Books
To learn more about the books written by our consultants, or to order a copy for your library, select from the titles at left.
Architect's Essentials of Starting, Assessing, and Transitioning a Design Firm, 2008
The definitive reference for the life cycle of your design firm.
By combining two popular titles in the Architect's Essentials series, this book offers a single resource that you can depend on throughout the life cycle of your design firm. Half of the book guides architects and other design professionals through the ins and outs of launching a firm. The second half helps you enhance your firm's strengths as you navigate ownership transitions, which may occur when you expand ownership to raise capital or begin preparing for retirement. Moreover, this book helps you determine when to conduct a review and how to make essential course corrections that keep your firm moving along a successful track.
Written by two recognized leaders in architectural practice, this book offers you practical advice based on firsthand experience for dealing with such issues as:
- Creating a business plan and evaluating initial costs
- Implementing winning business and marketing strategies to expand your firm's success
- Managing personnel, fees, contract negotiations, budgets, and legal considerations
- Evaluating a firm
- Establishing the criteria for selecting new firm owners
- Designing a smooth ownership transition program
Whether you are just starting a firm, evaluating an existing firm, or looking to transfer your firm's ownership, here is one book that provides clear, easy-to-follow answers.
Peter Piven, FAIA and Bradford Perkins, FAIA with William Mandel
Architect's Essentials of Starting a Design Firm is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and is available in bookstores worldwide.
Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change, 2008
Change. It's your job. It just won't stop. It's relentless. It keeps coming at you like never-ending rapids in a permanent whitewater river. Change will burn you out if you don't learn how to handle it. This book is not, however, about mere survival. It is about thriving amidst the challenges of your permanent whitewater world at work. [Read More]
Gregory Shea, PhD and Robert Gunther
Architect's Essentials of Ownership Transition, 2002
Every firm needs, but often overlooks, an effective plan to recognize leadership, expand ownership and perpetuate the firm. The means to accomplishing those goals is the activity called ownership transition. Architect's Essentials of Ownership Transition takes the guesswork out of buying, selling, merging, and other forms of design firm ownership transfer, including leadership development. Written by Peter Piven, FAIA, Coxe Group principal consultant, with William Mandel, Esq., a practicing attorney active in the design professions, it is an indispensable resource for architects, consulting engineers, interior designers, and other design professionals.
This portable guide provides practical, user-friendly information tailored specifically to design professionals. As with any small business, owners of design firms must make plans for growth, retirement or succession. Expert author, Peter Piven covers:
- growth
- mergers
- transfer mechanisms
- expansion
- acquisitions
- selection criteria
- retirement
- internal transition
- leadership
- liquidation
- valuation
- legal issues
Architect's Essentials of Ownership Transition is the first title in the new Essentials of Professional Practice series — a set of practice books created specifically to provide complete information on the business of architecture and its affiliated professions.
Peter Piven, FAIA, is the Philadelphia-based Principal Consultant of The Coxe Group, Inc. Mr. Piven is widely recognized as one of the best-informed and most effective management advisors in the industry.
William Mandel, Esq. is a founding partner of the San Francisco-based MBV Law, LLP, which specializes in merger/acquisition and ownership expansion programs for design professionals and other businesses.
Architect's Essentials of Ownership Transition is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and is available in bookstores worldwide.
Architect's Essentials of Starting a Design Firm, 2002
Starting one's own firm is a common dream for many, if not most, design professionals. Hundreds of design professionals start new firms each year and many others plan for the day when they can take the same initiative. Some start their own firms because they want to pursue their own ideas and interests, others because they see it as an opportunity to make a better living, and still others because they do not want to work for someone else.
This book provides practical, user-friendly information tailored specifically to design professionals who are considering starting, or who have already started a new firm. Most of the material is also relevant to smaller design firms whose founders are interested in growing and/or changing their current practice.
Some of the material was first developed to support the authors' course on the same topic given each summer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, but the bulk of the book is based on their personal experiences as principals of firms and as advisors to others in the field. The authors cover:
- marketing and sales
- resources and support
- financial management
- strategic and business plans
- negotiating fees and contracts
- planning for excellence
- organization and personnel
- potential causes of failure
- legal and ethical issues
- initial steps
Architect's Essentials of Starting a Design Firm is part of the new Essentials of Professional Practice series — a set of practice books created specifically to provide complete information on the business of architecture and its affiliated professions published by John Wiley & Sons.
Peter Piven, FAIA, is the Philadelphia-based Principal Consultant of The Coxe Group, Inc. Mr. Piven is widely recognized as one of the best-informed and most effective management advisors in the industry. He writes and speaks on management issues for design firms, and is the author of Architect's Essentials of Ownership Transition, also published by Wiley.
L. Bradford Perkins, is the founding principal of the Perkins Eastman Architects, P.C., a twenty-year old architecture, planning and interior design firm based in New York. He is a frequent lecturer on design and design-firm management topics, as well as the co-author of Building Types for Elementary and Secondary Schools (Wiley) and many industry articles.
Architect's Essentials of Starting a Design Firm is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and is available in bookstores worldwide.
Success Strategies for Design Professionals, 1987
As consultants with the opportunity to analyze literally hundreds of professional design firms, we have found the search for ideal management methods challenging. Each time we've observed a format that appears to work well for some or many firms, an exception has soon appeared, contradicting what looked like a good rule to follow. For example, some firms do outstanding work organized as project teams, others are very successful with a departmentalized project structure, and still others get good results with a studio format. This book explores various strategies.
One of the major puzzles for observers has been finding a relation between the project delivery system used by firms (that is, "how we do our work") and how the organization itself is operated (that is, "how we structure and run the firm").
After years of study and trial and error, a model has begun to emerge that holds promise for creating some order among these issues. At the heart of this model is the recognition that although no one strategy fits all firms, there is a family of understandable principles from which almost any firm of design professionals can devise its own best strategy.
We call these the SuperPositioning principles. This book sets forth the theory, a set of master strategies derived from it, and some thoughts on how to put the principles to use.
We look forward to further learning in the years ahead from the experience of professionals who apply the principles in their own firms.
Weld Coxe, Nina F. Hartung, Hugh Hochberg, Brian J. Lewis, David H. Maister, Robert F. Mattox, Peter A. Piven
Cost: $36.95 plus sales tax and shipping. To order, call The Coxe Group at 206.467.4040.
Marketing Architectural and Engineering Services, 1983
The material in this book is organized into four sections: Section I, Rules of the Game, defines the principles and the ethics, and is intended to orient professionals as to how their needs of marketing fit in the context of business promotion and communication in general.
Section II defines The Business Development Process. It will serve its purpose if it helps the reader recognize the sequence of the selling process so that, in any given situation, professionals can recognize what in the process is going on, and what techniques are appropriate to respond effectively.
Section III, Tools of the Trade, is an explanation of the communications technology that is applicable to support the professionals' marketing efforts.
Section IV, Making It Happen, deals with the organization and management of marketing in professional firms.
Experiences of real firms, cited in the Case Studies, serve to validate the techniques and principles in the text.
This volume does not attempt to be a comprehensive how-to-do-it for all time, for selling is always a dynamic, evolving process, and the methods of selling must be flexible to keep pace. Neither can it be wholly applicable to the marketing needs of every professional firm, for the concepts of practice always differ from one professional to another, and each firm must find the marketing strategy that suits its style.
This material is intended to encourage professionals to recognize the importance of marketing as an essential activity in the pursuit of their goals, and help them to understand how to apply the best marketing principles and techniques to their practices.
Weld Coxe
Cost: $43.50 plus sales tax and shipping. To order, call The Coxe Group at 206.467.4040.
Managing Architectural and Engineering Services, 1971, reprint 1979
This book is intended to lift the veil of mystery which has too long surrounded the promotion and new business development practices of architects, engineers, and similar professionals.
Weld Coxe
Out of print.
