Changing the profession from the inside out

At A'23, three architects hope to demystify firm ownership for women and minorities.
Leah Alissa Bayer, AIA, leads virtual firm Architects FORA alongside business partners Kate Conley, AIA, and Sarah Vaccaro, AIA. At AIA’s upcoming Conference on Architecture 2023, they’ll lead the session Buying, Acquiring, Elevating: Three Women, Three Paths to the Top. We spoke with Bayer about firm ownership, building a firm that aims to support the careers of its women employees, and Architects FORA’s mission of designing equitable and affordable housing.  

In 2021, your practice merged with a firm that was called OJK at the time. Can you tell me how that came about?

Interestingly, it was an opportunity that came out of architecture firms supporting one another during the pandemic. My firm had slowed in work, but I had started my practice as a virtual firm. I was not affected logistically by Covid, but more from the [amount of] work perspective. One of my employees ended up having to take another job because I didn’t have enough work for her.

The day she was supposed to start in her new employer’s office, she received a work-from-home order, so she never actually went into that firm’s office space. The firm owner of that firm was freaking out because he had a very traditional practice and didn’t know what to do, or how he was going to run his firm remotely.

She was like, “Hey, I have an idea. The other firm I work for is a remote practice, and I bet she would be happy to help you transfer your systems to a remote format in exchange for perhaps hiring her team to work on some of your projects.” [The firm] had a lot of work, and they didn’t have enough staff. We [firm owner Jerry King, FAIA and I] ended up connecting and talking, and we hit it off. He’s just really a lovely human and had a great mission and portfolio of work.

I met with the project manager that had been working with him for about a year, who is now my business partner. She told me a bit about the affordable housing project that she was working on, and we decided to make the exchange. I helped [the firm owner] transfer all of his systems to cloud-based systems – REVIT and BIM. He hired my team to work on this project with Sarah [Vaccaro], and over the next six months, our team loved the work and Sarah and I became very close. We had really similar goals in mind for the future of architecture.

We were talking one day, and she said, “Jerry asked me if I might want to take over his practice, and I don’t want to because I don’t want to run a business. But you love running a business, so what do you think about partnering and taking over his firm?” And I was like, “What?” [laughs]

How did you move forward from there to form Architects FORA?

I met Kate [Conley], who was working for another large firm at the time, and the three of us just really hit it off right away. We built this huge mind map and started looking at what mattered to us in life and what we wanted to pursue. We found that we had really complimentary interests and we were aligned in values and mission, but very different passions in how we practice architecture. We were just like, “Okay, if this opportunity doesn’t work out either way, we have to partner and run a practice together because we have this really beautiful synergy. We just, in earnest, entered into an agreement and negotiated very, very quickly. We took over the practice a few months later.

It definitely felt like there were some things aligning that were beyond us. It turned out that Kate and I grew up in the same hometown and went to the same dance classes. [laughs] All three of us went to college at [California Polytechnic State University] and I never met them. So it was just this really funny crossing of paths until we got to this place.

Architects FORA has a multifamily housing focus, correct? Was that something you were focused on before coming into this firm?

I was focused on residential work. My practice had been focused more on single-family housing, just because that’s an easier market to get into. However, I had a very sustainable focus – our main project was a total off-grid development in Hawaii. We wanted to pivot into multifamily but weren’t quite sure how to get there. We had a retreat right before the pandemic, and we were evaluating where we wanted to go next.

OJK had a 40-year history and legacy of not just multifamily, but also affordable housing design. That’s not something that I knew very much about until I started working with them, but in our retreat we had sort of identified, “Yeah, it’s fun to work for the millionaires and billionaires of the world because you can do really cool stuff, but it also doesn’t really feel that great as architects to just work for those clients.”

We stated that we wanted to serve the underserved, and this this opportunity arose to work on affordable housing. It was just like, “Oh, this makes sense. It’s residential, and it’s serving the populations that we want to serve.” So that’s what we carried on. What was important to Jerry was that the legacy of practicing affordable housing and really investing in underserved populations was continued beyond him once he sold his practice. That was critical to his decision of who he sold it to.

Can you tell me about what your session at A’23 is going to focus on?

The purpose of the talk is to represent three different buy-ins. Sarah is the internal transition, which is usually treated very differently from an external sale. Kate was sort of like an individual just buying stock into a partnership. I represent the perspective of coming in with an established practice and merging with an existing practice. We’ll talk about what the different considerations are for each of those perspectives, as well as how to structure a sale. Typically, those would also be different ways that you would structure selling a practice. Doing it all in one transaction was a little tricky.

What were some of the challenges inherent in the sale process?

One of them is always going to be what the price is. An internal transition usually has a reduced buy-in because there’s incentive to want to bring up your existing staff. An external sale is going to try and sell for the highest price, and that case it’s about trying to reconcile [the price] with a firm owner who is looking at selling everything he’s ever done. Finding the right valuation method was an exploration, and we ended up coming up with a hybrid, mid-range-based value, but then offering additional payout and incentive based off of our revenue over the next three years. If we did well, then he would receive more funds, and it incentivized him to help with that transition over a period of time, as well. So that helped us bridge the gap between the different expectations of the parties.

It's interesting that you had already been running a virtual practice before the pandemic, and Architect FORA is completely virtual. How has this model been beneficial?

The marriage between our practices was really my system and way of running a firm, and Jerry’s clients and portfolio. The virtual practice is something that I started because of my involvement with the women in architecture in my local AIA chapter, and just hearing story after story about what happens to women in caretaking roles. It really upset me, and I was at an age where I was starting to think about, “What does family look like for me? What am I going to be trapped in based off of these traditional models?” I decided that I wanted to build something that would support people and prevent them from having to drop out [of the profession] or penalize them for taking time off to raise a family.

What would you tell other women and/or minorities in the profession who may be looking to make this leap to ownership?

The main thing we want people to take away is that it’s really not that hard or scary. It’s totally accessible. When you hear about firm ownership or acquiring a firm, it sounds like a very difficult and very expensive process. I think that’s a barrier for a lot of people thinking, you know, “Only those of a certain circumstance that have the funds to do it can do it.” But we were able to enter into this agreement without putting any money down. The barrier was not anything related to finances. It was really about understanding what we wanted from our careers and our future and aligning that with the mission of the practice. You have to care about this practice indefinitely.

I also think the importance of partnership is a big component of what we learned. It was very difficult to run a firm on my own. I had so much anxiety until Sarah, Kate and I partnered, and then, Day 1, I was just like, “Oh, I feel so much better.” You really are working so closely with your partners. So whatever the opportunity is that you’re considering, whether it’s buying into an existing partnership or forming your own partnership or completely taking over something, it’s important to really consider who it is that you’re going to be working with day in and day out, and whether that’s somebody that you trust and that you know is going to support you as much as you’re going to support them.

If the work and the partnership aspect are in alignment and you’re really excited about it, just jump and do it. If we could do it in a matter of months without knowing anything about firm transitions and firm ownership, then truly anybody can do this. You just need the right support system.

What’s the biggest thing you hope people take away from your session at A’23?

This is doable and accessible, and it’s an option for people. It’s very difficult to change firm culture when you’re not in a leadership position. We’re seeing a lot of challenges with expectations of leadership and what people are demanding as employees, especially after things have been shaken up post-Covid. For a long time, we’ve seen a lot of challenges related to a lack of diversity. Without people in positions of power and leadership to make the decisions to create firms that work for them, it’s just not going to happen. It’s going to be a much slower change.

I think there’s a great opportunity with so many firm owners looking to retire in the next handful of years to really step up, take over a legacy and have existing work so you’re not having to start from scratch. The best way to enjoy the firm that you work in is to be the person that’s making the decisions on what those policies are. That’s been really exciting for us. Every day we’re sort of like, “Oh, can we do that?” It’s like, “Oh, we can do that. We’re the boss.” [laughs]

I think if we want to see more people staying in architecture, if we want to see more diverse people, this is an important component to making that happen.