Fresh Projects Blog | Fresh Projects UK

Calculate your cost rate in 3 simple steps

I often host workshops with architects on practice management. One of the exercises I do is to ask the audience to calculate the cost rate of a fictitious architect, given a set of financial and timesheet data. So far (and hundreds of architects have made the attempt), no one has …

When to hire? 3 factors that will change your view.

The UK construction industry enjoyed a recovery in 2021. And the great news is, this positive trajectory is expected to continue through 2022 and beyond: “With Government investment in transport and renewable energy driving the recovery and residential continuing to strengthen, analysts are expecting this positive outlook to continue through …

Didn’t reach your profit goals in 2021? Try getting these 5 basics right in 2022.

If your practice can improve on these 5 basic steps, you’re off to a flying start! 1 Start every project with a profit-inherent fee! From accurate charge out rates to realistic project time per stage, architectural practices get this crucial step wrong more times than not. The good news is …

3 questions you need to answer.

It’s all about focus. Making your architectural practice more profitable is actually quite simple. All you need to do is focus on the right kind of projects, the right kind of clients and ensure your employees are productive in the right way. Sounds easy, but determining what “right” is for …

Is there a secret to being a profitable practice ?

The secret to running a profitable practice

What is certainly not a secret, is that architects are not particularly excited by the financial management aspects of running a practice. At Fresh Projects, we believe that is the way it should be. We understand that architects became architects to create great spaces and design timeless buildings. Not to …

The "A Team" Approach: How a simple change can improve profitability.

Why tracking staff utilisation is important

There are 4 main types of employees in any professional service firm Reallocating the nature of work between the different types can drastically improve profitability The A Team We are going to be using the hot 80's TV show, The A Team, to illustrate our point: If you have a …

I Love Excel. I Hate Excel.

When I was a teenager, I authored an Excel workbook that was used extensively to capture the quantity, species and location of wild animals being spotted from a helicopter - in order to plot, aggregate and extrapolate game populations for management purposes.