CMap x AJ Webinar Recap | Scaling in practice: how to grow your business sustainably

Growth is the goal, right up until it starts to strain the team, the margins or the thing that made the firm good in the first place. So how do you scale an architecture firm without breaking it?

That was the question behind Scaling in Practice, the webinar hosted in partnership with the Architects' Journal. Four speakers, shared what growth has actually looked like inside their firms: Tara Gbolade of Gbolade Design Studio, Rob Hoyle of CMap, Gurmeet Sian of Office Sian Architecture + Design, and Jesus Jimenez of White Red Architects.

Four presentations, a lot of honest numbers and some very practical advice. Here's the recap.

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Tara Gbolade | Director at Gbolade Design Studio

Growth and scale are not the same thing. Growth is revenue rising, often with costs rising right alongside it. Scale is revenue rising while costs are deliberately held down. Tara's firm learned the difference the hard way: it added people as revenue grew, but without the systems to support them. The reset was bold. It halved its team and doubled revenue in the same year.

Since then, hiring follows the temperature of the firm rather than a single new project, clients are chosen carefully (a few were let go), and everyone owns the time and resource on their projects, not just their timesheets. When government pushed retrofit at scale, the firm leaned into its sustainable design expertise and won new work. A profit-first account sets aside a share of every settled invoice for the future. And Tara's advice for the rest of us: be intentionally curious. Looking outside architecture is how she found a waste services business that built an AI arm turning over around 200k a month.

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Rob Hoyle | Head of AEC Sales at CMap

The backdrop is tough. RIBA's Future Trends workload index slipped from +4 in July to +1 in August, the construction PMI sat at 46.1 in September (below 50 signals contraction, though it was the slowest fall since January), and Glenigan has pushed its recovery forecast back. Rob's point: use the wait to get the foundations right for your stage.

He sees four stages of growth: founder-led, first hires (where the cracks start to show at around eight people), structured scaling (where process and financial control stop being nice-to-haves) and established and optimising, where the conversation moves to margin, culture and choosing the right work. What got you from one stage to the next won't get you to the one after. The quiet threat is commercial leakage: pricing that made sense for five people but not 15, scope changes nobody tracked, and profitability only checked after the damage is done. The same gap shows up with AI. Of CMap's clients, 80% are now implementing it, but only one in five are seeing a measurable return.

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Gurmeet Sian | Founding Director at Office Sian Architecture + Design

What if the answer isn't bigger, but better? Gurmeet's challenge was to define growth on your own terms: confidence, desire and ability count too, and a firm can double its turnover without getting any better at architecture. He warned against growth by accident, where a quick yes leads to a hire, the hire needs more work to pay for them, and the firm drifts into boom and bust.

His alternative is the "breathing studio": collaborate with like-minded studios so capacity rises when work is there and falls when it isn't. It only works if roles, responsibilities and decision-making are explicit and your identity stays intact. His own small studio led an international team to a final-five shortlist in a high-profile competition by being clear about who it was. The takeaway: scale to be a better studio, not just a bigger one, and sometimes that means refusing urgency, or refusing work.

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Jesus Jimenez | Co-founder and Practice Director at White Red Architects

From three founders to a team of 20, White Red's story is one of systems catching up with people. Responsibilities between the directors are explicit, a senior leadership team protects design and delivery quality, and an outside network (HR, legal, insurance, a proactive accountant and a business coach) covers what architects aren't trained for. On data, the firm moved from Excel to better software, and now builds its own internal tools with AI so leaders see the numbers the way they want.

The bigger theme was planning for uncertainty, not just growth: at least three months of outgoings in the bank, business development even when busy, close attention to stage-by-stage approvals that can stall a small team, and a fortnightly look at pipeline and capacity. When 2025's pipeline looked good but uncertain, the firm brought in secondees from quieter studios for the first time, and built relationships with three studios along the way.

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From the Q&A

A few themes came up again and again. Culture survives flexible capacity when the core team stays stable, collaboration is intentional and you're honest with clients about any changes. Keep premises costs down for as long as you can, though the right space can matter for culture and strategy. Moving from architect to manager comes down to systems: can the business run without you? And on the first hire, the panel agreed on cash first, whether that's three to six months of salary or simply enough to sleep at night, plus the time to nurture the person you bring in. Jesus's addition: don't let fear of someone leaving stop you, and sometimes you just have to take the leap.

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Wrapping up

Thanks to Tara, Rob, Gurmeet and Jesus, and to the AJ for hosting. If you want more, you can watch the full webinar, or catch up on our other webinars here.

And if you want to see how CMap helps architecture firms get pricing, scope, visibility and resourcing right at every stage of growth, our team would love to talk.

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