|

What about those visits to exemplar projects, or training for you and your staff in using new technology? What about that research you’ve always wanted to do into new materials or into future developments of a given building type? What about that investment in doing competitions that will stretch your imagination and bring intellectual debate to your office? And that’s before you begin to think about being able to pay yourself and your staff an above average, professional wage for the professional job that you all do.

Without an income that does more than simply pay the bills, these sorts of aspiring professional ambitions are hard to achieve. And yet, across the profession, there is a real concern that a focus on money will devalue the enjoyment of creating architecture. So how can a balance between money and quality be found?

As with everything, knowledge is key. The more you know about your practice the better you can hone its performance. Unless you know its strengths and weaknesses – as a business – it is almost impossible to evaluate the things you do, and so find that perfect balance between business acumen and professional creativity.

This half-day training session will explore how benchmarking can help.

Firstly, it will explain how benchmarking works. Then it will look at the different business measures and benchmarks that can pinpoint where individual practices might be losing profit, or where there is an opportunity to develop the business further. It will identify the data that needs to be collected, to allow these measures to be undertaken and look at how the results of benchmarking should be interpreted.

It will then move on to look specifically at the RIBA’s new benchmark initiative, which is incidentally free to all chartered practices. It will run through the questions that need to be answered by participating practices, and look at the reports that practices receive. Finally it will consider how the results can be used by practices to galvanise profit.

Speaker: Caroline Cole of Colander. Colander aims to help professionals in the construction industry develop and improve their business management skills, to create and maintain a profitable balance between creative excellence and business acumen. With this aim Colander offers a range of services including benchmarking, inter-firm comparisons, training and management consultancy.

CPD record: 3½ hours of formal CPD

Core Curriculum: Practice Management (2): Business Administration/Staff Management/Time Management