Firm Culture

Our Painted Picture and a Recap of our Planning Retreat

Every year, Board & Vellum takes some time off from our regular work week and travels somewhere out of town (usually the woods) where we can spend some time relaxing and planning our goals for the upcoming year. This is a recap of this year's accomplishments.

Jeff Pelletier

May 29, 2014

If you haven’t noticed, Board & Vellum has been growing lately. We’re pretty much at our sweet spot for how big we want to be, and so it was time to sit down and figure out how to work best together. Our hiring process is pretty transparent and even involves a group interview where the entire team gets to “grill” the new person so we’re confident that we’ve assembled a fantastic team.

Say hello to Brian, Ben, Cheryl, Robert, Alev, Anne, Jesslyn, Matt, and Ryan. They are truly fantastic.

No, that isn’t quite right. This team is damn amazing. Incredible even. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t pinch myself for getting to work with such talented and skilled people. But I digress...

We assembled the great team, we’re busy, and now we had to ensure we all work as a well-oiled machine. I’m a big fan of planning for growth and so we packed up and left the office on a Thursday afternoon for a few days away at a cabin near Lake Wenatchee.

It was awesome.

Going through an aggressive agenda we covered/discussed/did the following:

Our strategic plan for the next 2 years to get buy-in from the entire team.
Exercises that explored our different personality types and how they work together.
Breakout sessions to strategize on goals for marketing, the office environment, our use of technology, and a bevy of other topics.
Discussed our shared goals for the firm
Drank and ate too much.
Learned some mad foosball skills and possibly played some sort of “not-gambling” numbers game involving “no risk”...
Assigned champions for all of our goals.

Most importantly, we went through a vision of where we will be in two years. In the book “Double Double” by Cameron Herold (recommended reading, by the way), it is discussed how creating a “painted picture” of what your company looks like is helpful to stay focused on what kind of firm we are going to be. So, with the goal of bringing you all into our shared vision, here is what Board & Vellum will look like at the end of 2015:

We will leverage the high profile and high quality project mix we have previously worked on and will continue to work on well-designed projects with excellent clients who value our time and creativity.
Our office space on 15^th Avenue East will be a fun place to work, allow us to work effectively, and reflect our design aesthetic.
We will have continued to strengthen and expand our project mix and portfolio. Our work will consist of mid to high end residential work, multi-family work for developers who value good design not just returns on investment, and retail and commercial work for unique and creative clients.
We will have grown our interior design work to be integral to the majority of our projects and do several stand-alone interior design projects annually.
We will continue to get projects published at the rate of one per quarter, while actively pursuing other publications.
The entire staff will be more involved members of the community. We will collectively sit on 5 boards and Board & Vellum will reimburse us for our time spent while active in our communities to foster our role as ambassadors to the company.
Our technology infrastructure will have incrementally expanded and we will all have the tools we need to be creative and productive while not using software that has a poor return on the investment.
We will pay ourselves well and be in the top one third of compensations per annual compensation reports.
Our website will be working great and will reflect our brand and personality. Our blog will be updated twice a week with valuable content to our current and potential clients. We will average over 100 ‘hits’ a day.
We will have leveraged our relationship with our current developer clients and established a smaller multi-family portfolio
Our internal working culture will have been clarified and shaped by our team which allows us to work efficiently on great work while engaging and expanding our team’s talents.
We will continue to provide opportunities for professional growth through project based or office wide initiatives
We will have a blast and have fun together as a company. We will continue to have out of office events and enjoy each other’s company. Employees who don’t “click” with the office culture will be encouraged to find a firm that suits them.
We will have grown sustainably and built a solid base of savings and workload. We will continue to grow carefully and sustainably.
We will have a thorough set of office standards to allow us to produce great documents.
Employees will pursue creative endeavors that aren’t specifically tied to architecture such as photograph, graphic design, videography, sculpture, welding, carpentry, etc. and Board & Vellum will support and promote such efforts.
All employees will have referred work to the firm and have been compensated for those efforts. While Jeff will be the sole owner, profit-sharing and incentives will allow everyone to feel ownership in the path forward.

Oh, and we’re going to still be an awesome group of people to work with and design awesome spaces. We look forward to moving forward with these shared vision and I can also say that I’m one lucky bastard to get to work with this crew.