There’s a particular kind of frustration that runs through the architecture profession right now. Practices are busier than they’ve been in years. Architects are working long hours, managing increasingly complex briefs, navigating planning and building control requirements getting more onerous every day, and at the end of it all, wages have barely moved. In some cases, they’ve quietly fallen behind inflation. I know of people whose wages, while increasing over time, have the exact same spending power today as they had 10 or 15 years ago. So why, in a profession full of skilled, hardworking people, is this still happening? The easy answer is to blame the market, or clients, or fees that haven’t kept pace with costs. And those things are real. But they’re not the whole story, and focusing on them tends to lead practices toward the same flawed conclusion: if we just win more work, things will get better. They won’t. At least, not on their own.
The trap that almost every practice falls into
I’ve worked in several practices and seen this pattern play out more times than I can count. When the pipeline slows, margins feel tight, and the instinctive response is to chase more projects. Win more work. Keep the team busy. And on the surface, that feels like the right move — revenue is revenue. But what actually happens is this: the practice takes on more projects at the same fee levels, with the same inefficient delivery model, and the same habit of directors absorbing scope changes without going back to the client for more money. The team ends up working longer hours on projects that weren’t profitable to begin with. Pressure builds. People get tired. And the margin stays stubbornly thin — or disappears entirely. The fee negotiation problem is its own particular dysfunction. Directors would routinely accept additional work, scope changes, and extended programmes — and say nothing. When pushed on it, the answer was always the same: we can’t ask for more money; they’ll walk away. There is a genuine fear that any resistance on scope or fees would cost them the client relationship entirely. What that thinking misses is the difficult truth sitting underneath it: if a project isn’t making money, if the client is repeatedly expanding scope without paying for it, if the relationship only works when the practice absorbs the cost, then the client walking away might actually have been the better outcome. A bad project that ties up your team for eighteen months while generating no margin isn’t a win. It’s a slow drain. More work of that kind doesn’t solve the problem. It accelerates it.
Strip away the revenue question, and what you’re left with is a delivery system that, in most practices, is quietly haemorrhaging time and money in ways that never get measured. Rework is probably the single biggest drain. An unclear brief at the start of a project creates a chain reaction that runs all the way through delivery — information gets produced, then revised, then revised again because something upstream wasn’t resolved early enough. Nobody logs this as a problem. It just becomes the normal texture of how projects feel. Add to that the manual processes that have never been questioned, the coordination gaps between disciplines that result in clashes no one catches until they’re expensive to fix, and the lack of consistent standards and templates that mean every project starts from scratch in ways it shouldn’t — and you start to get a picture of how significant the cumulative waste really is. This isn’t a criticism of the people doing the work. It’s a structural issue. Most practices have grown organically, adding people and projects without ever stepping back to design how the work actually flows. The result is that talented architects spend a meaningful portion of their time on friction — on the inefficiency that surrounds the actual work — rather than on the work itself.The commercial realityWages rise when firms generate more value per hour worked. That’s not a harsh business school observation — it’s just how it works. And generating more value per hour isn’t primarily about working harder or winning bigger projects. It comes from delivering efficiently, cutting waste, and having systems clear enough that people don’t have to make judgment calls they shouldn’t have to. When those conditions exist, the margin improves. When margin improves, practices have room to manoeuvre — to invest, to retain people, and eventually to pay them properly. Most practices focus almost entirely on revenue. Win the project, deliver it, and invoice it. The delivery itself — the internal mechanics of how work gets done — rarely gets the same level of attention. And that’s where the money is quietly disappearing.
The numbers, when you do fix it, can be striking. Projects that were sitting at one to three per cent profit margin — essentially breaking even after everything has been accounted for — can move to fifty or sixty per cent when the underlying delivery system is properly structured. I’ve seen it happen. It’s not a theoretical possibility. It comes from recovering time that was previously lost, reducing rework, and having clear systems that prevent people from duplicating effort or making expensive mistakes that have to be corrected later. It’s not complicated, but it does require consistency. The practices that actually improve their margins tend to concentrate on a handful of things: standardised delivery systems that don’t require people to reinvent the wheel on every project; clear workflows that make responsibilities unambiguous; structured information management that means things can be found and used rather than hunting through folders and email chains; and some level of measured performance so there’s visibility on where time is actually going. For example, in a 20-person practice, a structured review of delivery identified that roughly a quarter of project time was lost due to inefficiencies—rework, unclear handoffs, and process gaps. The team wasn’t underperforming. They were working hard inside a system that was working against them. Tackling the core issues recovered time, reduced the chronic pressure that had become normalised, and improved margin without adding a single new project to the pipeline.
There’s a longer game here that doesn’t get talked about enough. Practices that invest properly in their own operational infrastructure don’t just perform better in normal conditions — they perform better when the market turns. And the market always turns eventually. When a downturn hits, and work dries up, the firms that have built efficient, well-systemised businesses are the ones that stay profitable. They’re the ones who can afford to keep their teams together and keep employing people, while competitors around them are letting staff go or closing up entirely. That’s not luck. It’s the compounding return on having built something solid before the pressure arrived. Again, I have experienced this firsthand, so I know it works. But there’s another dimension to this that I find genuinely exciting. The right systems and accreditations have traditionally been the preserve of large firms; the “big boys” who win major contracts partly because they can demonstrate the infrastructure, quality management, and compliance frameworks that clients and procurement teams require. Small practices have historically been locked out of that tier of work, not because they lack the talent, but because they lack the credentials and systems to compete on paper. When a smaller firm invests in building those systems properly, something interesting happens. They can attain the same accreditations, demonstrate the same rigour, and then offer something the large firms genuinely can’t: agility. A 15-person practice with proper systems in place can move faster, communicate more directly, and adapt more readily than a 500-person firm with seventeen layers of account management. And they can do it at a price point that fits better for the client — while still being profitable. The client wins. The business wins. And suddenly you’re competing for work you were never supposed to be able to win.
The stagnation of architectural wages isn’t purely a financial problem. It affects who stays in the profession, who makes it through the early years without burning out, and what kinds of careers are actually sustainable here. Practices that continue to operate on the assumption that harder work and more projects will eventually fix the economics are likely to keep losing their best people to firms — or industries — that have figured out how to reward them properly. The firms that take operational performance seriously will outperform. They’ll have the margins to retain people. They’ll be able to hold their ground when the market gets difficult. And they’ll be able to have honest conversations about pay that most practices currently can’t, because the numbers simply don’t allow it.
If you want to talk through where margin is leaking in your practice — and what it would actually take to fix it — I’ll be at UKREiiF in Leeds from the 19th to the 21st of May. I’d welcome a conversation.