EA659: Ashish Desai - How Architecture Firms Can Use Data to Thrive
38 min
•May 8, 20262 months agoSummary
Ashish Desai, newly appointed CEO of Monograph, discusses how architecture firms can leverage data and technology to improve profitability. The episode reveals that firms using AI and proper business metrics—utilization, realization, and cash flow—significantly outperform peers, with AI-adopting firms generating $20K more revenue per employee annually.
Insights
- Firms that track and optimize three key metrics (utilization, realization, cash flow) consistently outperform those flying blind, regardless of workload or project quality
- AI adoption in administrative tasks (proposals, invoicing, RFPs) directly correlates with 11% revenue-per-employee improvement and higher profitability
- Monthly billing with easy payment methods (credit cards, ACH) reduces payment collection time from 6 weeks to 8 days and eliminates 5% of unpaid invoices
- Operations staff using AI increase utilization from 74% to 84%, while technical roles (BIM, CAD) reach 90-95% utilization with AI assistance
- Revenue per employee is the single most important health metric for architecture firms as it encapsulates efficiency, billing rates, and cash collection
Trends
AI adoption becoming table-stakes differentiator in architecture firm profitability and operational efficiencyShift from milestone-based billing to monthly recurring billing models improving cash flow predictabilityOperations staff becoming bottleneck; AI automation of admin work (invoicing, proposals, RFPs) unlocking capacityReal-time project budget tracking and staffing visibility becoming standard expectation for firm managementArchitecture firms increasingly recognizing payment friction (checks, delayed invoicing) as hidden business costData-driven decision making replacing intuition-based project pricing and resource allocationElectronic payment adoption accelerating as firms recognize 3% fee as cost of doing business vs. 5% unpaid invoice rateRevenue per employee emerging as primary KPI for benchmarking and firm health assessment across architecture sector
Topics
Business metrics for architecture firms (utilization, realization, cash flow)AI applications in administrative workflows (invoicing, proposals, RFPs)Monthly billing and recurring revenue modelsElectronic payment methods and payment friction reductionReal-time project budget tracking and forecastingStaff utilization optimization and capacity planningRevenue per employee as key performance indicatorStaffing and resource management for small firmsProject profitability analysis and pricing strategyCash flow management and payment collectionTechnology adoption in architecture practice managementBenchmark reporting and competitive analysisAutomation of administrative tasksClient payment experience and friction pointsData-driven business decision making
Companies
Monograph
Platform used by 2,000+ architecture firms for business management, time tracking, invoicing, and financial analytics
99designs
Marketplace platform connecting clients with graphic designers; Ashish Desai's previous role as CPO informed understa...
Handshake
Employment platform for college students; Ashish Desai's previous role as product leader before joining Monograph
NCARB
National Council of Architectural Registration Boards; mentioned in opening segment regarding licensure and architect...
WeCollabify
Insourcing model providing design and technical professionals to architecture firms to add capacity and support growth
Arcad
Provider of continuing education program (Arcademy) offering AIA-approved HSW credits through podcast learning
People
Ashish Desai
Newly appointed CEO discussing data-driven strategies for architecture firm profitability and AI adoption benefits
Mark R. LePage
Host conducting interview and providing context on architect business challenges and firm profitability gaps
Robert
Previous CEO of Monograph who transitioned role to Ashish Desai; founded company and shaped its direction
Andy McIntyre
Host of NCARB podcast segment on architectural licensure and Pathways to Practice initiative
Jeff Eccles
Marketing expert and podcast host exploring branding strategies for architects and creative professionals
Quotes
"You can't improve something that you don't measure and that you don't have easily accessible to you."
Ashish Desai•~42:00
"Bill every month. You can't run a business where you don't have predictable cashflow coming in and going out."
Ashish Desai•~28:00
"If there's one thing you take away from this, just do that. And then make your payments easy."
Ashish Desai•~29:00
"The 3% is literally just a business expense. It's not coming out of your profit. It's a cost of doing business."
Mark R. LePage•~33:00
"Focus on your business so you can go do your art."
Mark R. LePage•~48:00
Full Transcript
This is the NCARB podcast, where you get an inside look at licensure, regulation, and the initiative shaping the future of architectural practice. I'm your host, Andy McIntyre, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at NCARB. And this season, we're diving into Pathways to Practice, NCARB's multi-year effort to rethink how architects become licensed. Architecture is the hardware to the software of life, right? It is fundamentally about that interaction and it makes life easier if we have a built environment that works. Across eight episodes, we'll explore how licensure got to where it is today and where it needs to go next. We talk with architects, educators, regulators, and NCARB leaders about education, experience, and the exam, and why each of those pillars is evolving. And that portion of school where you go from conceptual to real is also really challenging. It's not something you're really gently moved into. It's kind of like you're doing something that's flowy and crazy and all of a sudden, wait, you actually have to make this work. You'll hear how the NCARB competency standard was developed, how research is shaping future licensure models, and what a more flexible competency-based approach could mean for candidates from a wide range of backgrounds. So we've seen that in our data as the number of reciprocal licenses starts to decrease a little bit, but that number of individuals who are licensed hold steady. We also tackle the big questions. Why does licensure look the way it does today? Where do candidates face the biggest barriers and how can we expand access without lowering standards? Not everybody fits into the same mold. And so having different pathways to licensure, I think, is really important. Whether you're a licensure candidate, an educator, a firm leader, or a regulator, this season offers clarity, context, and transparency into one of the most important conversations facing the profession. Does this requirement to complete all divisions of the exam place an unfair burden on any one group or other? This is Pathways to Practice, only on the NCARB podcast. Please follow the link in the show notes, subscribe now, and join us as we explore the future of architectural licensure. My name is Mark Arlepage and you are listening to Entree Architect Podcast, where each week I speak with inspiring, passionate people who share their knowledge and expertise all to help you build a better business as a small firm entrepreneur architect. Today, we're talking about something every architect feels, but often struggles to explain you can be busy, you can be fully booked, and you can be doing great work, yet you still feel like the numbers just don't add up. My guest today is Ashish Desai, CEO of Monograph, a platform used by thousands of architecture firms to build better understanding about their business and their business performance. Ashish brings a unique perspective from both the product and design industries. And today we're digging into what separates firms that are thriving from those that are just getting by and what you can do about it. Ashish Desai, welcome to Entree Architect Podcast. Thank you, Mark. Really excited to be here and dig into this topic. It's great to have you here. This will be fun and enlightening. Let's start where we always start here, origin story. So go back as far as you want to go back, Ashish, and share your story to where you started. What inspired you to get to where you are today? Yeah. So I don't know how much time you have, so I'm not going to go all the way, all the way back. You can go back as far as you want to go back. I would say like, you know, when I talk about my career trajectory, I'm a problem solver at heart. So that's the through line of my career. If you look at my resume, it might look a little weird. I was a GM of a greeting card business. I did hardware engineering. I did all kinds of things. But that, you know, ultimately, it was all about problem solving. And so yeah, I came out of school, did electrical engineering, everything from, you know, designing chips to testing out semiconductors. It was super fun. I really enjoyed it. I was building equipment that was five, 10 years ahead of where it should be. And that's fun for a little while. But then eventually you realize like, I want to be actually building things that people want and buy. And so I went back to business school to try to get a better understanding of that and actually say like, how do you determine what people want? And how does that inform what you should be building? And that very naturally turned into me learning about product management, which is effectively that, which is basically combining this idea of understanding customer problems, the challenges that they have, coming up with solutions, and then finding practical ways to solve that. And so that took me to tech and startup land where I did that across a bunch of different businesses. As I mentioned, at one point, I was even doing that for a company that was trying to modernize greeting cards. And that was actually really fun. And I learned a lot. And that's where I learned about other functions outside of products and marketing operations and things of that nature. And that's kind of helped me out in my current role, which I'll get to in a second. But then after that, I went on to 99designs, which is a platform to connect clients with graphic designers of all kinds. I would say that was my baby. That was where I grew up the most. I was the first product manager there and eventually became the CPO and had a large team and was there for seven years, which is an eternity in tech and amazing experience and really formative. And like you said, that was where I started really understanding the value of design and the challenges of being a design professional and running your own business. Graphic design is obviously different than architecture, but there's a lot of parallels. You know, in particular, a lot of people that love their craft, but don't necessarily love running the business. And so, you know, I got the first taste of helping those types of folks then. I took a little bit of a detour to go to Handshake, which if you haven't heard of that, it's effectively like a LinkedIn for seniors, juniors and seniors in college, effectively helping them find their first job. That was really awesome mission driven experience where, you know, helping people find employment is really important. And so I spent three years there. And then that led me to I met Robert, who's the founder and CEO of Monograph for basically up until just a few weeks ago. And we really clicked. It was an amazing experience, as I said, where I felt like a lot of the parallels from what I did at 99designs and some of the kind of marketplace dynamics that I learned at Handshake kind of came together. And I learned a lot more about architecture. I will admit, I didn't know very much three years ago about the architecture engineering space. But that's what I think I'm particularly good at is learning a lot about a new space. And that gets me excited. And so yeah, I've spent the last three years now leading product at Monograph. And for those of you that aren't familiar, I kind of mentioned it earlier, but what that really means is you have product managers, you have designers that are helping to understand and hopefully any Monograph customers on here know my face. I've met a lot of them to understand their problems, try to figure out how can we help. And sometimes we can do it in a very unique way that is different for them. And sometimes it's very straightforward, but either way, we try to come up with those solutions, work with our software engineering, not to be confused with, you know, structural engineers or they like to come up with those solutions and then execute them. And so I've been doing that for the last three years. And then, yeah, for the last little over a month, I have moved up into the CEO role. Robert did an amazing job getting us where we are. You know, I'm so grateful for him. He taught me so much, both about leadership as well as about the space, of course, of architects and engineers and used his intuition all along the way. I'm excited for what he's got cooking up next. Founders are founders and they like to start things. And I think we're now at a great position at Monograph where we're at a scale where it's maybe the business school guy's turn to take a pass at this. But yeah, and so that's where we are today. We have over 2,000 customers. We're hopefully going to now dive in pretty soon to the insights that we're able to derive from them because we do run most of their business. So we can also help both them, but then help others with insights that we can provide for them. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate you sharing your background and talking a little bit about the transition from Robert to you as CEO. Because I think a lot of people when they saw the title of this episode were like a little confused if you haven't heard the news. And so it's good to have you leading Monograph. Monograph has been an integral part of a lot of the firms that listen to our podcast. And Robert and Monograph have grown up with our community. And so welcome to the community. Thank you so much. Let's jump into the insights. The thing that we want to talk about today is a report that you've recently released at Monograph. You want to share a little bit of background about the report, what it's for, who it's for? Yeah, for sure. You know, I think what's amazing about Monograph is because we run, you know, so much of people's business, you know, we do everything from tracking their time to creating their invoices, to getting them paid, to connecting with their accounting system. We're able to give very unique insights relative to, you know, some of the other things out there that might be survey-based, self-reported. I think we all know that part of the biggest challenge that I'm sure we'll get into in a second is really having a good understanding for your current business. And so I say all that to say we're using actual data from our platform, anonymized, of course, we're not looking at any individual customer, but all aggregated across those 2000 firms, we're able to give a lot of insights on who's doing things well, and how can you learn from them, really, because I think obviously, all of us, that's how we grow and improve We look at what possible and we try to understand okay well what are those folks doing that I not doing And how can I achieve that And you know hopefully the takeaway if you do look at this report and listen to this podcast is that some folks are doing really, really well. You know, I think this is a space, you know, better than me, Mark, that, you know, a lot of people often feel like it's a slog. It's really challenging to, you know, run businesses in this space. And how do you do that profitably? And how do you focus on what you love, but still run a business? And I hope what comes out of this episode and out of the report is that you can see that there are people that are doing quite well. And that's possible for you too, as long as you're able to kind of follow some of these steps. Let's talk about that a little bit, because in the work that I am doing at Eintree Architect, I talk to hundreds of architects. and there is that gap of some of those firms are thriving and they're doing great and they're building really profitable firms. And then there's others that no matter what they do, they're busy, they have tons of work, but they just can't get it to work financially. And they struggle through their entire career, right? There's a lot of architects out there that feel that for decades because they just can't figure out what's wrong. What is going on there? Can you walk us through what is causing that gap between firms that are thriving and firms that are struggling? Yeah, yeah. If I were to summarize, I would say, and we'll dive in a little bit deeper, but I would say those that are utilizing technology in one way or another to help them are the ones that are separating themselves. And what we found this year, we've been doing this report for several years now, and we release them every year. This year in particular, we've noticed, not to surprise anyone, but that AI usage does separate the people that are performing the best from those that are even just doing average or worse. And I think that's actually, you know, of course, everyone, not everyone, but maybe some people are rolling their eyes and like, okay, yeah, I know, AI, AI. But I think really, it's just a continuation of a trend where it's like, if you are embracing technology to help you solve these problems, especially the things that are not critical to your business or not like strategically valuable to your business, I should say, and kind of let technology do that work for you, then you can spend your time doing the right thing. So what I mean by that, you know, if we were to break it down, it's probably three major areas. First of all, everyone's a service-based business or, you know, for the most part. And so where you're spending your time is critical. Your employees actually working on billable hours or work that's going towards, even if if you're not doing hourly work, let's say, just work that's going towards client outcomes is what you really need to be focusing a lot on. So that's like step number one. And everyone, I think, knows that. But then, you know, how do you achieve that? And we'll talk about that. The second step is, okay, well, you know, you could spend a lot of time doing client work, but are you making sure that you're doing that efficiently within budget? And the reason all that matters, obviously, is can you actually charge for that work that you're doing? And then are you doing that at reasonable rates that keep you profitable, right? And then finally, it's once you, you know, probably anyone that's deep in the metrics, the first one that I mentioned is utilization. The second is realization. And then the last thing is, are you actually then getting paid, right? Is it happening? And, you know, are your clients, you know, paying that? Are they doing it at a regular interval? How's your cash flow? So those are all really surprisingly challenging at times for folks. And so just hitting each one of those things is really what it comes down to. And on one sense, it's simple. There's three steps. On the other, we realize that there is a lot of balance there. And so, you know, the number one thing I'd say, like from the very beginning, is the folks that are actually have the insights and can see this are already at an advantage, right? So if you're doing this without dedicated technology of some sort to help you, i.e. if you just have a bunch of spreadsheets to track all this stuff, you're really going to struggle to balance all these three things. And so that's number one. And then, you know, we can start getting into the stats, I'm sure. But if you use technology and then on top of that, if you use AI, we're seeing proof that that is going to really separate you from the pack. Yeah. So to repeat what you said, utilization, where your time goes, realization, what gets paid, right? What work is payable and what's not payable? What are you doing for free? What are you doing that's not billable? And then cash flow, where the money's coming in and where is it going out? Exactly. Being able to track that and understand at any time what those numbers are. And what you're saying, Ashish, is that by tracking those, that's really what's separating the firms that are succeeding from the ones that are not. The ones that are paying attention to their business and the ones that are just sort of flying by the seat of their pants. Correct, correct. I mean, you can't improve something that you don't measure and that you don't have easily accessible to you. So, you know, making sure that you have a good sense of where those things are at, and then you can track those over time and improve those and see where you're missing. I think you can, for example, look at our benchmark report and compare what you see internally to what you see in this report. And in this report, you'll see the top portal of folks, i.e. the people that are doing the best. You'll see the average and median and you'll see the lower. And if you're in anything other than the top, my message would be, there's no reason that you can't be in the top. You should be able to achieve that. You're seeing proof that people can achieve that. For anybody who wants to just go check out the report, it's available to you at monograph.com slash benchmark. Easy, right? Monograph.com slash benchmark. and you can go download the report and follow along. Can we get into a real world example? Maybe talk about a firm that's maybe five to 10 people, small firms, people who are listening to this podcast, how one change in one of those three areas can make a difference? Yeah, maybe we can even go through each of those individually. So on the utilization side, I think the number one thing you can do is find a way to automate or at least dramatically simplify a lot of your admin work, right? So what we see is, I think on average, we have about an 80% utilization rate for most of our kind of the average customer. And those with AI, I will say, you know, actually in this particular case, they have around the same, but what we find is the ones like certain roles where you really want to get that closer to 100% because they shouldn't be doing a lot of admin work. That's where we saw a lot of gains for those of our firms that use AI. They're having their most expensive roles. You want those people not spending a lot of time with admin work. And what is that admin work? Creating invoices, trying to understand where people are spending their time doing staffing work and resourcing. Ideally, a lot of that can be, like I said, if not completely automated, at least very close to that. And so then you're having most of your folks spend all of their time doing work that actually matters. And so then on the second front, realization, how do you make sure that happens? Well, a lot of our firms, what they do is the way Monograph is set up in particular, it's hard for me not to talk about us specifically, but what we do is we try to give you a real-time view of how you're trending against your budget And not just what you've consumed so far, you know, in terms of how many people, how many hours people have logged and that kind of thing, but also looking at what you have planned in the future with your staffing and resourcing and telling you, are you going to hit your budget or are you going to exceed it? Or hopefully maybe you come under it. And that's actually the number one thing you can do to hit your realization, right? Because what you don't want is, you know, towards the end of a phase or a project, you realize, oh, man, we are already over and we can't charge the client for this, but we still have to finish this project. And so having that real-time visibility at any given time on how you're trending and then moving folks around, even if you're a five-person firm, when we first launched our staffing product, I think there was some question of like, yeah, okay, we'll use this to just look at this week. And we'll also just copy it from last week. Like whatever they did last week, they'll just do again this week. And then I think some people realize like, oh wait, this power of actually looking all the way to the end of the phase gives you what I just described, a real-time view on like, oh man, we're not going to be able to charge for this in two months, three months. And that's super important. And that's how you keep ahead of the realization rate. And then on the cashflow side, here's where I would say, you know, AI isn't even necessarily something you need to worry about or maybe in a subtle way, but there's just some really simple things that I think everyone can do. Number one, bill every month. Right, exactly. I know, Mark, you talk about this all the time. I know we still have customers that are like, we only bill on certain milestones. Why doesn't your product make that easy? We do allow you to do that for sure. But a lot of what we default to is like, just bill every month. You know, you can't run a business where you don't have predictable cashflow coming in and going out. And it's very, very challenging. Just candidly, your clients are taking advantage of you if they're not paying you every month. You're giving them a loan, right? And you're not charging anything for that loan. You're not getting any interest for that loan. So that's a problem. And so bill every month, number one. If there's one thing you take away from this, just do that. And then make your payments easy. One of our customers said it best. I think he was at AIA and he was just telling us. He was like, it's so nice that with Monograph, we just charge our clients and they can pay the same way they pay for everything else, right? There's nothing unique about architecture and engineering. There's no reason that you can't take credit cards or you can't take a ACH and don't pass those fees on. I know that it feels like, you know, those fees, they eat into you and I can get into the math. You know, you got an MBA on here, so I'm going to get, I'll do it in a second. But you know just if you were in their shoes and you saw this like we agreed to a number and now you adding these things on top they not going to pay that way And then if they don pay that way what going to happen Well 5 of the invoices on Monograph that don have electronic payment they just never get paid And so I'm sorry, like right away, you just lost 5% of your business. And so you're worried about a 3% credit card fee, like that's already a 2% win. Right. And so like, that's even in the worst case. Now, most of the time, you're not paying 3% because there's a mix of different payment methods and all that kind of stuff. And again, I don't want to bore you here, but I could talk about this for a long time. But there's that. There's the fact that when you make this easy, you get paid a lot faster. So back to what I was saying earlier, the longer it takes to get paid, you are effectively giving out loans. You are effectively getting charged interest. You just don't realize it. It's not as obvious. And so these fees that you're concerned about, they can't be thought of in a vacuum. They're a trade-off. They're a trade-off to get paid quickly. On Monograph, if you send out an invoice with payment enabled, the median time to get paid, like money in your bank account, is eight days. And if you don't do that, it's six weeks or something of that nature, right? So it's a huge difference and that adds up. And so those are the types of things on the cashflow perspective that you can really do. And of course, you can do other things like late fees and encourage folks. But from our experience, the main thing is just make it really easy and make it really regular. Those monthly invoices, besides getting paid more regularly, it's just a cadence and something that your clients get used to. Okay, yep, this is that monthly bill. I'll just pay it. And then one last thing I'd say on the monthly that also has a benefit is each invoice generally is for a smaller amount. And that also makes it a little bit easier for people to get paid. They don't get that sticker shock. they are like, oh, okay, yep, this is that monthly fee. And so then it just makes the whole process a lot smoother. Yeah, the transaction fees are something that architects struggle with so much because they think that they're losing 3%. But in reality, the credit card, everybody wants to pay by credit card, right? You want to pay by credit card? I want to pay by credit card. I want to pay the bill fast, right? If I have to write a check or I have to do some other way of paying, which is ridiculous that I'm writing a check, it's going to take forever. and the 3% is literally just a business expense. You have to just have a different mindset on what that fee is. It's not coming out of your profit. It's a cost of doing business. And by like what Ashish is saying is that by using credit cards and ACH, it makes getting paid faster. And now you have the money to do the work that you need to do. Rather than spending two or three weeks chasing that bill, chasing that getting that paid, all of the time involved with having to follow up with them, all the stress that's involved with following up with them, just get paid as fast as you can get paid. That should be your goal. Couldn't have said it better myself. Yep, that's exactly right. Yeah, we didn't even talk about all the following up. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of time involved in that. The accounting work to tie that check for probably the slightly wrong amount to your correct invoice in your accounting system. All of that stuff is so painful and none of that is necessary if you just do the easy thing. Yeah, and takes away from the time of doing the things that you really love to do. Let's take a quick break to say thank you to our sponsors for their support of this episode. This episode of Entree Architect Podcast is supported by WeCollabify, one of our trusted allied partners. As this community has grown over the years, one thing has become very clear to me. The partners we choose matter. Allied partners are not sponsors. They're not advertisers. They are organizations that we've taken the time to get to know, to work alongside, and to trust. They understand the real pressures of practice and the responsibility that comes with leading a small firm. We Collabify earn that trust by helping small firm owners address a challenge that sits at the center of long-term firm health. building capacity in a way that supports people, not just projects. Their insourcing model brings skilled design, BIM, and technical professionals directly into your team. They work in your time zone, inside your systems, and part of your day-to-day workflow. That integration allows firms to add capacity when it's needed, scale with intention, and grow without sacrificing culture, leadership focus, or quality of life. If you're thinking beyond short-term fixes and focused on building a firm that lasts, I encourage you, go learn why WeCollabify is one of our trusted allied partners. Visit WeCollabify.com slash Entree Architect to learn more. That's WeCollabify.com slash Entree Architect. Gain lessons learned and credits earned with Arcademy, Arcad's continuing education program. Listen to popular episodes of the Detailed Podcast and earn AIA-approved HSW credits. Yes, you heard that right, HSW credits for episodes of Detailed Podcast. Listen to an episode, check out the learning objectives, and use what you've learned while listening to take the course. The program is free, it's simple, and can be found at rcat.com under the resources tab. Or just go to rcat.com slash rcatemy. That's A-R-C-A-T dot com slash A-R-C-A-T E-M-Y. That's rcat.com slash rcatemy. Please visit our sponsors today and thank them. Thank them for supporting you, the Entree Architect community. You talked earlier a lot about AI and how AI can make firms more efficient. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Where is AI making the biggest difference right now in architecture firms? Yeah, great question. So, and I'm going to just pull up some numbers because I don't have them memorized. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so what we found is that our firms that are actively using AI are generating 20K more per employee. So the headline number, we didn't talk about so much earlier, but the way that we at Monograph think of measuring your overall efficiency as a company in this space is revenue per employee, because that kind of encapsulates all of the things that we just talked about. You need to be efficient, you need to be able to charge that revenue, and you obviously need to get that money in the door. So I think revenue per employee encapsulates all that. And so we're seeing that the AI cohort is actually doing 20K per employee more. And that's about 11% improvement, which is obviously fairly significant. Yeah, real money. We'll pay those credit card fees, no problem. Exactly. Yes, correct. And I will say that they actually are spending a little bit more too. So about 5K more. And that's not directly from AI, but there probably is a little bit more adjustment happening there. But even if that is how it will be forever, that's still a 15K overall improvement in profitability. And so I think that's quite clear. And where we see that kind of... I mentioned on utilization, on an overall standpoint, we don't see a huge difference there. But what we do see is your operations staff actually being able to go from 74% utilization to 84%. So that's real numbers. And as I mentioned earlier, people like engineers or, you know, for BIM and CAD work, like those folks are getting well above 90, 95% versus maybe even 90%. And, you know, that might sound small, but that's actually a pretty big deal. In terms of realization, that's where we're seeing the AI firms get basically 100% realization rate. So that's pretty impressive, right? And then even in these top cohorts, we're seeing them get 115% in our kind of like top quartile group versus 107%. I know I'm throwing a bunch of numbers here. And part of that is because, you know, my team told me I got to hit these numbers. But also... You can download, if you're playing along and you downloaded earlier when I said you can be reading along, but you can still do that. Yeah. Slash benchmark. Thank you. But mainly like, you know, I think what I'm trying to help people take away, you know, again, I think this is just part of this trend where if you embrace this work and especially get it to do a lot of the more mundane tasks, if you will, then you can focus more on what you love. And that's actually always been what we've said at Monograph, whether this was AI or nothing or just generally technology should allow you to do that. So you're talking about using AI to make your firm the most efficient it can be, right? Instead of doing things manually or the long way or using software that doesn't use AI and just takes a lot longer, if you can cut down an hour's worth of work and make it a five-minute process or an automated process where you're, like you said, 100%, right? It's automatically doing it without you involved at all. Yep. That's where we're getting advantage on AI. So many architects are resisting AI and we're not even talking about AI in design here at all. No, we're talking about administrative AI. Correct. Just making your business more efficient. And so I agree that we should all be looking at ways to be more efficient. And then we've been doing that forever. Right. It's not just AI makes this a new thing. We've always tried to make our firms more efficient. It's just that now AI allows us to do that much more effectively. And there are software that you can use to do that. You have ChatGPT and Claude where you can create agents now that are really easy to create and do some of those things. And so there's lots of ways to do that, right? There are applications and software that will do it, but you can build your own small little software and small little routines that do things automatically for you. And it's not hard to do. Yeah, agreed. And I realize I'm the product guy and I haven't really talked about specific things that you could do. But you know what we seen both within Monograph where we building these things but also just in general as I talked to customers you know things like creating proposals you know very time consuming answering RFPs obviously creating invoices And that, again, that may not be AI really, but just make sure you're using technology to kind of generate those quickly. And, you know, from the data that it already has on where you've spent your time, like those types of things go a long way, creating invoices, creating proposals. These are things that are very time consuming and not to say they're low value, but they are very important. But they're also, it's not necessary for you to be spending a lot of, you know, your time, your thinking on them, because in a lot of cases you have examples of before. Some of the more subtle ones might be things like knowing what you should charge for a project, what your rate should be, things of that nature. It's really important that you're re-evaluating that on a regular basis. You know, obviously, we all know about inflation. You know, my strong recommendation would be understand how profitable you are in your projects. You know, obviously, you shouldn't be continuing on and doing another project the same way you did the last one if you didn't make money on it. And, you know, unfortunately, in a lot of cases, it's hard for people to even know the answer to that question. And so I would highly recommend feeling very comfortable on where are you making money? What are you doing well? And, you know, again, technology and AI both can help you a lot on what should I charge? Where should we go from here? And then there's, you know, very rote things like you're getting emails every day, probably still to talk with clients and consultants. Like, how do you parse that information? How do you get that into a system? How do you turn a bill, you know, that you got in your email, like to an actionable thing that you can spend? You know, again, find tools. Of course, Monograph can do all these things, but, you know, find tools that can help you with all of those things because those are all the things that you're spending your time on. You know, even just go into your time tracking tool, assuming you have one, and look at where you're spending all your time and then figure out how can I spend less time doing the ones that aren't actually helping me run my business. Yeah. And you could spend more time doing the things you love. Exactly. There's a message that I tell you about all the time, right? Focus on your business so you can go do your art. Before we get to the final question, we threw out a lot of information here today. And we've given them lots of suggestion, lots of valuable advice. So it's lots of numbers and lots of places they can start. For somebody who's listening and they're not sure where to start, can you give us like a simple self-assessment starting point where it could help us understand where my specific situation needs the most attention? Yeah, for sure. I would start actually with what I hope would be the simplest metric, as I mentioned, and you don't need any tools or hopefully you don't need any tools to figure this out, is just your revenue per employee per year. Look at that number. Is it healthy? And again, you know, we can give you ranges if you get a report, but like, where do you sit on that? And the reason that we like to use that is that obviously controls for there's big firms or small firms and things of that nature. But within reason, that should be something that you can control for. And so first understanding that. And again, you don't need... I hope that's not very overwhelming. You should know how much you made last year and how many employees you have. So that's pretty straightforward. Then getting into the nuances of... Like I said, I would probably look at those three buckets, the utilization, the realization, and your general cash flow and just get a sense of how you stack up against those. and then just kind of work your way down. Like, okay, these two look great. This one, not so much. Then maybe this is where I should be focusing. And I understand that, you know, it can feel intimidating. So I would just, you know, start with a small, that top level number and like, hey, if it's healthy, I'm not saying don't do anything, but then you're like, okay, good. I have a good understanding where we're at. Maybe we can optimize and improve, but, you know, we're not in a dire situation. Or if it's like, oh, this is quite low, then let's keep digging to try to figure out why. And yeah, that's where I'd start. Very, very helpful. All right. Final question. What's one thing that a small firm architect can do today to build a better business for tomorrow? I mean, I think we've probably covered this at nauseam at this point, but like, I would really encourage everyone to feel like they have a good sense of the key levers of their business. And by that, I mean, these metrics that we've been talking about. So if you don't have a way that you're comfortable with to have this information on a regular basis, you know, I mean, of course, a real time basis with a tool like Monograph is ideal, but even just something where you feel confident that I can look at this on a regular basis and understand where I'm at. Because again, if you don't know where you're at, you can't improve. You can't have a sense of where things are going. And it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, but I think it's really helpful. And again, I hope that it doesn't require, like, I think some of these steps are very simple and don't require a lot of work to figure out where you're at. Yeah. Very helpful. His name is Ashish Desai. He is the new CEO of Monograph. You can learn more about Monograph at monograph.com. The Benchmark Report, 2026 Benchmark Report is available at monograph.com slash benchmark. Super helpful. You can download it and found out all kinds of information and then compare your firm to the benchmarks. That's the idea. Ashish, thank you very much for actually first dedicating yourself to this community of architects and doing all the work that you've been doing for the last three years at Monograph, building that product into a product that really helps architects be more successful. So I appreciate you for all the work that you've done up to now. It'll be interesting to see where you take Monograph from here as CEO. So thank you for your leadership and thanks for coming by here and sharing some really valuable information at Entree Architect Podcast. Thanks Mark and thanks for all you do to help educate. I know we're very aligned in what we're trying to do here. So really appreciate that and thank you for having me on. You're welcome. If you enjoyed this episode of Entree Architect Podcast, please share a link with a friend. because that's how we've continued to grow and serve thousands more small firm architects just like you. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode. Links to the sponsors and all the resources we discussed today, they are all available in the show notes for this episode at entrearchitect.com slash podcast. Entre Architect is a proud member of the Gable Media Network. It's the multimedia network moving the architecture, engineering, and construction industries forward through the power of storytelling. You can earn AIA continuing education credits by listening to select episodes of this podcast and many others at gablemedia.com slash members. And if you are a small firm architect, listen up. Join us today at Entree Architect Network. It's the worldwide community for entrepreneur architects. We've been around since 2012, and our basic level is now free to join. And yes, you can join Entree Architect Network for free. And that gives you access to valuable business resources and our global community of architects. And you can upgrade anytime for live coaching, AIA-approved training, and mastermind support. So visit EntreeArchitect.com to learn more and to get started. My name is Mark Arlepage. Thank you for listening to the Entree Architect podcast. 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