Founder: Sophia Panova - Architect - SOZA Architecture

Sophia Panova is the founder of SOZA Architecture, based out of Boston Massachusetts.

After graduating with her M.Arch from Harvard in 2017 she spent 6 years working at a local practice in Boston and since mid-2022, has been running her own practice.

SOZA focuses on a range of project types from initial planning consultations, pre-design, zoning evaluations, schematic design, design development, construction drawing, contract negotiation and other construction administration.

Sophia is a solo founder and currently a team of 1 as she navigates the birth of her second child and growing the brand and portfolio of her practice.

Sophia’s Key Takeaways

• Sophia appreciates the flexibility of self-employment, as she believes managing a family would be more difficult in a traditional firm setting.

• Only 20% of her time is spent on production work currently, with the majority focused on business operations, marketing, and networking.

• Outsourcing tasks like BIM, branding, social media, and SEO to contractors. There’s a plan to potentially hire part-time help during maternity leave.

• Has growth ambitions but emphasizes intentional and thoughtful scaling.

• Most work comes from referrals and word of mouth, although she seeks high-end residential and commercial projects. Also interested in public sector opportunities but recognize the need for proactive marketing beyond referrals.

• Engaging with platforms like LinkedIn has been crucial for visibility and networking. Personal posts, like her viral one about undervaluing architects, have helped them secure new clients.

• Sees social media as a necessary tool to remain top-of-mind with potential clients, understanding that consistent engagement, branding, and visibility are key to building relationships and securing work.

• Planning for maternity leave involves managing client expectations, saving money, and potentially hiring temporary help.

• Works heavily with Revit for her production work but outsources renderings, which is not a favourable task.

• Focusing on forming partnerships with trusted engineers and contractors, and overcoming the perception that they lack experience as a newer firm.

Website & Selected Projects

Q&A with Sophia

What does a typical day look like? How is your time allocated and focused on different tasks?

I just try to do everything. I have a two year old, so I really have only nine to five to work. That's just what it is. I'm also 26 weeks pregnant with a second one. So part of the reason I left is because I just couldn't do it in a regular firm anymore, and maybe I thought I needed more experience, turns out, I don't.

I just needed to figure out what to do and so much of it used to be 10-12, hours of just production per day. Now that's probably 20% of my time. Everything else is marketing and figuring out business operations and reconciling books and all of that stuff.

Some weeks I'm doing two to three site visits, which can sometimes be two hours there, about two hours back, so four hours a day, three days a week. Some weeks, I don't have any site visits at all. The best part about it is flexibility and being able to make those decisions for yourself. This week I have three business development lunches, so that's going to take up a ton of my time. So there's a big portion of that. I think the networking aspect is really huge.

How big is your team right now?

Right now, it's just me full time, but I have a contractor who does my BIM, so everything from existing conditions and setting up sheets and things like I need to offload. I have somebody else that did all my branding and my new website, because I realized I put a website together early on, and it was bad. I needed somebody who was going to market to potential clients and not to architects.

He does my social media now, he does my SEO. So anything I ask him, he helps me out with that. Then aside from that, during my mat leave, I may hire somebody part time as a contractor.

Do you have a short-term plan of growing more?

I want to grow. I definitely want to grow, but it has to be intentional and it has to be thoughtful. It's a whole organization, and right now I am where I need to be. It makes sense for my life. I have like 40 years ahead of me to work, I'll figure it out. But in that process, things change too. So opportunities come up, and you have to adjust all the time. That's part of why I love it so much.

What is your most effective method for obtaining project work?

It's referrals and word of mouth. I could not believe it and I still don't believe it, because referrals and word of mouth are great. The downside is that the projects that I have and I've done in the last year and a half are not the type of projects I want to continue doing. I want to do high-end residential projects with the best clients and the best team, and I want to do that in the commercial space as well.

So there's all of these things that I'm trying to fit together, but that's not going to happen by word of mouth, maybe, if I'm lucky, so I have to be very intentional about it. How am I going to market myself out there? How am I going to put myself out there? What am I going to do?

I was terrified of posting things about myself and being honest and open and vulnerable online, and I was terrified of what my friends would think of me. I found my own community of people and all those fears are gone. 

At this point, I realized that I have to go after what I want to do and finally, having figured out what that is now, I have to put together a plan and ask people for help which is humbling also, because sometimes when people help you, you can't give them anything back other than gratitude and saying thank you and actually following their advice.

The guy who taught me about LinkedIn, Steve Flanagan, told me early on when I still had time, he said thank everybody, everybody who likes your posts. When I had time, I literally thanked everybody who liked my post. 1500 people. I thank them individually. One guy reached out and he got me, like five of my clients. Part of it is also like, you never know where work comes from. You have to be intentional and you have to be genuine. You have to actually be curious and interested in these things. That's the kind of stuff I love. So I do it.

How much do you rely on social media? Is it purely for marketing and do you want it to act as a portfolio?

People that I talk to who have been in business for a long time, architecture and then other businesses, they always tell me to stop thinking like an architect. Start thinking like a salesperson. You need to sell yourself, and what are you selling? Sales is not a bad word. All it means is you have to be front of mind.

When people think ‘I need an architect, who do I know?’ I want that to be me, and even if it's not the kind of project that I want for the time being, it’s just part of the strategy at the moment.

Steve Flanagan, he told me, do you know how many touches it takes to make a sale? Seven to eight. That's why people have newsletters, that's why people have blog posts, that's why people have all of these things. It's one (sales) strategy I know how to do.

But it needs to be front of mind. It needs to be pretty pictures, something that captures your imagination, but it's also brand. What you get on my page, is what you should be getting in person. There should not be any disconnect. When people hire you, they need to know exactly who they're getting. They need to know exactly what's happening because you've already put yourself out there.

So I think it's just dumb not to use the tools at our fingertips, right? Why miss the opportunity? I can't do all of it though. I would like to start a TikTok and do 30-second short reel, but I'm not there right now. I don't have enough interesting projects. I don't have enough stuff going on, but it is something that I want to do further on because I think that's where the new money is.

So it's kind of like you have to find the market. You have to go after it. But it's also like a way to connect with people. It's a way of also building a community that actually matters a lot, and it's very real.

On LinkedIn, I'm not trying to go after homeowners. There's no way I'm going to get a homeowner coming to me from LinkedIn. I'm trying to show myself as somebody in the industry who wants to make changes and who wants to have conversations. It gives me a sort of status. People think I'm way more successful than I am. That's how it works. There's a certain kind of credibility that it gives me, that then people are more open to talking to me, and suddenly they're like, oh, well, maybe she has something interesting to say.

Then suddenly you're not chasing work. Work is chasing you and you're making the choices for who you work with or not. That's the way that we want to hack architecture. But it does take thinking about what the client wants. Like most of my clients don’t actually know what architects do. So why would I not talk about all the different parts of their home and how to improve on it, and how to make it better, and how to think about this and that.

There are so many different subjects. Suddenly they search for one thing my video comes up because nobody else talks about it. And people love to see behind the curtain. My last post was about the messy side of a project, people love to see that stuff because it's a process. They don't always just want to see pretty pictures. They want to see how you got there. What's your thought process?

A lot of people think, oh, I'm giving away my intellectual property? No, you're not giving away that much, nobody's gonna from your two videos to be able to do it on their own. They're gonna say this guy knows what he's doing, and I want to hire him.

How are you planning for maternity leave while maintaining your firm's growth?

I am telling all my existing clients I'm pregnant and that I need them to make decisions now so that I can get it done by the end of mid-November, and you're not bothering me anymore. I literally tell them that you guys need to make decisions. I'll be gone, and anything new that comes in the door, I'm going to have to field it.

At the moment there is an interior designer from Florida, I would kill to work with her. We are so aligned on so many things, and I know that a project might come through with her soon, and I will need to get on it right away. Well, I might need to suffer through it a little bit. I'm gonna have to juggle. I'm gonna have to figure it out. 

It's going to have to be a lot of putting things together. I think there's so much you can plan for and so much you can't.

What software do you use most frequently?

I use Revit the most and then anything else, like renderings, I’ve used Lumion and Enscape in the past. Adobe Suite of course. 

Project management, I haven't gotten that far. That's one thing I don't know enough about, and I need more help. I know some people use certain kinds of software, so I'm doing research on that.

What's the biggest challenge you have at the moment?

Personal life right now, figuring out next year because I don't want to miss opportunities that I really want but my family comes first, always and forever. So I have to realize that sometimes it's just like circumstance and context.

The biggest challenge up until maybe four months ago was figuring out what I wanted to do and what I wanted to focus on. People were really pushing me, “specialize, specialize, specialize”. Well, I have a specialty, I did higher education and performance spaces for six years of my life. And now I'm not gonna go and do that.

So my projects are all over the place. There's renovation of a grocery store and warehouse, and somebody's little addition to their house, like all over the place.

The hardest thing for me initially was to get the right resources, because you go from having a firm that has resources and you can ask questions to no one. It's really starting from scratch, and it's building the right connections.

Right now, what I'm doing is building my network of people that I want to work with in the future. Out of necessity, I've had to work with shitty engineers and shitty contractors. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to find the right people, make friends with them, figure out how to work together, and convince them that I'm good enough to work with them. That's half a job, because they're like, well, you just came out, what do you know? And they're right, don't know much and I don’t have a reputation yet, I am working on building that.

Part of it is the experience, you need to put together a portfolio, you need to prove yourself, you need to get the projects, you need to do all that. And have patience. I'm a very impatient person, but having children helps with that. You learn real quick how to gain some patience when you have a two year old.

What is one thing you think architects should talk more about?

It's a good question. I want to know everything. I went to a talk the other month about invoicing and billing clients, and it was like a talk about money, and no one talks about money, that's very taboo. Part of the reason why we have trouble with our value system is that there are a lot of architects who charge low rates, really, really low rates, and people really undervalue us. The more that we talk about it, the better we can make our industry altogether.