Marketing an Architectural Business
I had a wonderful phone chat with Jeff Stikeman the other day. He took the time out of a very busy week for him to talk and for which I am very grateful. He is a very talented architectural illustrator and architect with close to 20 years of industry experience. We discussed some of the pros and cons to our practices. His work encompasses phases that range from more sketchy types of illustration work to more finalized, illustrative renderings. My work on the other hand tends to lean towards the more photorealistic end of the spectrum. In essence, some of those differences appeals to different types of projects and clients and often serves different purposes.
Jeff has had a significant base of architects and firms to have built his practice upon. A lot of his sources come from word of mouth. That, and the fact that he employs a very high standard of quality, efficiency, and creativity to his work speaks volumes in of itself. He appears to have no shortage of clients – and I hope and firmly believe that will continue well into the future. The aesthetic quality of his work is excellent. If you have a chance, please take a moment to view his websites at:
http://jeffstikeman.wordpress.com
As for myself and Lunarstudio, I didn’t have anyone to turn to when I first started out. I literally started from scratch and had to fight to get Lunarstudio started and noticed. That’s not to say that this is any “better” – by no means do I think it is – and in some ways really wish I was in his position instead.
In order to land my first few clients, I spent a solid month on the phone – cold-calling local architects and developers and seeing if anyone needed any work done. Now please keep in mind, I don’t really have much of a sales background and telephone experience either and that proved to be an added challenge. Out of the 200 odd phone calls that I made that month (not including emails and follow-up), I only had one return from a developer and that happened to have been a fairly large client. That project alone gave me a huge jump-start in business. From then on, I was able to use that one single project as a base to launch all my other projects.
But still till this day, my work is not a constant flow of projects. I don’t always have the luxury of being able to essentially, “pick and choose.” I have times where I am very busy and times where the work is completely still. I’d much rather be in a position to have work constantly flowing through the door. It’s starting to look like Lunarstudio and I might eventually get to that point, but many years later it is still proving to be somewhat challenging. Marketing art-related services in general is a very tricky subject.
Jeff accurately described my approach to marketing Lunarstudio as “casting a wide net.” I tend to throw my work out on to the web (through my website) and not rely on word of mouth alone. I put a lot of emphasis on my website’s search engine rankings and Internet visibility. While I get a lot of inquiries and hits, a good percentage of them turn out to be less substantial than I’d like them to be. On the other hand, I do get a lot of different inquiries – everything from large scale, city-sized project inquiries to logo creation and dairy farms out in Wisconsin. The varying projects I get approached with can keep you on your toes, but sometimes I spend more time responding to people and job applications than doing the actual work itself. Lunarstudio has a lot of exposure, but the quality (financially-speaking) of returns on being marketing mostly through the Internet seems to be watered-down.
In a nutshell, we both had very different approaches to starting out.
Hi Charles.
I guess I have to be careful what I say on the phone, in case it winds up here. hahahaha
I wouldn’t say our approaches were different due to any strategic reason. I didn’t set out to find business so much as reacted when business found me. And so later on, I have just continued building the business the way it “worked” for me. I would never pooh-pooh the approach you have applied, it’s just that I would never have been able to do it in the first place. I was aware of page-rank optimization (for search results), but never had the acumen to actually get into it. Subsequently, when someone searches for “architectural illustration”, I am pretty far down the list.
But as I mentioned to you half-kidding/half-seriously, I’m the number one return when you google “Jeff Stikeman”. And that’s ultimately what I want someone to be looking for. Me.
I learned from Dennis Allain, who in turn learned it from some of the other gurus, that in the end, it is important to have a singular style. I spoke with Michael McCann the other day, one of the best watercolorists in this field, and he reiterated, for any illustrator it’s important to have a singular ‘style’. It can be a little more difficult with “photoreal”, because the very nature of the concept seems to (but doesn’t necessarily) remove artistic style from the equation. The client says they want something “that looks like a photograph”, and implies that they want to limit the evidence of human consideration in the image.
But I would look to Studio AMD, or dBox, or Neoscape. Those guys all have Style (with a capital ‘S’). Even if the client thinks the work was really “done by the computer” (which we all know is not the case), their work would still be signature work, have a signature style. The camera is passive. The photographer (or photoreal illustrator in this case), is like Ansel Adams, or Scorcese, or Julius Shulman (the architectural photographer of architectural photographers, who early on shot Neutra’s work with cheap hand-held camera). It’s the person running it that is in charge of the image, not the equipment.
You want people to want YOU, not just to “want an illustration”. It’s a very critical thing to develop a reputation for the ability to deliver under schedule, under pressure, with sometimes little or no information. Of course skill in illustration is required, goes almost without saying. But the secret handshake in all of this is that when an architect in need calls his friend at another firm and asks “do you know anybody? I really need help”, you want to be on the tip of their tongue. The aren’t asking for an illustration. They are asking for help.
In my mind, any ‘style’ I have has grown out of the process of solving someone’s problem. Every job is different, in a way. Every schedule, whatever assets the client has (how far along is the design, etc.), and who their audience is… all of it is different. What they are looking for is not necessarily ‘just’ an illustration. They are looking for approvals, or financing, or to win a competition, or to move a project forward, to get a client to say “yes”, etc.
Don’t kid yourself, either. I would enjoy having your page rank. It’s an asset. I don’t get nearly as many RFPs or contacts as you might. I would be happy to pump up those numbers.
I would say you have the best of both worlds. You have the ability to capitalize on the way the web works now, and get traffic. But you have also been developing a style yourself. Those two things together will be unbeatable. It literally just takes time. I did my first architectural illustration for a fee in the early 1990’s. It took many many years for me to be able to support myself full time with that effort. And in the current economic environment, even that isn’t a certainty anymore.
Great article. Sorry if my comment is longer than your post. You know how long I can talk on the phone, right….? hahaha I’m having coffee right now before diving in to work, so I’m sort of putting off the work by typing here as long as I can….
Thanks for the kind words.
-Jeff Stikeman