Post by Robert Clemens

I’m a Director of Operations. I have the most unglamorous job in architecture and design—and I love it. Maybe you should too. Years ago, I ran a small design/build firm in Los Angeles. I designed the work, built it, and kept it alive for over a decade. From the outside, it looked successful. Inside, it was constant stress. Every project felt like it might be our last. Staffing was unstable. Insurance was painful. Marketing was guesswork. And no matter how strong the work was, we hit a ceiling we couldn’t scale past. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. When the market crashed in 2008, I went back to school for architecture and eventually landed at Columbia. I loved it—but I was stunned by how little we talked about how design firms actually run. I think there was one professional practice class. No real discussion of how insurance, contracts, staffing, IT, taxes, foreign offices, or going global works. After graduating, I made it my mission to understand how firms scale—from 20 people to 100 and beyond—and why. I worked at mid-sized and large offices to see what I’d missed. Here’s the lesson: as firms grow, someone has to own the unglamorous stuff. Operations. Operations comes with a language and work most designers avoid—KPIs, net multipliers, labor rates, contractual exchange rates, margins, P&L sheets, risk mitigation, international contracts and lawyers. And on a good day, great design is more than all that. It’s transformative. That’s exactly why this role needs to be lead by someone trained to design. Operations has to understand what it takes to create spaces that have the possibility to be transformative. I handle the spreadsheets so designers don’t have to. Because buried in those numbers are all the reasons my first firm couldn’t grow: no standardization, no measurement, no clarity. Great design gets you noticed. Great operations let you grow. That’s why I love this unglamorous job—and why it matters more than most people think.