Pricing projects for family and friends

Learn from my mistakes

Within the first year of graduating an old school friend of mine got in touch about designing a house for them. I had very little experience in practice, very little understanding of the risks involved and very little understanding of how to charge my friend. So, naturally, I said yes!

Within the first few weeks I broke some cardinal rules of clients and projects:

• Didn’t have the correct protections in place for me or my friend

• Didn’t have an agreement in place between me and my friend

• Didn’t even properly broach the topic of fees, my services or an expected timeframe to complete the project

Because of this, when we eventually got around to fees I was sheepish and awkward and accepted a shockingly low rate. I was working full time in practice so I had to squeeze this into my weekends and nights. Because I was getting paid so little I came to resent the project, it dragged on forever and I rushed a job I was less than proud of – just to be done with it. 

Please, learn from my mistakes.

Traditional Services

Years later when I first setup my own practice I had a much better understanding of how to run a project and price it. However, I was doing everything by the book. This meant full services, traditional fee arrangements and the somewhat stand offish nature of the client and architect.

This served me well for ‘real’ jobs with clients that I didn’t know. But it never felt like a good fit for working with close friends and family.  And if you’re anything like the typical early practitioner, many of your early jobs will be friends and family.

This was because I felt awkward about charging full fees for my aunt or close friend. So I would discount the fee and enter a fairly traditional arrangement. In the early days this was OK because I didn’t have many overheads but I did have lots of enthusiasm so I could absorb the poor fees into the business – and hey, it was a project! However, as most traditional projects might take two years until the doors open on the new building these low fee jobs hang around for a long time and you eventually lose that enthusiasm and the poor fees will get remarks from your accountant 18 months into the practice!

 

How I price for friends and family now

Now that practice matured and I don’t rely on friends and family for jobs, but I still get the occasional request for help from them. I knew that I couldn’t keep discounting fees and running traditional services so I started to experiment with the arrangements.

I’ve drastically changed how I manage these jobs for three reasons:

• Overtime discounting a fee can lead to resentment, rushing and feeling guilty. This doesn’t help you or your client

• Reducing scope or doing partial services only still meant that the practice wasn’t being properly compensating or we weren’t delivering exactly what our clients wanted.

• Look, I swear my friends are trendy and have good taste, but the way I see it, the overlap between ‘you’re my friend’ and ‘you want full service, capital A, high level architecture and you can afford it’ is exceptionally small. They might want that, but chances are they just want some help on a specific task on a small project

Therefore, I now run my friends and family jobs as “sprints.

 

Enter the Sprint

Long before I set up the practice I have had a real interest in business. Most business books are from the tech world and so I would naturally find my way to these. I came across the notion of “the sprint” which is part of the Lean Business movement.  Essentially it means that work is organized around getting a concentrated amount of work done in a short period of time and then get lots of feedback on it.

I have found that adopting the sprint model works perfectly for friends and family. I operate it like this;

• I charge blocks of hourly rates. I know that I can do a reasonable amount of design work in, say 20-30 hours so I might sell blocks of these hours – one block at a time

• I am very explicit about what we’re aiming to achieve in that sprint and that we may not complete it all in the allotted time

• I allow for a meeting at the beginning of the sprint and at the end of the sprint

•  Within the middle I go hell for leather trying to solve the specific problem my friend is looking to solve

•  If I get there in the allotted hours I stop the clock and arrange to meet up again

• If I don’t get there by the allotted hours I know I would’ve made significant progress toward resolving it so I stop working and arrange to meet up.

• Either way I report back to them and we discuss how I went. They then either take what I’ve done and go on their merry way, or they ‘re-up’ for another sprint to continue refining the response

Its important that I clearly define exactly what I’m going to work on in each sprint. For example, the first sprint might include:

• A site visit and measure up

• A briefing discussion where we record the project brief

• Draw up the site at scale

• Develop 3x design options. Hand drawn only, at scale with furniture arrangements

• A follow up meeting to discuss

The second sprint might include:

• Refining one of the options (for example, trying a galley kitchen or relocating a bedroom)

• Turn the sketch into a 3D sketchup model with 3x views and renders

The third spring might include:

•  Capturing the design into a set of drawings that can be costed by a builder

I am explicit and clear that I may or may not get everything done within those hours but that it strikes a fair balance for both us as a practice and my friends as clients.

Note I find that this works best for concept design work. I’ve arranged my practice in such a way that a lot of our jobs are concept only before we hand off to a builder to do some of the legwork to get it to site (its kind of like a cost plus lite option) . If you don’t arrange your practice this way and typically do full service, you might need to refashion this model for DD and documentation so that you find a good balance between what is necessary for a good project and what your friend needs.

 

Why I can’t do this for ‘real’ jobs

I’m a big advocate for pricing flexibility and transparency. I’m sure I’ll write more about it soon, but I think that it’s important to clearly explain what is involved in your service and to provide choice to the client. However, I don’t find this model to be a good fit for typical projects. This is because:

• it requires a lot of trust on the part of the client - they are holding more of the risk because they’re effectively paying on hourly rates without a guarantee of what will be finished in that sprint

• it’s exhausting - it works on occasional projects, but being on hourly rates all the time means you’re constantly watching the clock. When working on percentage or fixed fees you’re ‘rewarded’ for being efficient, and ‘punished’ for being slow. That feels like a fairer balance between client and architect and makes more sense for most projects

Disclaimer - this article assumes that you have the correct insurances and protections in place for you and your client, including a clear and tested agreement and that you are experienced enough to provide the services that you are signing up for