Dear Beesoul,

With over 10 years experience in helping my uncle who is an architect, I can tell you confidently that architectural firms rarely get noticed but their works do. My uncle started his firm on our dining table. I don’t think he would want anyone to notice that because he always poses like a multi-million naira firm.

Starting an Architectural firm is pretty much the same as starting almost any kind of business…

How to go about it:

1. Evaluate your skills to identify the category of clients you will like to offer your service to. Decide based on your experience if you want to offer your service to individual clients, corporate clients or both.
2. Once you have selected your choice of clients, you need to evaluate demand for your service. Google keyword planner will help you. Almost everyone looking for something first go to google these days.
3. Start talking to your organization (if you are currently working for one) clients to find out if they will need some kind of architectural related services that your company is not providing. Make sure it is only the service your organization doesn’t provide. This will give you leverage of starting with few clients when you start and you won’t be seen as a backstabber by the people you’re trying to reach.
4. Prepare your business plan to have imaginary knowledge of what is going to cost you to start, run and grow your business. liveplan.com will help if you want to do it yourself. You can also get a business plan expert to do it for you though not recommended. I always advise people to be actively involved in writing their business plan. Also, make sure you follow the plan.
5. Based on the demand data gathered from the google keyword planner, Have your website built (And I am not talking about me too website here).
6. Offer your professional advice for free whenever the opportunity arises.
7. If you have the pictures of your completed projects, Upload them to the projects page of your website.

I have tried to speak in layman’s language so that you can grab most of the point. These are only the basic to get you up, running and noticed in very reasonable time if you don’t want to wait for the day you will design and develop an epic structure that we will all see and applaud.

Giving you all the jargon details here may sound jibberish. Let me know if you need more details….

I wish you good luck in this great pursuit.