Training as a Complement to Experience - 4 Get Into Your Client's Mind

I've been a licensed architect for 35 years, but I've been in architecture for over 40 years, and over that time, I've worked with a lot of clients, and I've found that working with clients, or understanding clients is one of the most difficult things that architects have to do.

Clients are people in their own world, doing their thing, and they hire us, and we have to advise them. We have to guide them. We have to design for their goals, and ultimately, we have to help them and teach them. In order to do that, we have to understand who they are and what are their goals and their aspirations as a client.

They live in another world. Maybe they're medical professionals, maybe they're education professionals, maybe they're business people, or perhaps they're homeowners.

But when they come to you, they're a client and in order to understand them, you really have to get into their world, into their mind.

There are a lot of competencies in NCARB’s Competency Standard that deal with clients from designing for them, advising them, and working with them as a team, including developing a program where you have to translate a client's vision and goals. You also create design solutions for a number of different aspects where you're advising clients on those design solutions, you're communicating design solutions to them, and you're dealing with all their needs during construction processes and helping them with pay applications and close out and throughout the practice management, you're creating proposals for them. You're communicating with their stakeholders in order to understand them in experience, to get experience working with them, that's fairly common to get that, but it could be a disaster if you don't really understand them.

That's why the training is called Get Into Your Client's Mind.

It’s a key complement to the experience you're getting where you're trying to work with and help clients.

Get Into Your Clients Mind is about an hour of training with eight sessions of short trainings that get you thinking like your client.

That's the main intent, is to help you understand:

• What are their goals?

• What are they really thinking about?

• What do they think about you as the architect?

They have perceptions and expectations for who you are and what you're going to do for them. Some of those expectations are not very nice. Some of them are great, but it's understanding to recognize those key “flags” that come up that help you understand what they think about you, so you can respond appropriately and maybe not work with them at all. They may not be the type of client that you want. How do you know that beforehand? You look for the signs, and I give you those signs in this course.

Get it at https://architectsaccelerator.com/clientsmind

I give you the strategies, so you can put them into practice today, and work more effectively with clients. That's my goal is to create trainings that complement experience that you can put into practice right now, that help you achieve competency as an architect.