“Whatever is the hardest path is probably the path we should be on. The hardest path is also the least traveled.”

• Robert Yuen

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast, host Randy Wilburn is joined by Robert Yuen of Monograph and Mark Zweig of Zweig Group for a candid conversation around the future of A/E firm management. Together, they explore the recent industry benchmarks released by Monograph, unpack persistent pain points for design firm leaders, and discuss how technology is reshaping project visibility, profitability, and firm culture.

The discussion dives into the importance of real-time data, transparency, and the need to rethink how AEC firms measure success—challenging outdated norms that stifle both business growth and employee engagement. With stories from Robert’s career and practical lessons for both emerging and established leaders, this episode delivers actionable strategies for navigating the evolving landscape of architecture and engineering firm management.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize Real-Time Financial Data: Accurate, daily time tracking and monthly invoicing transform firm cash flow and profitability, while improving financial literacy at all levels.
• Culture Is as Critical as Tools: Transparency, communication, and a willingness to share essential financial metrics with staff help reshape and elevate firm culture, supporting sustainable growth.
• Small Firms, Big Potential: Success isn’t determined by size—firms pursuing excellence at any scale should aim for profitability, intelligent processes, and strong client relationships.
• AI for Better Processes: Automation and AI-driven workflows, like contract parsing and resource allocation, can instantly streamline operations and reduce manual data entry.
• Simplicity Drives Adoption: Keeping time tracking and project categorization simple increases accuracy and efficiency, preventing costly misattributions and confusion.

All this and more on this episode of the Zweig Letter podcast.

Links referenced in this episode:

• Monograph Website: https://www.monograph.com/
• Connect with Robert Yuen: robert@monograph.com
• Connect with Robert Yuen on LinkedIn
• Connect with Mark Zweig on LinkedIn
• Learn about the Zweig Letter and subscribe: https://thezweigletter.com/
• AI in AEC and Benchmarks: Explore Monograph’s Benchmark Reports  (linked from monograph.com)
• Connect with Randy Wilburn on LinkedIn

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Stay tuned for more enlightening content from the Zweig Letter podcast, and make sure to subscribe for regular updates!

Other episodes you'll enjoy:

From Specs to Stories with Cherise Lakeside

Bridging Design and Construction with Dan Crist

AI Transforming AEC with KP Reddy

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Welcome to the Zweig Letter Podcast. Putting

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Podcasts elevating the design industry one

Episode at a Time.

Hey folks, it's Randy Wilburn here with the Zweig Letter podcast

and today we are diving deep into the future

of architecture and engineering firm management with Robert

Yuen from Monograph and Mark Zweig from Zweig

Group. Robert, as a leader in practice management technology

along with his team is reshaping how small and

mid sized firms operate, compete and grow.

And fresh off a significant round of funding at monograph

and the release recently of recently of

groundbreaking industry benchmarks, Robert is here to share

some insights from on the evolving landscape of the

AE firm operations and how technology is

transforming the way firms look. I'm sorry. Is

transforming the way firms work. So without further

ado, I want to welcome Robert Yuen and Mark Zweig to the

Zweig Letter podcast. Gentlemen, how are you doing today? Doing good. I'm

excited to be here. What an intro. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. Mark,

how are you doing? I'm doing fine and I'm so glad you didn't

say aec. No. Well, I mean,

so anyway, yeah, it's always fun to be with you.

Absolutely. Yeah. We've actually had a couple of recent episodes that we've, we've

had been had a chance to sit down and do and you're no stranger to

podcasting, so I'm excited to be here with both of

you. Mark, a lot of people already know you, so I'm going to let Robert

go first. And Robert, I would love for you to give your quick superhero

origin story to our audience and just tell them in a cliff note

version who Robert Yuen is and then you can dive right into

just introducing us to monograph so that we can have a better understanding

of the work that you're doing out there in California. Man,

Randy, I haven't given like a quick intro in a long time. See where, where

do I start? Give a long intro, then I'm

going. To see if I can tell a story. My parents are Chinese immigrants. I

was born and raised in Chicago. We grew up extremely, extremely poor.

My dad worked as a Chinese chef. My mom was a stay at home

mom. I'm the oldest of three. I have two younger brothers.

I've always loved architecture. I started off with playing Legos, which

I'm sure every architect shares the exact same story. I studied

architecture in high school. I learned on the vellum

T squares and a trace board. I learned how to draw,

I learned how to draft. I had an incredible time in high school.

I did incredibly well. So I ended up going to University of Illinois

Chicago UIC for my undergrad in

architecture. Competed. Did really, really well. My last senior

year won an international competition that gave me the opportunity

to travel for 11 months backpacking across the world.

So I was 21 years old for almost a year. I visited

21 countries, came back, worked for my

professor in Chicago for about two years. Then I went to

University of Michigan for my graduate degree, Master's of

architecture. Go blue for all the Michigan fans out there. Ended up

staying for a second master's degree at Michigan, focused on

robotics and digital fabrication. Came back to Chicago,

worked at Skidmore, Owens and Merrill. I had an incredible time

working there. I've done work on towers that

existed in China, Dubai, Canada. It was a phenomenal

time. It was incredibly difficult, but perfect for a young design.

Young love took me to San Francisco. Then I did

mostly high end residential here in the Bay Area. I eventually

started a design agency where we mixed design

architecture and digital product software all together

as an agency. Monograph came out of that. All

of our friends, all of my spouses of the three co founders are all in

architecture. And we realized the common problems are always the same. Don't

have visibility into timelines, can't manage fees appropriately.

Were always working up until the last minute. And then the firm's

profitability was always a little wishy washy. We set out on a

path to start solving that problem. Naively, we thought it was easy.

Six years later, I can tell you it is incredibly hard. And we're still working

on it. Over the course of the last six years, three guys who

started a business have raised 50 million. To date, I have

grown the business from three employees to almost 100.

Went from zero customers to almost 1800 customers. And they

employ over 13,000 architects and designers and engineers.

That's about as fast as I can do it without getting into.

That's great. I didn't know all of those specifics. I mean, I knew you were

in the Bay Area. I didn't know about the Illinois background,

which is really interesting. And I'm sure Mark heard that very clearly because he went

to college in Carbondale. So I'm sure he heard

that. But you were certainly an underachiever at the University of

Michigan and you kind of propelled that to some significant

success. And certainly we know Skidmore,

Owings and Merrill and so many other amazing firms that you've been

a part of. But I'd love for you maybe just to kind of talk about.

You mentioned several of the pain points, but what was the one glaring pain

point for you that most small to medium

sized design firms were struggling with? That you said, hey,

if we create monograph or if we can build monograph out, we can

really solve this problem. More than any of the other problems that I

see in design firms. I've used an analogy I've

shared with a few others in the past. I'm going to try it again. I

think running a practice or design project, they're almost one and

the same is kind of like driving a car. You have a destination you

have to get to and you're trying to get there. I live in the Bay

Area now, so I visit Tahoe quite often. I think for most

firms it's like driving from San Francisco to Tahoe without the

gas meter. Obviously it's going to be incredibly difficult to make

a four hour journey without a line of sight in terms of how much

gas you have. That was the initial idea that we started off with. This is

also why time matters so much. It is, at the end of the day, a

services business. You need to know where your time goes. You need to know where

your time is going, you need to know where your money's going. These are just

gauges so that the profession can make really intelligent decisions

along the path to your destination. The completion of a project

or firm profitability. Yeah. And you know, I'm

curious, Mark, to get your thoughts because obviously you've, you've got a few

more years in this industry. This has been a problem

since the beginning of time with the design industry. Is that correct?

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Well, I don't, I'm not sure I can add to that.

It has been a problem. There's a lot of reasons for it. I mean, tools

are one thing. The other aspect of it is just the culture of

design firms and the people who run them. You know, they're not all great

communicators. They don't in some cases hog

information. They're afraid of other people who work

there to see what fees are or how many hours were allocated.

They want to just give little pieces of the assignments out

to people. So the tools are certainly important. But it's not

the only thing that I think impacts project

management. And firm management in these businesses. You're absolutely

right, Mark. This is also where I think tools can impact culture

because we've designed our software in a way where we have to advocate for

visibility, communication and transparency. If we don't do that,

the culture will never change. Luckily for me, we run

the business here at Monograph and we can be fairly strong and

opinionated in terms of how we build the tool to essentially

help the industry get to the next tier of growth. We

have to put the pass in the past. Fees have to be

communicated, budgets have to be communicated. We're all

intelligent professionals across all age groups. Empower

the team and the team will drive success. Yeah, I agree with

that totally. I think it's interesting, you know, back on Robert's background,

you worked for a whole bunch of different firms. Obviously looking back

from the very big to the very small. Yes. It's your history and I think

that's such a great framework. Big companies do certain

things well. You know, they tend to be more organized, they

have some discipline in some ways that smaller firms don't have.

They're not very innovative though, either. You know what I mean? They don't tend

to be the ones that really come up with something new because they've got

so much invested in the old way of doing things. Has that been

your experience? I think of innovation as like incentives.

Are there incentives for a large firm to be innovative in

most cases not for the reasons that you've just shared. Like they have

a. They have a process in terms of how they run the business.

They have to have to keep the machine and the lights on. Is

a well oiled machine. Especially the larger you get. Which is also one of the

biggest reasons why the larger you get, the harder it is to innovate. I do

think innovation typically comes from outside of the larger firms.

You have to look at it from first principles. Clean slate.

Yep, you really do. So, yeah. So you got into this

software business. Wow, 50 million bucks is a lot of

money to raise an outside equity. Do you still feel like you

are in control of this creation of yours or, or do these

outside owners now have to have the wheel?

I'm just curious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, I think

there's a version of this business where it can be

extraordinarily large. No different than like a Salesforce

or a Meta or an Amazon. I think it can be extremely

impactful and be a very large business and help

a lot of architects and engineers execute on their work and

to build that vision. There's no way I'M going to be able to do it

alone. I need the capital and I need partners to help me along the way.

It's incredibly important, but I am absolutely in control. That's

great that you can say that. I think now, you know, obviously

when you raise the capital has a big impact on the business.

If you've got a proven concept and you've got

customers or clients and you've shown that you can

actually run and grow the business before you go out for the money,

it's a lot better than it is. Yeah,

I got this idea, you know, it's like before you're out of

the gate, you're done. Yeah, well, obviously it can be a

big business. I mean, Deltec, they grew like crazy. I mean, I used to know

all the guys at Harper and Schumann and BST and

Semaphore and all of them. You know, those were all the early,

earlier players. I guess Harper and Schumann was probably the first

one out there and they all ended up being part of Deltec, I guess.

I don't know about bst. Are they still in business, do you know?

I don't know. They must not be. They must be gone.

So it's great you guys came in. You've got

perspective based on being insiders in the industry,

actual real practitioners. Gosh, I think that's so important

as opposed to just being software people. I don't think you can solve

the this problem by just being software people.

There's too many intricacies, as you know, the workflows are

extraordinarily complex. There's a lot of stakeholders.

The process is completely difficult to navigate.

It's a really hard problem. It's not an easy problem. You should not take that

lightly. I think without industry knowledge, it's incredibly

difficult to solve. Incredibly difficult. So what do you think

makes your solutions, and I hate to use that term,

I hate all cliches. So even deep

dive? Sorry, Randy, I don't even like to deep dive in anything. But

it's what makes it different from the other products that are

out there on the market. How have you guys been able to come into this

where there were a lot of established providers and build a company

that's already got a hundred employees serving this vertical market? Well,

I think who leads the business matters because that, that resonates across the

entire business. Obviously, I'm an architect. I lead the business. I'm the CEO.

And that drives an internal culture that we are on a mission.

And I think when you don't have that, everything just kind of falls

apart a bit. The passion, the fire just isn't there. And if it

isn't at the top, it's definitely not at the bottom. That is what I've learned

so far. That's absolutely true. The second thing is I think all the

legacy players really just focus on making a lot of money because they're, they're

industry outside. So naturally speaking, where they're going to go to try to

make the most money is to go to the largest firms to make large firms

can pay more money. They're going to solve the problems for the large firms

first. I just think that's a fundamentally flawed mistake

considering that 90, 90 to 95% of the entire industry is

small and medium sized businesses. Like if you really want to drive

impact, which like I said, goes back straight to the top. Yeah,

would I only focus on 10% of the industry? I have to focus

on the larger part of the industry. So we're going to start where there's a

lot of small businesses. We're going to start with empathy and care

and on a mission. We're going to build a world class product that

prioritizes representation of financial insights first, because

that's really, really difficult. Architects and engineers are visual

professionals. It's very difficult for this industry to just look at a

table or an Excel spreadsheet. To understand a business, you have to make

it visual. That is an exercise in and of itself

and that's where we start. And I think by building the business this way,

the market and the industry starts to recognize and

the market pulls you. Makes a lot of sense to me. And I

agree that having somebody who's passionate about the business, the

industry that you serve, is a really important thing. It's like

I'm a car guy myself, Robert. And Motorcycle

Guy is a great book out by Bob Lutz.

He was on the boards of gm, BMW, Chrysler

and Ford. And he's called Maximum Bob. He's still Alive. He's

about 93, lives in Michigan, outside Detroit. But

anyway, Bob's book was Car Guys versus bean Counters.

And the whole thesis of it is that the auto industry

declined because the car people, quote

unquote, are no longer at the top. They got bean counters and brand

managers as opposed to people that actually understand,

you know, cars. It's kind of like that with you guys. I also

think it's interesting too. You know, I found that like even in our business,

whenever the big players decide they're going to build a consulting

business that serves the industry that we do. I used to get

like every year I'd have like all of a sudden, you know, Anderson

Consulting or Accenture or whomever sends like two

guys in to see me, you know, they're Both highly educated

MBAs from Wharton or somewhere. We're going to start a

consulting business and we're going to go after the AE market. But

we, we're not interested in the companies you guys work with.

We only want the top 10 or top 20 companies. It's

always their approach. And then, you know, what happens

usually is they don't succeed. If they do, you know,

it's rare. They usually give up, but that's where they think the big money

is. But it's harder to serve this fragmented

audience like you serve, you know, all these little companies.

The reason these companies don't go after them is there's a lot of time,

investment and marketing, cost and effort

in order to build a, you know, a brand or. And a

business around serving all these little customers. I have a personal

saying I say to myself and say to my internal team is whatever

is the hardest path is probably the path we should be on. I'm

really, really excited because the hardest path is also the least traveled.

That's a good point. I agree with that. It's, you know, the other thing is

though, back in, you know, sort of the architecture and engineering

world, when it comes to the financial performance

of projects, seems to me like I worked with a

lot of companies over the years and they would do these studies. You

know, I haven't seen this recently, but I used to hear this all the time.

Well, we've done a study and we've determined, Robert, that

we can't make any money on a job with a fee of less than

$5,213. Therefore, we no

longer do projects with fees of less than

$5,214. And I always thought

that is such a stupid approach because if you've

really going to serve your clients, you got to do

whatever it is they need. You can't

always make the decision based on

profitability. What do you think about that? Well, I think it's

important for a firm to be profitable. Let's make that really clear, Mark. Like there

is no business if a business is not profitable. So don't disagree.

So that's absolutely important. I do think. But the

business has to be profitable. That's the difference. Not

necessarily every single project. The fallacy and the

thinking is that, well, every project's profitable, the firm's

profitable. Yeah, I guess that's true. As long as you're overhead

is calculated properly. Right. Well, that, that's part. Well, if you're

calculating true profit, then this should be. It should be. Right.

But, but you know, it's the company that we care about, not

just the individual project. My general advice,

without being specific in terms of what the project is or who the client

is, because those variables going to have to be taken into account

as you make your decision. But I think it's more important to not

go straight into logic so quickly. For example, the

minimum viable project is 5200. As you said, this project will

not be. So we're not going to do it. I think it's much more

exciting to ask the questions like, well, okay, this project can't be

more than 5200. I know historically I couldn't achieve that,

Mark. Probably how can I. And should I

revisit the processes that are internal to essentially get us

there? I think that's a much more intelligent and

intellectually stimulating conversation. I know. Well,

this is a lot easier problem solved. Rather I have a fixed number,

5200 that's not going to move. Right. Process that

doesn't serve it great. Not great, but at least I know

where the problem is. Let's figure out

what's the right way to achieve success in

projects of this size. Because I would like to try to have

every project be profitable and for that to apply.

Sometimes processes don't scale. So I am so glad

you said that. Like I said, it's about being problem solving

first, which is most architects and engineers are really good at. Be a problem

solver. You obviously have a problem. Identify where the

problem is and work on it. Don't just disregard it and

move on like that. And also don't accept the fact that you're just going

to not be profitable. That's like, you

should stop doing that too. Yeah, amen to that. I mean, I used to teach

a class called everything they don't usually teach you in architectural school

here, fifth year students. And one of the things I did was bring

in very successful architects, people who make 5,

10 million to $15 million a year. And because

I felt like they're so many of the

professors, they had basically told them they have to take a vow of poverty

to be in this business. I'm like, that's because they're

crappy architects and business people don't listen

to them. Okay, that's a totally dysfunctional model.

You can be successful in this business. I think a lot of people don't even

believe that though. Don't you? I think a lot of people don't believe it. I

believe it, which is why we're building monograph here and this is why we're going

to continue to advocate for it. I think it's very simple, generally speaking,

for most, most of the profession to acknowledge

that as you grow your firm, your previous processes

don't scale as you scale up. Everyone kind of understands that concept.

I think everyone forgets that sometimes you might have to scale down from a process

to make things work too. It goes both ways. It's a two way street. Absolutely.

So if you know that project is not going to be profitable because it's on

the smaller end, your process is probably a little bit too

heavy and you're going to have to reevaluate whether appropriate

processes and team size and, and protocols that are

needed to execute on a smaller budget. That's a really good point.

And you know, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to jump in

on that. Another thing I found over the years is when I'd be talking

with companies about their business and their projects

and what they do, and I would ask them, what do you think is an

average size project for your firm? I would always get

these numbers of, you know, 100,000, 200,000,

whatever. And then when I actually did a dump of all their

jobs, all their open job numbers, I always found

out, you guys are so far off, you don't even know what you're

talking. Your average job is like $14,000.

You know, it was always, was

always smaller than they thought, of course. And so then the

process, as you said, is designed to do the mega jobs

and it just doesn't work when you try to do the jobs.

So what happens? People just don't do certain steps. There's like, throw

that out, throw that out. But they decide what steps they're going to throw out.

Instead of you as management really figuring

out what that process needs to be to do the smaller job, and of course

that's a disaster, then you know, that's where problems

happen. I'm so excited because I think like these problems are,

they're actually not the hardest problems in the world. We're not trying to figure out

how to build an autonomous robot. We're not trying to figure out how to space.

We're not trying to figure out AI. Like we

can solve these problems. Like all I need is, I need the

grit, I need the passion inside me. I need a little bit of time and

a little bit of money. And we'll we'll get it done. So, back

on monograph, so. Oh, sorry, Randy. No, I was just. Hey,

I'm just a fly on the wall here listening to both of you guys talk.

And it's actually enriching because there's a lot of really good advice

coming out of this conversation. I did want to kind of

guide the conversation a little bit more with, for Robert to share,

just because you, you alluded to it. But what are some of the recent

released industry benchmarks and surprising findings that

you guys have found at Monograph that has really kind of

helped you focus on how you're going to serve your client?

It's a really, really good question for everyone to know. I think this is

the way we're doing our benchmark report. I think it's one

that I'm incredibly proud of. One, because it comes from real

data. It's not surveys. It's anonymized data from our

customers. So we can really understand the trend, the progress and

the gaps within the industry. I believe surveys are

extraordinarily biased and really, really hard to get the right

leading indicators in terms of like, what is accurate and what's not.

What we found so far that's fascinating is like, every customer that starts on

monograph over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, they're

extremely more profitable once they adopt their system full end

to end, where they are essentially tracking time all the way to

invoicing their time to payment reduces, the utilization

rates increase, the realization rates increase.

And everyone's familiarity with financial literacy

also increases, which I think is really, really important, especially if you're a business

owner, to have a certain level of financial literacy outside of just

design literacy or practice literacy. We've also seen

salaries grow. We've seen that profit from firms roll back

into the organization. So headcount grows and the average

salary increases. We've also discovered that at

some point the salary of the principal and owner starts to plateau.

And the biggest driver for, let's say, revenue back into ownership

is profitability. It's the. At the end of the year, what is the margin

left between what it costs for you to operate the business and what

you netted out? These are incredible findings that we

found this year and we'll continue to do the report every year to hold

ourselves accountable as our data set increases and we do our

best to disclose to the industry what we see through our customer base. I

think that's very valuable information. I agree with you. The

fact that you've got the actual info there instead of surveys the

only thing I'll say about surveys though, I'm not as down on them as you

are because you know, people would say like, well, 200 people responded

to this. Who says that's representative? I'm like, would you rather have

0 people or 200 who are actually doing it? I

mean, that's true. You know, it's like we're not making life

and death decisions based on this information.

So, you know, some information is better than

none. But I agree, if you can get actual

data based, you see coming through your

users because you've got their accounting information that's very

valuable and meaningful. It should be. My

only concern is sometimes the surveys are, let's say

surveyed, primarily targeted towards the larger

enterprise firms. Then the representation of that survey is industry

wide. I was like, that's not like you're serving, let's say, up to

200 firms that you went to go survey, 190 of them were enterprise.

You have a very good understanding of what the enterprise space

look like, which operates substantially different than the SMB.

There are projects that only enterprise companies can do. This goes into

large campus build master plans, big buildings, big

projects. Sure. A small and medium sized business

mostly focus on residential and local commercial,

lightweight commercial do like, it's just not a fair representation.

No, I would not disagree with that. I mean again, if you take

ZY Group as a model or you know, as somebody that does a

lot of surveys, if you look at what we're doing, it's because that's not our

target market. The small firms are, I mean we know

that the people who buy the most stuff from us, you know, our

primary customer base is probably companies with somewhere between

100 and maybe three or 4,000 people. Are there those that

have less that do work with us? Of course. Are there those bigger? Of

course. But if you look at like the core business, they're big enough to

afford us, but they don't think they know everything. You know,

once they get to a certain size, like, oh, we've got this development

department that handles all our M and A, you know, or whatever, they

don't feel they need you. So to a certain extent, in our

case, and I'm not being defensive about surveys, don't get me wrong, but

we aim at the market that we serve, you know,

and it's not all five person firms that are going to AIA

meetings and, but that is a. You make a really good point.

And I think having that information that you have, I mean I've always told

people that as you Grow. It's easier to

pay yourselves better. And if you look at salary surveys, basically

every position in the firm does better as the firm gets larger.

Yes, you know, speaking. Yes, there really is money solved a lot of

problems. There is sort of a general pattern there that

doesn't surprise me. But so back on though,

things you said, their cash flow improves. What is it because

of their financial literacy that is improving? They understand

how critical that is to working capital, or what do you attribute

that to? So like I said when we started off, there's. We

can be extraordinarily opinionated. So this, I will call this like the

monograph method. There's a few principles that

are part of that monograph method. The first one is you gotta stop

logging time once a month or once a week. We can't remember what

we did. I can barely remember what I did

two days ago. If we break it down to like projects and tasks, you have

to be tracking your time. No different if you were like going to the

gym and you do it. On the day of, you put it in the phone.

Are you guys phone oriented? You're. We have an

Apple app, we have an Android app. You have to be. You

gotta be. Time tracking has to be on a daily interval so we can be

as accurate as possible. That experience has to be so

enjoyable that the industry doesn't mind

because everyone knows that they don't like tracking time. So we have to make that

experience so delightful that you want to and

that. So we spend a considerable amount of energy making sure that that experience

is world class. I just want to ask you

one question about that though, and you can come back to your second point.

So do you find that when it comes down to

defining various ways to

categorize one's time, that those

categories are poorly designed in firms such that

the individual who's entering their time can't make a decision

on where that time goes. Like, it could go to five different

things. They're not mutually exclusive. Where do I throw

that time? You find that less is more.

Yes. The less options you have, the

more likely you'll get it accurately attributed to what?

Luckily, being in the small and medium sized business, we generally see

more firms with less categorizations than more categorizations.

If a firm does come into Minecraft a lot, the first thing we remind them

is Mies van der Rohe, less is more. We want to be very

designed appropriately for the scale of the business. You don't need a lot if

you're still small and will scale proportionally as the business

scales. But always remember, simplicity

means way better success. Less is more. Amen to that. Your

team is telling you. Or if you're the. If you're the firm owner and you're

finding that there's a ton of miscategorizations,

become the designer or become the doctor. These are symptoms of a problem.

Simplify it. It's probably over categorizations and you can probably

group a lot and get it back down to less is more. So sorry I

interrupted you. What was the second point that you wanted to make back then? I

wanted to bracket the two endpoints. One is tracking time and the other point is

actually getting paid. So historically, the industry

gets paid based on. I'm generalizing here because I know there's a lot of micro

scenarios, but generally speaking, based on face phase,

the problem is your rent, your payroll, your insurance.

Everything else in life happens on a monthly cadence.

You should get paid on a monthly cadence. If you want to

really understand your cash flow in cash out,

obviously you have all your cash out happening once a month. Your payroll, your utilities,

your rent, everything else in life. You have to essentially

adjust how you invoice your clients down to a monthly interval.

And by doing that on monograph, we make it really, really easy. It also makes

it really predictable for your end client. From

my architect, every single month is going to roughly be the same. I like that.

Kind of like a very expensive Netflix account.

Yeah, I agree with that. Ability helps a ton in terms of running a

business. It also removes the ambiguity of when is

truly a phase complete. Well, like who. Who's the operator

of 50 complete? Who's the operator 25 complete. If

you start negotiating this with your client, obviously it's not very

clean and. Cut or you make that decision internally

and your revenue accrual is wacky. Because I think

I'm x percent done and you say I'm not

correct. Yeah, for smaller businesses,

this is like this historical standard. Yeah, smaller businesses.

This is also what happens. You run out of cash before you get paid. So

you'll take out loans, you take out line of credits, you float. Essentially, that's

the financial terminology. You float your cash bonds until you get paid.

And you know you will get paid because the client relationship is there.

The entire problem is that your internal operating process is a

little bit off sync. You need to be operating at a much tighter

cycle, ideally monthly, no later than two to three months.

Anything that looks like six months or more. My first advice to that firm owner

is like, we got, we got to change this. Like either you have

a really large piggy bank so you don't have a problem. That could be the

case. But if you don't have a large piggy bank, then we got to get

your billing cycle a lot tighter by doing that, which

fascinating. There's a lot of trickle down influences. You're going to run

the business a lot tighter now because all that information is happening a lot sooner.

I was like, oh, I know exactly at the end of the month how much

I spent, I know exactly how much I'm going to collect. You start to essentially

calibrate much faster and you get a much more in

attuned understanding of your own business because the things are there much more

immediate. These are all the byproducts of one a great process,

great software and us being fairly heavy handed that we're going to build it in

a way to ensure that you drive success. That makes so

much sense to me. I completely agree with you. And

it makes so much sense. It's kind of, it's a little bit

analogous to the idea that I always said

bootstrapped companies end up being better companies later than

those that start out with a big pot of money because they develop the

discipline in their processes to, you know, faster

billing, faster collection. All the

things that allow you to have the working capital to

operate that you don't have, you know, so

it's kind of like that is what you're saying and it makes a lot of

sense. You do see some companies that sit on a whole bunch of money.

I've worked with some clients like that. I've got one

that just honestly, they probably have a half a year's worth of cash sitting there

in the bank and no debt. And it's crazy though, because

then they're not using their money wisely. They shouldn't have all that money

in there. They should extract that and do something. Else with

depends on the corner's ambition. But if the ambition is not there,

then more than likely you're not going to use it. But if the

ambition is there, then it's kind of straightforward. Like you use it to grow

the business, get more work.

You're gonna have to need to deploy that cash to grow the business.

What do you think about the design firms out there? Okay, you

have a zillion small design firm users, right?

What do you think about those that say, well Robert, we really

don't want to be more than a 10 person company. I

like 10 people. 10 people's great. I'm going to be 10 people

until I decide to Retire and then I'm going to come in one day and

just shut the, lock the door and don't want anybody else using

my name either, by the way, if I'm not the one designing everything. What do

you think about that? I mean, do you tell people the fallacy in that thinking

or do you just let them go on like that? Well, no, I tell

them I want to make you the best damn 10 person firm ever.

Like, my job is not to like tell you what your dreams are. Your

job is to tell me what your dreams are and my job is to help

you get there. So if your dream is to be a 10 person

firm, have incredible work, life balance and run it

to the day that you hang your hat up, well, let me help

you. I actually think, Martha, we, there's a need in this country to have a

lot of those firms. At the end of the day, they design our fire stations

or police stations or schools or libraries or parks or

residentials or homes across the street. Like

these are the firms, the 10 person firms, the 5 person firms,

the 15 person firms that design the neighborhoods that we spend a

considerable amount of our time living in and enjoying those

spaces. They're incredibly important. I want to empower them. I want to make sure

that they stay in business. I want to make sure that they don't worry about

their financials and I want to make sure that if that's what you want, I'm

here to help. That's interesting. I mean, I agree with you. We do

need small firms. I guess my only problem though with that thinking

is who is really good. If you're a strong

architect, do you want to work in that firm where the

owner comes in every day and says, I don't want to be more than 10

people, I'm not going to sell any ownership. I don't want anybody to

ever use my name. But I want you to work here for the rest of

your life, Susie, and do a great job and work your ass off.

I think it's an unrealistic view of the way it's going

to go. Because what I see those guys do is they have

that small firm, they suck all the money out of it, they

exploit people who work there as long as they can,

then those people leave and then they find some new ones to exploit.

Their experience at the below them becomes

less and less over time because good people don't

really want to work there. And then in the end they're pissed off when they

come to us and they go, I want to sell my Firm. What do you

do? We design churches, schools, houses,

retail, everything. And by the way, I've got nobody

who can take over and I'm 72 years old now. But I want you

to go out and get me a good price for my company. I've worked 50

years to build. I think it's unrealistic. There's a lot in that

statement where I would disagree. Okay, what's that? I think there's

good people across every segment of the industry, from the very small to

the very big. The easiest comparison that I can make

outside of just the architecture industry is like restaurants. Do I want to eat

at McDonald's or Benihanas all the time? Big, big

corporations? No, like I want

a person who understands me, who has passion

at a different scale. And I appreciate that. And I think there's a

need in the market. I don't disagree with you. I use

those people. Yeah. I mean, it's just the problem is, can you

say, I mean, they're all going to be. If they start out, they're all going

to be there initially. Right. And then some evolve

past that, some don't. I guess my point is

I agree with you 100%. Like, if I'm going to need help with

a 10,000 square foot office building, I'm not going to go call hok,

okay? It ain't going to happen. But,

but how do you. Can you go public with that

and say, I want to be this size forever? Or is that

just a step along the way to having

a company that's going to grow and outlive you as

the founder? You ever hear of this company called Square

or Toast? Sure. Or Mind Body? Well, they serve

small businesses and they're incredible. They're large, publicly traded businesses and they're

very, very big. And I believe I can get there too. Well, these architects

aren't that though. They're not going public. They don't have anything that's that valuable.

I mean, I'm just. I guess my whole point is I agree we

need small firms. They serve a great position in the market.

I just think it's really hard to say that

we're going to stay this size forever. I think that event

it, you're not going to be able to keep great people if

that's the way you operate. I mean, it just, it's

inevitable. I had a client like that years ago. He's very successful

guy. He won all the design awards in his state every year it'd be like

this guy cleans up okay. And then you know, I'm going to stay this

size forever. He designed everything. Everybody else is an order taker and

one day just everybody left. I mean he

had nothing there. He had all these jobs, he had

two people, like 15 of them left in a really short period of

time and he had to go find another company that he could go

to work for to finish, you know, to bring his

jobs along to, to finish him up. It was just kind of sad. He was

very depressed about that. I don't think he really thought about what the long

term ramifications of that strategy or program

we're going to be. I think times are changing and I think with the help

of modern Graph, we can empower a lot of the smaller owners to have a

little bit better line of sight on the decisions they make. It's not my job

to say like, obviously I'm extraordinarily ambitious and want

my company be as large as possible. Right. I also have enough

empathy that I'm not going to deploy what my wishes and desires on

anyone else. My job is here to be of service

if you want to be running an incredible firm at a certain scale. My job

is to help you. My job is not also to help you today, but also

help you get line of sight of what tomorrow might be. Well, that makes total

sense. Yeah. If you think about you want to

hang your hat up and you want to sell. Well, like we should start having

an education around like, well, what does the cell look like and how soon

should you start preparing? It isn't going to happen like overnight.

You got to prepare for this. I have to have a fair

representation of how does the market assess

values on the services based business. And as long as you're

prepared, you'll be ready. I think the problem is historically is they

weren't prepared and you're not prepared, you're not going to be ready.

Let's prepare the industry and everyone's going to be a much better

spot 10 to 20 years from now. Well, and I think it's important

to remember that you know, a company like yours didn't

necessarily exist 30 years ago. Right. In terms of the

way that you deploy your technology and the way that

you can surgically reach out to these smaller companies,

some of whom, like Mark said, don't always have the vision

to see what the long term effect can be or what,

you know, the impact they can make. They're only thinking of it through their

role in that organization and that company that they started. And,

and I think, you know what I hear you Say, you keep saying line of

sight. I keep thinking about vision. And sometimes it will

take an organization like yours to kind of connect the

dots for that small business owner, that

small firm architect, that small firm engineer to

understand that, oh man, I actually can make something of this long

term. And the folks at monograph have actually helped me do that.

I got another one for you, Robert, I'd like to get your thoughts on. Fire

away. Okay. Because I love the fact that you've got a point of view

that you can articulate clearly. What about the

woe is me whining

architects young, they're out there.

I work so hard, the boss doesn't

appreciate me. There's no work life balance, yada

yada yada. I want to work from home though. I'm not going to do

anything extra unless they absolutely force me to.

What do you think about that? I mean it seems to me there's a

lot of. There's a culture of a lot of complaining

and a very negative view of

perhaps the career possibilities or opportunities

that architecture presents in this younger group of people.

Mark, you have all the spicy topics. Sorry, I got

it. You're a guy that's. I know it's got an opinion on this

stuff. That's why I want to ask you. Yeah,

no, this is a very spicy topic which I love, love to essentially

debate on. Help me drive focus. Do you want

my point of view of how I see it as I build monograph, or do

you want my point of view of how I see the industry and the clients

and customers we serve just because they're slightly two different? Point of view? Yeah,

I could guess on what your personal

perspective and orientation is. So I mean

we could talk about that. But no, I think from an industry standpoint

though, as business owners, firms that employ

people that have this orientation,

how do we, I mean do we allow that? Do we

cater to that? Do we try to

change their mind? I mean, what do we do with that? So

here's how I like to think about problems usually and like what are in my

controls and what are not in my controls. I would like to essentially

articulate that there's, there are cultural shifts that happen

globally and domestically that happens every so

often that like they're just. These are the trends of the current times and when

they're trends of that scale and magnitude, I can't control it.

What I can decide is how do I participate within that trend.

And I think it's really important for me to then give advice to firm owners

is like to remind them this is your firm. You have

complete control over the culture and the people you hire and the

people you recruit and the people that you attract. Right. There's two

ways of acquiring great talent is you go after talent, but talent can also

come to you. You are in control of that culture that you want to establish.

So you make the best decision for your business and whatever that

decision is. My job is to serve you. So like I'm going to take less

of a, I'm going to play Switzerland here. Like it's, it's okay whatever

decision you pick. But it's really important that you know that you

are in control as a firm owner and you decide the culture

that you want to build and then build that culture. Do not waver, do

not compromise. So if you have a strong opinion in

terms of the people you want to attract, go get it. And if you have

it either way, it can be fairly extreme. If you want everyone in

office working extraordinarily hard and extremely

motivated, then you go build that business. If you want to essentially

build a remote first everyone distributed across the

country and everyone works at very flexible with high

degree of, let's say time off, family time and

work life balance, go build that. My only ass is like

be committed to the business you want to build because it's your business. Don't

ever forget that. That's the why. That's why you started a business. You are in

control. Go to sleep happy. Go to sleep happy.

I love it. I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's good.

I mean I always tell people too that, you know, you think about it as,

especially for younger people, younger design professionals, proximity,

there's some power in proximity when you're close. You know, we used to

talk about like management by walking around in the 90s and early

2000s and now that walking around looks a lot different. Right. It

might mean several video check ins during the day with, you

know, several of your up and coming rising stars. And I

think for young professionals, they need to know how best they

can develop their skill set by virtue of whether they

receive more, they can receive more virtually or if they

need that face to face, kneecap to kneecap connection in order

to, to grow in their profession. So yeah, it is, it can be

one of those things where individuals can kind of self select

for what works best for them and an environment, a company

that allows them to grow in that way. So this

is something that I wish I would give myself feedback if I was a

younger designer. Again, like I'm going to be A designer. I'm going to be

an employee. I'm applying to jobs. I have to constantly remind

myself I can decide where I want to apply, I can

decide where I feel that I'm going to have a good time and it's going

to be the best environment for me. No matter what my ambitions, desires or

work, work ethics or not work ethics, aesthetic

or not aesthetics. Like, I get to choose the place where I want

to apply and I should actually hold that to a very high

bar because at the end of the day, if that too doesn't match,

well, that's the beginning of a frustration in a

relationship. They just didn't align. The firm has to find the right

talent as an employee. As a young designer, you also have to find the right

firm that has to come together. And when that happens,

everyone's happy. The work is extraordinarily good, the

cultural environment is going to be extraordinarily the best. When that alignment

doesn't happen, that's Mark. That's usually where we hear all the frustrations either

from the employee side or from the owner side is because like it just

didn't match. Whenever I hear that, I also remind firm owners

and management that like it's your company, it is also

your responsibility. Yes. If you see that there's a

problem here, you, you cannot ignore it. Now how you

resolve it, that's still also your choice, but you have to resolve it and it

is your responsibility. If you don't like the responsibility, don't start a

firm. Like that's the weight of essentially being an owner or being in

management. I like your philosophy. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think

the problem though, if there is a problem with it, it's that the

young architects have not really been

educated properly. They don't really understand the

ramifications of one decision or another or

what type of company is good to work in versus what types

not, you know, and what the career path options.

If I go to work for a 400 person firm that designs

Walmart stores versus the Starchitech

10 person company that wins all the AIA awards in my

state. I mean, it's just, they don't really. Nobody's given

them the perspective that they need in order to make an intelligent

decision like you just put out. I mean you,

I mean you're a good example in a way because you work for so many

different companies when you were in school and young that you

really develop that perspective probably better than most

people would have. You know, I'm older now. So I have a

perspective of current age. I would argue there's

probably less of a problem than most people articulate. I have

to try to remember when I was 21, 22, and was I

confused, Did I make a lot of not so wise decision?

Was I a young adult making young adult decisions? Mark.

The honest answer is yes. Like, I'm not gonna, like, shy away from

it. Like, I don't know what I didn't know. And I made a ton of

mistakes along the way. I also think, I think it's

sometimes inappropriate to judge the next generation too

early because they're just going through a period of time where they're growing

and they're trying to figure out. And I think we need also sometimes to

remind ourselves that we were that age once and we weren't that wise

either. And that's okay. Like, that's kind of

live. That's how it works. Yeah, I, I don't like to bash the

generations at all. That's never. I. I think it's terrible when people do

that. Yeah. You know, where they like, oh, the young people don't want. There's always

exceptions. I mean, I'm a professor. I see the whole mix.

Yeah. You know, I just have highly ambitious ones and

ones that aren't that motivated or whatever. So I remember professors,

and there's always a few that are incredible professors that are also life coaches in

my mind, where they obviously, like, you

still have to teach the curriculum and you're not really fully prepared. Like, the jump

between academic and practice is actually a really big jump. And I

think the best professors want acknowledge it and just like give,

just give you a head up. Like, it's not gonna be that easy.

And yeah, you know, here's your diploma. Have fun. Learn on your way.

Be hungry. Don't ever forget that, like lifelong learning exists

throughout your entire life. It does not stop at the diploma.

You'll learn a lot, you'll struggle a lot. You'll make a lot of mistakes. People

will tell you that you're doing things right. People will tell you that you're doing

things wrong. And that's okay, I guess. You know, one of

the things, though, I do think some of the things that people are taught

in architectural school in particular are

incompatible with running a good business. You know,

like I had a young architect tell me,

or he was a fifth year student tell me once that

basically that what we did in my design build firm

was all crap because we didn't break any new ground.

Okay. We tended to do. I mean, you don't know anything about that

business I had, but, you know, I was known for being the

guy who was very sensitive to the historical

aspects of the architecture. I used all original

materials. I was very. I was all about context

and not standing out. And so the student, you

know, he's telling me, basically, I'm a failure because I'm not

breaking new ground design wise. Now, if

that's the attitude that you go out into the business

with, good luck being successful,

I think the odds are going to be stacked against you. And so if

that's what you're carrying, I just use that as one example of

what I would say is sort of dysfunctional thinking that

gets people off on the wrong foot and therefore

makes it difficult for them to have a successful business at

any size in this industry or profession.

Hard for me to assess. I don't know who this person is, but I think

it's clear that what that person was looking for and what you were doing

did not align. And that's, that's why that

conversation happened. So,

man, you guys are. This has been rich. I want to kind of

wrap, want to find a place where we can wrap this up because we could

go on and talk about the conversations for day. There's so many, so

many nuggets that have come out of this particular conversation. I did want to ask

you because I'd be remiss if I didn't ask everybody that I talked to

what they think is the impact of AI specifically. But

I would imagine for you guys, as you, you've got this new round of funding,

you have the latest round of industry benchmarks. How are

you looking at AI as it pertains to

monograph? Right. As opposed to saying, well, what do you think about AI? How

are you looking at AI in terms of where is it going to

help the most for design firms and what will that look

like potentially for. Monograph streamlining and automating

workflows? That's where the highest impact is.

Imagine having an army behind you

that you didn't have, ensuring that the streamline of your processes

go a lot faster and a lot smoother. I think we've all,

at some degree, have taken a contract and have data inputted

into a system to track. And you can imagine that historically someone

had to go line by line, column by column, field by field. Enter

the name, the client, the duration, the phases. That is

one example that here at Monograph, you don't have to do anymore,

just upload the contract and our AI will essentially read it and we'll Auto parse

it immediately, all the information in the appropriate places and you don't have to

go field by field anymore. Not only that, we can look at your resource

tab and figure out who's available, give you essentially a draft of

a roster of who might make sense to essentially staff the project.

Obviously it's still a draft and you should review it, but we can say like,

based on this calendar, based on this new project, based on these new parameters, based

on the categorization of this building type, here are the people that might

fit the schedule in the timeline. We essentially took a first stab of

drafting out all the people that are available, who are appropriate with the right skill

sets to go and work on this project. That used to take weeks. Right.

You have to pull up a spreadsheet, you have to look at your entire team,

you have to figure out who's available, who is in between projects, who's been

in between phases that can essentially pull to start a new project.

This is done in seconds. Andy, like that. I think this

is where I'm extraordinarily proud where AI is going to take us, where I think

it's actually going to be much more under the hood in terms of how it's

going to serve and support the industry versus other industries where it

might be much more upfront and obvious. An example

would be on the other spectrum of the industry where they're pushing

architectural visualizations, 3D rendering, that AI has a hand

in that side of the industry as well. And that's much more, let's say,

upfront in terms of impact for us. It's really

behind the scenes on how do we make sure that you click less and

we do more. Yeah, yeah. And I would imagine,

given that you're working probably in helping clients that

use Monograph are using the AI within a closed

LLM system. The level of hallucinations are

probably non existent. Not. No, we only use the data that

we have to work with. We don't work outside. There's a lot of risk when

you start to do that. I think only, let's say horizontal companies. Horizontal

companies in this context would be like an OpenAI or any of these other

companies that serve multiple industries. There's a lot more hallucinations because they

can't be so verticalized. We're so specific that the way that we

can build our software gets extraordinarily catered. I don't care about the other

industries. I only care about serving architects, engineers. But

that also means that we can be much more specific and much more

targeted. In the software we build, including the AI that we're

continuing to essentially train. Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect

sense. Well, Robert, this has been. This has really been an

enlightening. I have, like, a page and a half worth of notes here. Really fun.

I'll be sure to get these show notes out so that people can

really appreciate them for this particular episode. If somebody wants to

reach out to you, what's the best way for them to connect with you, to

connect with Monograph. And again, we'll make sure all this is in the show notes,

but I would love for you just to share that here while you're here. My

email is really, really easy. It's just. Robertograph.com if

this podcast comes out after AIA, well, then you might have missed me, but

I'll be there. I'll be there in Boston in person. Yeah, it may not be

out before aia, but. But people will be able to refer to it. And I'm

sure that won't be your last trip to aia, and certainly

they should reach out to you if they have questions about Monograph and how it

might be able to help them in their particular organization. But

we really appreciate you joining us today and spending a

little bit of time with us, just kind of sharing a little bit about

Monograph and what's going on. And we hope to have you back here soon to

talk further about some of the new findings. And maybe we'll. We'll have to make

an annual thing of talking and discussing the benchmarks, because as

all we can all acknowledge, with technology and the times, things are

going to consistently change over and over again. So what we're talking

about now, this year will be different next year. Randy, you've been

an incredible host. Thank you for having me. And I hope to be on, because

I think, like, Mark and I can just have enough

confidence and banter to actually, like, just treat this like a Fireside

chat. Yeah, that's. That's what it was. And Mark is perfect at

that. He's got a couple of podcasts that he does, and certainly I. He

and I have been doing this for. For years now, almost 10 years. So

this podcast and stuff, I. I know. And you. It's taken on a life

of its own, so. Yeah, yeah. But no, Robert, it's

really great to finally get to talk with you. I've

been, you know, watching you from afar, and I can see why you're

successful. I. I think you have a really great way of

putting things together in a sensible way

that people can understand. And I. I can see that

that is. I'm sure that thinking has been applied to your

products as well. So that's impressive

and it's great to have you. Let's do it again, Randy. Let's have another.

We will, we will. I'll pencil it in and we'll get something going. And

shout out to Chris Morgan also who works with Robert, who helped pull

this together. So do this without Chris. Yeah, no, Chris is the man,

so we really appreciate him as well. So. But thank you both so very

much. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Randy. Absolutely. Well, there you have it,

folks. Another episode of the Zweig Letter Podcast. To learn more about

Zweig Group, please visit our website@zweig

group.com you can subscribe to the Zweig

Newsletter, which is one of the longest running newsletters in the design

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