Independent building envelope firms are having a moment. Clients and good people are moving back to smaller practices where the principal still answers the phone. CopelandContinuity is our effort to help those firms take on more work, add people, and put technology to real use, without turning into the kind of firm their clients left.
In conversations with envelope consultants who run their own practice, or are thinking about it, the same few things come up.
Work is outrunning the team. Hiring is slow and risky, and nobody wants to grow just to grow. The goal is to serve the clients you have well.
Proposals, contracts, invoicing, report production, IT, the website. A large firm has a back office for this. A small one has the principal at night.
Work comes in waves, and few small firms have time to build a steady pipeline while delivering the work in hand.
Most firms are experimenting. Few have turned it into how reports, reviews, and proposals actually get done, because that takes building and maintaining the systems.
CopelandBEC is a multi-office building envelope consultancy. Over the past few years we've built most of our operating systems ourselves, and we use them every day on real projects.
All of this is in daily use at CopelandBEC.
Here's our current thinking on what CopelandContinuity could offer an independent firm.
Access to the tools above, or help building your own. Off-the-shelf software is giving way to tools built around each firm's work, and the more useful offer may be the know-how to build and run them.
How to run an envelope practice, written down: onboarding, proposals, field protocols, QA/QC, invoicing, plus a technical library to work from.
What we use for accounting, project management, field work, and AI, why we chose it, and how we set it up, so you don't have to evaluate everything yourself.
Independent firms helping each other: overflow work when someone is at capacity, specialists and equipment to borrow, shared back-office help, and project leads passed along.
Other principals to think out loud with about hiring, pricing, growth, and when to say no.
We're exploring options to support independently-branded firms as well as a Copeland-branded route.
Principals of small building envelope design, forensic, or BECx firms who are busy and thinking about what's next. Also senior consultants at larger firms who have wondered what it would take to run their own practice.
I started building these tools to run my own firm. Along the way I kept talking with people in our industry who were great at the work and stretched thin by everything around it. I've come to think small, well-run firms are better for clients and for the people doing the work, and that the right shared infrastructure could let more of them thrive.
I don't know yet exactly what shape this should take. A conversation with me isn't a pitch. I'd like to hear how you run your practice and where it's hard, show you what we've built, and get your honest take.
Tell us a little about your practice and we'll find a time to talk.
Start a conversation