We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Andrea Shapiro. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Andrea below.
Andrea, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, let’s jump into one of the most exciting parts of starting a new firm – how did you get your first client who was not a friend or family?
I had been getting small “side jobs” for a number of years while consulting for other architects. This is a pretty regular practice within the industry, where you work a full time job, and then take on small projects on the side. I finally decided to branch off on my own when I got my first big client. They are investment real estate developer/contractors, specializing in luxury single family homes. And I had met two of the three partners just taking my kids to school. They were dads to the my children’s classmates. One morning, at drop off, I was asked if I was available to join them for prospective client meeting later that day. That job did not materialize, but the relationship between myself and the construction firm did. Within a few months they had given me four homes to design, and at that point it was more than side work. It was then that I stopped working for anyone else, and began my own firm.
Andrea, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a high end, single family, residential designer. I design new homes, renovations, and additions in the Los Angeles area. I work with developers and home owners. I’ve worked on interior kitchen rehabs, and I’ve done many 10,000sf new builds. I’ve worked coastal and hillside. I am a licensed architect in Massachusetts, where I worked for eight years after receiving my Bachelor of Architecture in ’94, at Roger Williams University, in Rhode Island. In the Boston area, I worked in a number of architecture firms, learning sustainable design, hospitality design, transportation design, as well as residential design. What I found, was that I loved working with people on their homes. It is so much more personal, and it brings me joy to bring home owners happiness in their daily lives.
So when I moved to California in 2003, I decided to focus on Residential Design. I spent 11 years at a high end design firm in Santa Monica. There I worked with VIP clients on their Malibu, Beverly Hills, and Las Vegas residences. After that, a couple of years with a firm in the Valley that put out hundreds of houses each year. The later experience really exposed me to the ins and outs of the City of L.A. Building Department, and I credit this experience to my efficiency in permitting today.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
I strive for meaningful relationships with all my clients. When I am working with homeowners, it is such a personal part of their lives. I am getting to know them, how they live, who and what is important to them; it’s a very intimate relationship. They are giving me a great deal of access into their lives, and I do not take that for granted. I want to help them achieve their goals, and that they should be happy and content living in the end result. There’s a lot of trust built into all of that, and I work hard to maintain that trust. In the end, I have often made new friends. On the jobs that I work with developers and contractors, I also wish to honor those relationships, as these are the customers that come back frequently, and that are regularly giving out my name. I want to be their number one designer, so I really work hard to deliver quality designs in as short a time frame as possible. They know I am good at design and problem solving, and that I will get them to building permit as quickly as the city allows.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
I built my business taking my kids to school. Really. Getting to know the families in our town, eventually working on a few small projects for the children’s classmates homes; incorporating some of the contractor dads at the school into the project build out. This started to get me known on the campus. Eventually a few more contractor dads began inquiring about my work, and eventually I secured a large developer/contractor client, whom I met at the school. From there, the referrals came. I did not advertise my firm once in the first six years of it’s existence. I was busy just from the school drop off interactions. Now the kids are older, and I have to work at networking with the community. I am going to advertise in the school newsletter soon, I don’t want to be forgotten there.
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