Inputs
Depending on the review, this may include questionnaires, project logs, staff observations, referral patterns, written materials, interviews, or operational notes.
Services
Most practice problems are connected.
Small architectural practices rarely struggle with just one thing in isolation. Communication problems affect referrals. Poor-fit projects affect workload. Over-involvement affects delivery, confidence, and fee pressure.
The reviews are organised into three connected categories covering pipeline patterns, communication, and practice operations. Practices can begin wherever the problem feels most immediate.
Reviews can be taken individually, combined, or used as starting points for deeper work.
How the reviews work
The work is structured enough to be useful, but not designed to reduce a practice to a score. The aim is to make patterns easier to see, discuss, and act on.
Review and analysis
I look for recurring patterns, tensions, mismatches, communication gaps, operational bottlenecks, dependency structures, and fit issues.
Findings document
Most reviews produce a written findings document with observations, working interpretations, practical implications, and useful next steps.
Handover conversation
Where included or added, this gives space to clarify the findings, discuss tensions, and identify what might be most useful to look at next.
Programme area
Feast or Famine
Pipeline patterns, client fit, project fit, and referral relationships.
Most small practices depend heavily on referrals, repeat work, and local reputation, but very few have a clear picture of how those systems are actually functioning.
The Feast or Famine reviews are designed to make those patterns visible: where work comes from, which clients and projects fit best, which relationships are quietly carrying the practice, and where the current structure is more fragile than it appears.
Patterns that often appear
- Long quiet periods followed by sudden overload
- Heavy dependence on one referral source
- Difficulty explaining where work actually comes from
- Strong technical projects with poor commercial fit
- Clients that consume disproportionate time and energy
- Referral relationships that exist but are not actively managed
The Pipeline Review
£300For practices experiencing an unpredictable pipeline or uncertain flow of work.
What gets reviewed
- Project log
- Sources of work
- Workload patterns
- Concentration risks
- Referral dependency
What the practice receives
- Short findings document
- Observations about work patterns
- Comparison between perceived and actual pipeline structure
- One practical direction or action
Often connects with
- Messaging Review
- Referral Review
- Client Fit Review
The Client Fit Review
£300For practices that want to understand the clients they work best with, and the client relationships that tend to need more caution.
What gets reviewed
- Staff questionnaire responses
- Client relationship patterns
- Communication signals
- Situational signals
- Optional project log
What the practice receives
- Typical good-fit client profile
- Typical poor-fit client profile
- Communication and behavioural signals
- Practical guidance for recognising fit earlier
About the profiles
These are narrative composite profiles, not checklists. The aim is recognition: a clearer sense of the kinds of working relationships, expectations, and behaviours that tend to make good work easier — or harder — for the practice.
Optional additions
- Staff conversations
- Client interviews
The Project Fit Review
£300For practices that want to understand which project types suit them best, and which tend to cost more than they return.
What gets reviewed
- Project log
- Project-type patterns
- Economic fit
- Operational strain
- Strategic and portfolio considerations
What the practice receives
- Typical good-fit project portrait
- Typical poor-fit project portrait
- Economic and strategic observations
- Guidance for evaluating uncertain opportunities
About the portraits
The project portraits are intended to make recurring project patterns easier to recognise. They are not rules about what the practice should always accept or reject.
Optional additions
- Staff conversations
The Referral Review
£300For practices that want to understand where referred work comes from, and how deliberately those relationships are being managed.
What gets reviewed
- Past and returning client referrals
- Professional referrer relationships
- Peer referral patterns
- Current visibility and follow-up structures
What the practice receives
- Referral-pattern findings
- Relationship observations
- Referral-source analysis
- Practical areas where deliberate effort may help
Optional additions
- Client interviews
Programme area
Getting the Phone to Ring
Communication, positioning, and first impressions.
Practices are often much clearer in conversation than they are in writing.
The issue is rarely that the work lacks quality. More often, the practice is difficult to describe clearly, difficult to refer confidently, or difficult for prospective clients to understand quickly.
These reviews help practices clarify how they present themselves, how they are understood, and what signals their current materials are sending.
Patterns that often appear
- Practices that are much clearer in conversation than in writing
- Websites that underrepresent the quality, clarity, or distinctiveness of the work
- Prospective clients struggling to understand what kind of practice this is
- Referrals that depend heavily on someone else interpreting the practice personally
- Difficulty describing why certain clients or projects fit particularly well
- Uncertainty about what actually makes the practice distinct from similar firms
The Messaging Review
£300For practices that want clearer language for what they do, who they serve, what makes them distinctive, and how they talk about value.
What gets reviewed
- Practice question set
- Descriptions of projects and clients
- Communication patterns
- Fee explanations
- Positioning language
What the practice receives
- Positioning statement
- Practice description
- Observations about ideal client and project fit
- Communication observations
- Fee-conversation observations
Often becomes more useful after
- Pipeline Review
- Client Fit Review
- Project Fit Review
The First Impression Audit
Messaging Review add-on, £125An additional review for practices that want to understand how their current website reads to a prospective client.
Base review
- Practice website, up to five pages
Optional add-ons
- Brochures, from £50
- Capability statements, from £50
- Printed materials, from £50
- PDFs, from £50
- Email or proposal materials, from £50
What the practice receives
- Prospective-client perspective
- Communication gaps
- Messaging strengths
- Questions the materials are not answering clearly
Positioning note
This is not a UX audit, branding review, or conversion exercise. The emphasis is on clarity, confidence, and whether a prospective client can understand the practice quickly enough to make a sensible enquiry.
Practice Identity Diagnostic
Currently in developmentA slower, more interpretive future review intended to help practices understand the instincts, tensions, and positioning signals underneath their work.
What it explores
- Design philosophy
- Spatial instincts
- Commercial and civic orientation
- Practice stance
- Tensions that may be useful as positioning material
Current status
This review is still being developed and refined, and is currently being pilot tested with a small number of architectural practices.
Programme area
Too Many Moving Parts
Practice operations, dependency patterns, and involvement.
Many small practices rely heavily on a small number of people holding things together.
Sometimes that dependence reflects genuine expertise. Sometimes it reflects organisational habits, confidence structures, unclear authority, or systems that evolved informally over time.
This work is designed to identify where involvement is necessary, where it is habitual, and where the current structure is costing more energy than the practice realises.
Patterns that often appear
- Directors becoming default escalation points
- Repeated reassurance requests
- Interruption-heavy working patterns
- Over-reliance on tacit knowledge
- Clients bypassing project architects
- Operational decisions landing on the same person repeatedly
The Involvement Audit
£300For practices where too much still depends on the same people noticing, deciding, correcting, and carrying things forward.
What gets reviewed
- Project-stage involvement patterns
- Escalation behaviour
- Interruption structures
- Administrative dependency
- Operational bottlenecks
- Unnecessary pull-in
What the practice receives
- Lightweight findings document
- Involvement pattern observations
- Dependency themes
- Operational pressure points
- Possible structural interventions
Positioning note
This is not about removing necessary expertise. It is about distinguishing useful involvement from dependency patterns that have become expensive, disruptive, or difficult to sustain.
Shared tools and working materials
Many of the reviews use shared working materials designed to make patterns easier to identify and compare over time.
The aim is not to reduce practices to a score or formula. The structure exists to make complex patterns easier to see and discuss clearly.
Project logs
Used to ground impressions in actual work, project histories, and recurring patterns.
Structured questionnaires
Designed to collect specific observations without forcing false certainty.
Briefing documents
Used to explain what to select, what to ignore, and how much effort is proportionate.
Findings templates
Used to turn patterns into clear, useful documents the practice can return to.
Working style
How I tend to work
The reviews are designed around small-practice realities: limited time, partial information, and problems that rarely arrive neatly labelled.
Most reviews begin with written material
Practices usually work through questionnaires, logs, or briefing notes in their own time before the findings are written.
The work is interpretive rather than automated
The structure helps gather useful material, but the value is in recognising what the responses reveal about the practice.
Uncertainty is useful information
A partial or unclear picture is often where the interesting material begins. The point is not to force certainty where it does not exist.
If one of these patterns feels familiar
Practices rarely need every review. Most begin with the area that feels most pressing and work outward from there.
If you are unsure where to start, explain what has been happening in the practice and we can work out which review is likely to be most useful.