We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dean Dalvit. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dean below.

Dean, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

The EVstudio story started as a sole proprietorship operating out of my basement that has grown to over 100 professionals in multiple offices across the Rocky Mountain region. From the beginning, the vision was always to grow the company for several reasons. Growth allows for diversity in market opportunity, project type, variety of service, and inherently provides stability and resilience for the entire team. Growth also affords a tremendous opportunity for team member career growth that I never had when working at other firms, including ownership opportunity. Our process of growth can only be described as organic and over the years, we have learned that it tends to come in waves. Growing our team requires steadily increasing work. We encourage and empower all of our team members to participate in business development at all levels, so much of that fuel for growth comes from within and naturally scales as we continue to add talented professionals to our team. We also see growth through the repeat work we do with our trusted clients that are also scaling their businesses. We are committed to scaling our team to meet the growing needs of our clients. It has not always been easy. Having started the firm in 2006, we enjoyed a few years of boom economy up until the Great Recession when real estate development literally dropped off a cliff. We were nimble and reactive at the time, and began an intentioned effort to provide more services as we had fewer clients. This was when we launched our in house engineering departments, which effectively enabled us to actually grow during the recession while many of our peers were reducing in size or going out of business altogether. We also diversified our project type at the time, winning projects for higher education and military clients that were protected from the recession. We came out of the recession stronger than before and set on a trajectory of growth that increased EVstudio team 20%-30% year over year ever since. While this level of growth places considerable demands on our recruiting and HR staff, our support services has also had to grow to keep pace. And more recently, we have launched an acquisitions program and have since acquired another firm to enable the strategic regional growth at a larger scale. This acquisition strategy will continue to be a part of the EVstudio growth plan as we have organized the firm to easily absorb new teams within our highly effective vertically integrated A/E Studio model. We very much have our sights set on being a leading National firm in 5 years, then continue to scale internationally, so we have plenty of runway to go yet. All the while, maintaining a culture of excellence, creativity and most importantly, Joy, which is one of our core values and a constant focus in everything we do.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always had a love for buildings and the built environment. Spending most of the Summers of my youth working in some form of construction, I had been advised by many of the “old-timers” that I worked with to get an education and become licensed so I could be on the design side of the construction industry. My father was an engineer at a construction firm and my mother was an artist and entrepreneur. My academic career took me through two engineering degrees as I felt that left the most options open. After working for a few years as an engineer, I discovered that Architecture was my true passion, so I underwent the lengthy process to become licensed as an Architect. Then later, I went ahead and became licensed as an engineer as well.

I started my own Architecture firm in 2005 and after a year of great success (which to an Architect means long hours and sleepless nights), I brought on a partner and EVstudio was born. We have grown steadily over the years (now to over 100 employees and multiple offices in the Western region) and the business is based on the simple fundamentals of high client service, great design and practical creativity. As a dual licensed professional, the DNA of EVstudio is also multidisciplinary and, like my own professional experiences, the firm has deep expertise in Architecture as well as Structural, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing Engineering with subspecialties in Surveying and Field Services to help Contractors do their work.

For more than a decade, we have managed the full spectrum of design services for new construction and renovations, both large and small, for sectors including commercial, residential, multifamily, mixed-use, industrial, office, retail, hospitality, education, healthcare, government, parks and recreation, worship and more. We’re known for a fully integrated design process and high client service.

We’re set apart from others because of the sheer breadth and depth of different projects we can take on, and that versatility leads to great creative and innovative opportunities to cross-pollinate design ideas from different project types. Most of all, I am proud of the team that we’ve built – all professionals that are at the top of their fields and so capable to have built a portfolio of work that I would never have imagined only 17 years ago when I started.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses

We had which may be one of the most astonishingly coincidental events in our history occur just last year, which resulted in the acquisition of a firm which added over 20 architecture and engineering design professionals to our EVstudio family. I had been introduced to one of offsite construction’s most recognized experts, Troy Tiddens, through a mutual colleague when starting work with modular client, Fading West, over a year ago. We hit it off immediately, and I quickly engaged him and his team for consulting on the project. Troy and his team worked for neUdesign, out of Meridian Idaho, and they compemented our EVstudio team in Denver perfectly. At precisely the same time, my business partner, Sean O’Hara, had been speaking with an acquisitions brokerage, Zweig Group, about looking for a design firm that would help EVstudio scale. The broker mentioned that there was one firm that wasn’t officially on the market yet that we might be interested in. Sean came in to my office later that week, and said we should check out this firm to see if it might be a good fit. As he was describing the firm, we soon came to realize that it was neUdesign, the same firm we were already working with. We already knew that the team culture was a perfect fit because we’d already been working with them for several months at that point. Getting team alignment is truly the hardest part in a successful merger. The rest was working through through the tactical aspects of the negotiation, which was very smooth because the owner, Jim Escobar, is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, and he built his team around essentially the very same core values that we have at EVstudio. The acquisition occurred in August of 2021 and we’ve been going strong ever since!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The Great Recession had a tremendous impact on design firms worldwide. Many reduced staff by half or more while others went completely out of business. Jobs were hard to come by for many talented professionals and clients were even harder yet. Our young company was only two years old as the housing bubble began to burst, which all but decimated virtually every asset class along with it. We quickly strategized a number of objectives that would enable us to not only make it through what at the time seemed to be an indefinite situation, but we actually strengthened the firm and made it more resilient once it was all over. We developed strategic partnerships with very talented, but out of work design professionals to broaden our ability to market new work. We also created an affiliate program with other allied design businesses to both co-market and share work, some of which ultimately became business units of EVstudio. Some of these alliances also broadened our geographic reach beyond the local market where we were located, and this took us as far north as Saskatoon Saskatchewan and as far south as the Texas-Mexico border and everywhere in between. We also created in-house departments for other design services like structural and MEP engineering so we could provide a broader base of services to our clients. And we pivoted within the market and chased projects in higher education and government work – both client types that were largely insulated from a recession. The combination of talent and services won us the projects and we managed to get through the entire recession not only without laying anybody off, but actually growing the firm. Once on the other side, we were positioned as an A/E leader across the region that put us on a trajectory to continue the growth to where we are today. And all the while maintaining our strategic decisions to diversify in project type, services offered, and geographic location.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.EVstudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evstudioae/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EVstudioAEP/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deandalvit
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/EVstudioAEP

Image Credits
EVstudio