How I work

I drew it, and then I stood in front of it while somebody tried to build it. That is not the same as having been in the field first and learning to draw later. It means the bad line was mine and I had to go look at it. There is a lot of humility in looking at your own bad drawing, and it is most of what I know.

A portfolio shows what was made. This page is about how it gets made, and how it gets won in the first place. It is the part that does not photograph.

At Jenkins I drew custom houses- often alongside Jason- and handed them to the build and estimating side. Then I went out to the site almost every day. I was not coordinating the framers. I was the one they called when something architectural had to be solved in place.

That is a different education from drawing alone, and a harsher one. There is a lot of humility in looking at your own bad drawing. You cannot argue with a wall that is already standing, and you do not forget the detail that did not work.

At KRDB I ran the construction outright- lined up the subcontractors, took the bids, picked the winner and managed the build. Not advising a contractor. Being one.

It is the reason a superintendent will talk to me like a peer instead of like an architect.

It shows up when something goes wrong. On a 101-unit building in East Austin, the developer decided during bidding to change from wood framing to cold-formed steel- after we had the permit. I revised the specifications, the details and the drawings in two weeks.

Knowing how a wall actually goes together is what makes that a two-week problem instead of a redesign.

Work does not only arrive. Some of it has to be gone and got.

If you pay me a dollar I will make you 7.

New service revenue generated against salary cost, across the DFW, Houston and Austin markets. Revenue against cost, not profit- the firm applies its own multiplier to decide what that was worth.

A client once found me on LinkedIn and brought a project to the firm I was working for. That is the whole job in one sentence: the relationship is the pipeline.

Structural, civil, landscape, builder. On my own projects those are my relationships, not a firm's approved-consultant list- and they are the difference between a team that has worked together and a team that met at kickoff.

It also means I can tell a client, honestly, who is right for their project rather than who is available.

Most business development in this industry runs on a notebook and a good memory. I have replaced that twice.

• A Vantagepoint pipeline with standardised reporting, so leadership could see the state of every pursuit rather than hear about it.
• Density studies built in TestFit and handed to land brokers- showing an owner what their site actually yields before anyone has been asked to pay for a drawing.
• AI-assisted research and outreach systems, built before that was common in the industry.

None of this is the reason to hire an architect. It is the reason to hire this one.

Austin's missing middle- the three-to-twelve-unit infill the city keeps writing rules to encourage and then making hard to build. I am tracking the code as it changes, because the constraint on that work is rarely design. It is a utility upsize, a subdivision process, or a reviewer who has not seen the program before.

Notes on that are here →