About the Webinars
Architecture and engineering schools teach you to design. They do not teach you to run a firm. Yet from the moment you make partner or hang your own shingle, the business demands are relentless: staffing, fees, cash flow, strategy, culture. Most principals learn by trial and error, if they learn at all.
These webinars give architecture and engineering firm leaders an ongoing library of practical guidance on the business side of practice — time, fees, cash flow, staffing, technology, strategy, ownership transition, and more — built from the ground up for the way AE practices actually work.
Steven Burns, FAIA, has spent nearly 40 years figuring it out, first as a practicing architect and firm owner, then starting a software company to build tools to help A/E firms, and finally as a consultant to over 1,000 AE firms. Each session draws on those decades of experience to give A/E professionals practical, no-nonsense guidance for running their practice with the same rigor they bring to their best work.
Meet Steven Burns, FAIA
Steven Burns, FAIA, has spent nearly four decades at the intersection of architecture and business. After earning his Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he spent seven years at SOM before founding his own architecture firm, BBA Architects, in 1989.
Running his own practice showed him firsthand what architecture school leaves out: the operational and financial discipline it takes to keep a firm healthy. That realization led him to build ArchiOffice, project and office management software designed to solve his own firm's problems — technology that would go on to become the foundation of BQE CORE, the platform thousands of AE firms rely on today.
In 2007, Steven sold his firm outright. He then founded The Well-Designed Firm, a business consultancy dedicated to helping architecture and engineering firms run their businesses with the same elegance they bring to their design work. Since then, he's worked with more than 1,000 AE firms, sharing the lessons of his own trial and error so other firm leaders don't have to repeat them.
10 KPIs Your A/E Firm Needs to Track for Maximum Project Profitability
Improving Your AE Firm’s Profitability Through Business Intelligence
Rewriting the Fee Formula: A Smarter Model for Pricing Your Services
