good design. In Southeast Asia, it's not like that. In Southeast Asia they understand light as a medium to facilitate emotions. You measure lighting, not by a meter but you measure lighting by how you feel in a space, how your customers feel, how popular it is, and how people keep coming back. So that's much more closely aligned with the way that I think, of course.

So having the opportunity to have an office in Australia and an office in Southeast Asia allows you to bridge both of those and bring the best of each to the other, that's why I keep maintaining a Sydney office.

It's much harder to do our work in Australia, there are many people who don't understand lighting as anything more than doing a lux plot, calculating how much light there is in a certain place. So therefore someone with more of an engineering skill set is our competitor. And we don't want to do that. Our fees reflect a greater involvement in things like understanding the design narrative, the narrative supporting the design narrative, and coordinating.

So our fees are often not competitive with the guy that rolls out a light map showing how much light there is, and goes, okay, there you go, there's the design.

What do you think is your value proposition that helps you distinguish yourself from electrical/light engineers?

So the first thing we do to respond to that is educate our market, because there's no point telling them that light is something that we respond to, emotionally, biologically, as well as visually when they don't really understand that and all they think is light is something you measure with a meter.

We do that formally in terms of teaching at schools or universities. Mostly, we do it at events, like giving talks. We do it one on one, with webinars, with consultancy practices or developers helping them understand. Education is a huge amount of time for us.

Thankfully, there's a lot of really good research that's gone into things like wellness and sleep quality that link quality of life with lighting and light. Thankfully in the last 20 years, people have started to think about that more. I definitely notice the change.

Once people kind of get it, our value proposition is very easy, because then they see that we are trying to set ourselves up to be a point of excellence for lighting or a center of excellence. We understand more than just doing a lighting plan. We understand the physiology of a human, we understand the technical sides of how you control light to give you the maximum benefits. And we also understand construction processes, costs, budgets, all of those sorts of things. So we're trying to become really well-rounded in everything, which will definitely set us apart from the typical engineering package or architecture package.

Is the challenge of competing with other lighting designers or the lack of market awareness a greater hurdle for acquiring work?

I definitely think it's the lack of market awareness. It's not competition with other lighting designers. I think if the market awareness increases, there's plenty of work to go around and every lighting designer generally approaches things slightly differently. So customers will choose who they want.

Is your current team structure and size intentional?

With the number I have anyone in the team reports to me on anything, we are structured very flat with our directors and junior/intermediate staff. Within that sort of number, I can have direct contact or work directly with anybody in the organization.

I think that's a good thing because I do want to leave behind something. There is a legacy element in this and it came about through the commitment to educate the market. When you make that commitment, you need to change the way that people think about the market and change the way your staff think about it as well. At the level where we are, I can do that with each staff member, if we go to more I lose that.

Have you given any thought to succession planning?

I think succession planning is really important and I left that way too late. I should have done that 15 years ago. I think you should set up a business with a succession plan. Clearly identify what your vision and your goals are and then when you reach that point you can step away, or you can take it to the next level, or whatever you decide.

Just this month, I'm going to talk with all the senior designers because I’m probably happy in five years not to do so much. They've already indicated that they're happy to step up and for me to work less and I become kind of like a resource to them.

What being a consultant in the construction industry taught me is that there comes to a point where you always gotta give the baby back. You know, you spend a lot of time on creating an amazing place but you've still gotta give it to them and they might do with it whatever they want to do, and that's up to them because it's theirs. So that point will come with the practice as well.

What improvement would you have made to your practice if you could go back in time?

I could have been more intentional. I never actually wanted to own my business. But I was very lucky enough to have children, and I just talked to my boss about it when that was about to happen. So back in 1990s, it was clear that if I wanted to work less and spend time with my children, it would be difficult.

So then I thought, well, that's it, I'm going to start my own practice, and then I can decide when I want to work. The problem with that, though, is that I didn't really end up deciding when I would want to work, because you get so much work.

So I should have been more intentional and known about the practical sides of business. You know, it would have been great to have a business coach to set up the business with, rather than just relying on your own general knowledge.

I think it would have been better to hire someone earlier, but not a designer. I think hiring an administration person to take all that load away. I mean, if you're an administration person, hire a designer. If you're a designer, hire an administration person. It's just about being intentional, knowing it's a business. To create the best out of that, you need special advice and people to help you carry the load.

What does a typical day look like?

There are things I do for the practice as a whole, and that would take up 30% of my time, which is marketing, preparing content for marketing, writing, and posting. The other 70% is spent divided across the three offices.

So let's say, let's say eight hours in the day then two and a half hours on marketing, content, writing, thinking, and planning. Then another sort of two and a half hours on administration but others in the practice do all of that, I kind of follow up and make sure things are happening. Then the remaining third of the day would be actually working on projects.

I don't travel very much, and I don't attend very many meetings at all. That's all done by my team. I'm not the front face of many projects, only a few small projects that require really specialist input. I do critique all of the concepts that are generated across all the offices. Still quite active in design. Let's say a third administration, a third design, and a third business development.

How much planning do you do for potential recessions, and what strategies do you have in place as a defence against them?

We can fairly accurately predict when a recession is coming or when a downturn in our work is coming because we've been through three that I can remember since 1990. We know the cycle, and we can see the cycle of global business, and where we fit in that cycle.

We tend to be busy in recession times, but very slow the year before a recession. You can see the indicators in the market that okay, next year is going to be slow.

A highly commercial business will release a lot of staff, and they won't have to dip into their own salary. They then face the problem of what happens when it gets busy again. They've got to hire staff again.

I believe it’s better to maintain a core of really good staff, who are totally aligned with the brand of the business. If you find people like that, you should hold on to them, and it's better to cut your own salary and keep that core. Throughout the pandemic, I'm sure a business coach would have said you've got too much staff. But I think we were really well placed with the people we had.

If you had to identify one key factor that has contributed to the long-term success of DJCoalition, what would it be?

Short answer: Culture

Long answer: It's just amazing to see people become the best they are. And if you can facilitate that, in your organization, it's just amazing. When people find a place where they're respected and supported and diversity is welcome, then they can flourish.

There is also financial value in that because they contribute more, but there's also great pride in that. It kind of goes back to the whole idea of why you set up the business. I didn't set up the business to make money, although I'm glad it does. I set up the business to make better lighting outcomes. That goes back to that whole idea of education and trying to be a center of excellence for lighting.

If you can facilitate your team to also understand that goal and commit to the goal, and they flourish as people, and designers, then that's a really successful culture, and that's how we build on it.

I mean, our culture is very diverse. There are four or five different backgrounds, there are Vietnamese, Spanish, Thai, Filipino, I was born in New Zealand. So there's lots of diversity in terms of nationality. There's lots of diversity in terms of just who they are as people.

So I think business culture is great for that. I think people can see that DJC is a company that listens and is genuinely interested in creating solutions that are tailored for each individual client for their benefit and they get personal service from people who care.