Dark trestles loom which, if chosen to traverse, permanently change your trajectory. Bleak and scary because they provide no flicker of fortune or doom. But deep inside your gut instincts will drag you over those rickety beams and across the foggy swamplands.
There are, of course, life reroutes in which you have no control. Like when I was a nineteen year-old college sophomore and Sandie Wells sashayed across the dining room hall carrying her salad bar supplies and her brown, wavy hair underneath a navy blue triangulated fold of cotton – a much cuter version of some health department uniform for keeping stray hairs out of students’ meals. On our first date we talked for four hours straight while I drowned in her huge, deep, blue eyes. It was out of my hands – we would be together, and best friends, ‘til death doth us part.
Or when either of our two, gorgeous, life-loving daughters were born. You plan to be a parent, but you can’t plan to be a parent. The multiple stages of raising children fly at you like wind-driven snows. Just as you figure out a phase and are about to pat yourself on the back, those little smart asses grow and change on you. And in an instant, they are gone and taking care of themselves and you ache for the days they give you a call or send a text even if its only because they need something, like say, money.
Or the Great Recession when both Sandie and I were laid off within one day of each other and we ended up losing our house. Or when the mistress Dementia came a-calling for my Dad and I watched as she slowly stole him away from all who loved him and they strode side by side into eternity. None of those pathways were within the grasp of my skill or will to navigate. They simply appeared and derailed me into a new realm of existence.
2021 was altogether different, despite the continuing threat of COVID and those dreaded mandates. It would be the year I took on a dare – from myself – to climb in the front seat of life’s roller coaster and raise my arms as high as possible while the cars climbed that first, steep hill, and the sounds of the wheels clickety-clacked and my heart pounded violently in my ears. I started my own architecture firm. What a scream!
To say it was a “mid-life” crisis would not be accurate. I was born in ‘65, so it’s already been a few years since I began counting out my prescription regimen every 28 days and placing a sundry of pills into one of those multi-colored containers they sell at Walgreens, like some geriatric retiree. But it did feel like I had arrived at a crossroads. I was still young enough to take risks but much wiser than my younger self. There was no devil offering to trade guitar-slinging talent for my soul, but there was a distinct, burning ache inside to choose a path and get on with it. In a way, you could say I had experienced a calling.
For one, I had grown bored of where I found myself in my career. Having worked for nine years in a regional outpost – if we were cast members of The Office, our location could have easily been Scranton – of a 100-person firm based in a far-off state, I was no longer interested in the politics, the handbook of policies, or the ever-present cliques of our corporate culture. But I understood the necessity of it all. Those accoutrements are in place to make certain all employees feel they’ve been treated equitably and that ownership of the firm is handed down to the next generation. But I was simply over it. Most definitely, I didn’t envision myself taking my boss’s position whenever he retired. His role had inevitably placed him far away from building design – managing only monthly reports to headquarters, people and problems. And the firm’s vision for markets they wanted to target (a smart business strategy, yes) did not include the commercial sector I had developed within our own region. I felt awkward, left out, even though I was responsible for a considerable amount of revenue for our office and was keeping a handful of talented young professionals extremely busy meeting deadlines.
I was brought up in a family – primarily my grandparents and their kids – who taught, or rather, lived and breathed, relational skills – like asking good questions, listening, and not hogging the conversation by talking about your own accomplishments. I’ve written previously of my dad who, while delivering Oscar Mayer hot dogs and bologna all over the state of Georgia, developed relationships with grocery store managers by simply treating them like good friends. My mom also worked in a nursing home and then a hospital for more than 30 years and treated every patient like they were a family member, making them feel as comfortable as possible in some of life’s worst situations. So developing relationships with anyone has never been hard for me, in fact, it comes naturally via my immediate ancestors and their view of their fellow humankind. Treat others as you would like to be treated.
I should state that I was extremely fortunate to have not been required to accept a non-compete contract with my former employer. I’m sure they wish they had pursued that course looking back, as a great percentage of the clients with which I had developed relationships over the previous nine years followed me to our new firm. But from my side of the equation, it was a tremendous divine provision. Of course, they sent a swift cease-and-desist when I placed multiple photos of some of their most exciting projects whose design I had presided over on my new companies’ website. But I had almost expected that attorney-signed letter and the threats of being reported to the state board. I was given the option to have all the projects re-photographed and to state they were completed while I was under their employ. But given the fact I was trying to create my own firm, I decided it was actually not helpful to lean on the crutches of prior work product. After all, design should be forward-looking. I decided that within a short amount of time, we would have our own work to display without any obligations of giving someone else credit.
But the most offensive stunt I pulled was to take with me one of their best young employees. We had worked on several projects together already and had developed an excellent working relationship. She was committed to working hard to further her career, and I was committed to helping her grow. We had lunch the Friday before I resigned. ”I have bad news and good news,” I stated, with Sandie sitting next to me. “On Monday I’m resigning to start my own firm…and I’d like you to join me.” Over the weekend, Sandie and I worried, as we knew we would need this person to make a strong start. But on Sunday night, we received a text from her. “I’m in!” One victory in the books, but still an entire war to win.
The next immediate challenge was to find office space. We wanted to be downtown. The city is where architecture thrives, its buildings tell the story of a place, and where the hustle-and-bustle aura of entrepreneurship creates excitement, progress, and, in my opinion, life. And downtown Wilmington, sitting on the eastern banks of the mighty Cape Fear River, holds a cargo ship’s worth of stories going all the way back to England and its colonial expansion into the New World. It happened that one of the most historic buildings in town, the Murchison Building completed in 1913, and for nearly a century the tallest in the business district, had a couple small offices available. One of them was an 850 square-foot, 3-room speckle of space on the top floor, with a view of the river, the permanently-anchored WWII battleship USS North Carolina, and just before dusk, a glorious western sunset. Yes, the second means of egress was accessed via the womens’ room, to use the mens’ room you had to traverse two flights of stairs to the eighth floor, and the ceiling height was so low you could only see the tops of the windows while standing directly underneath them. And one of the two elevators was still controlled by a gear-shift shaped wand which could only be operated by the building staff. But the price was right and the view, arguably one of the best in the entire state, sealed the deal.
Another hurdle was how to take care of all the clients who had followed us in our little adventure, providing us with some very exciting work. We went, almost within a months’ time, from wondering if we could afford rent, liability insurance, payroll, an IT service provider, and the purchase of laptops and software to trying to figure out how to get all of our work accomplished with only the two of us. Once again, providence was apparent. Through word-of-mouth we were able to find and hire two highly-trained designers, both with masters degrees in architecture who just needed someone to give them a chance to practice their skills. And we found another graduate of the local community college to assist with drafting. In the blink of an eye, and counting Sandie who was assisting us with human resources and bookkeeping duties nights and weekends, we were already up to six people and purchasing medical insurance for the team. A couple months later, we posted an opening on Indeed.com and found, not one, but two exceptional designers from Baton Rouge and Houston. This overnight growth not only surprised us, but many in the business community as well. One client told me he had imagined I was going to work out of my house designing single-family homes. “But you went out and started an entire firm!” I would say that opportunities opened up, and we walked right through those apertures.
But now we were out of space, crammed into our tiny footprint on the 10th floor of Murchison. One day I got a call from the legal firm who worked across the hall from us. Whereas we had the northwest corner of the building, they were in the southwest corner. And, even better, they also had a huge conference room which faced the river, located in the center of the western face of the building, sandwiched between their office space and ours. And this conference room’s entry door was in the common space hallway, not within their space. They had to walk into the hallway to access it. In meeting with their lead attorney and director of their office, he asked if we were interested in sub-leasing their space within the next few months as they were looking for larger spaces in a more modern structure. I told him we were definitely interested, pending our continual growth, but that we could immediately use their large conference room, if they were willing to give that up sooner. He said, “it’s yours!”
When we had first moved into the building, we had only upgraded the flooring of our space and painted accent colors on two or three walls. But we were tired of the dated ceiling and the conventional office layout. There also existed outside the main entrance to our office, and immediately outside of the law firm’s conference room, a large hallway space which could easily be incorporated into and become part of our office. So we made the decision to incorporate the attorney’s conference room and the additional space in the hallway and to completely renovate our entire office.
As creative types, architects need spaces which are wide open, where collaboration can easily take place. We do not need standard, 8×10 offices. In fact, we really only need one office where I can shut the door when I’m on the phone at length or meeting with someone in a private conversation. Thus our new floor plan demolished a good portion of our original walls, opening our plan up like a legitimate designers’ office. We selected new finishes for the floors, new paint for the walls, and an upgraded ceiling grid which is thinner. We also removed the old 2×4 ceiling tiles, which sag over time, bringing in 2×2 tiles. And we designed angled ceiling surfaces at each of the tall, exterior windows which sloped up to the top of the window heads to allow as much sunlight in as possible. We ordered all new lighting, including a really nice rectangular pendant to hang over a new conference table. We ordered electric standup desks and new furniture for the old hallway space, which will become our lounge to greet visitors and double as our pinup/design critique space. Our landlord moved us temporarily to a space on the 4th floor and as of this writing, we are one week away from moving back up to the 10th floor into our new home.
There is a funny story about our new conference table. It is beautiful, made of repurposed wood floor planks retrieved from older homes in the Chicago area. But it is also very large. When it showed up, it would not fit on the elevator, although we put the poor delivery guys through multiple spaghetti configurations to see if we could get it to work. So for now, it is being stored in the landlord’s office, and there is a plan in place to have the maintenance staff remove an overhead exhaust fan and the ceiling of the old elevator so that the table can be stood up and taken to our space on the top floor.
One of the most difficult tasks I had to perform in this adventure, possibly in my life, was to let someone go who was not working out. In a small office like ours, you become friends with your employees. Not pals, necessarily. But you do learn a lot about them as a person and you enjoy interacting with them. So when things need correcting, you have to remove the friend hat and put on the boss hat. It was painful, obviously, and I dreaded it all weekend. But it had to be done.
It has been nearly a year since I climbed into this roller coaster. We have worked on over 100 projects, both small and large. We were even awarded a project to design the headquarters for a local nonprofit, in which we were in competition with both a long-established local group, and as it turned out, my previous employer. I have met many new people and gotten dragged into more than one argument about the building code. Sandie and I have had to chase down only a few unpaid invoices. Being completely transparent, I am having the most rewarding time of my life. Yes, our workload still exceeds our capacity and we are continuing to look for talented designers who would like to grow their career with us. We are still developing our standards to make our drawing product more consistent. But I feel ‘22 is going to be the year we explode, barring some crazy correction in the markets which typically stalls the construction industry for a time. But Wilmington is still growing like crazy, and every time someone moves here from New Jersey, or Long Island, or any of the harsh winter regions or unbearable property tax states, they need a dentist, a restaurant or two, a church, a bank, an office, a brewery, a grocery store, a school for their kids, and a fire station. And all those destinations need walls and roofs. And that’s where we have the opportunity to do what we do best, designing places for people.
learning2breathe 