Robert Brown

Robert spent the first decade of his career on the contractor side, pricing fit-outs for a general contractor in downtown Los Angeles. He knows what a drawing set is worth to the people who have to build from it, which makes him unusually blunt about scope.

What he does

He runs the studio’s commercial pipeline: workplace, retail and hospitality clients, from the first conversation through to the signed appointment. He also handles the tender stage on larger projects, because he can read a bid faster than most of the designers can.

• First consultations and scoping for commercial work
• Fee proposals and stage agreements
• Tender analysis and builder recommendations
• Account management for the studio’s repeat clients

What he tells prospective clients

Robert will talk a client out of a project more often than the rest of the studio combined. If the budget and the ambition are more than a factor of two apart, he says so in the first meeting rather than the fourth.

The most valuable thing I can do in a first meeting is tell you what your budget will not buy. Everything after that conversation is easier for both of us.

He is the author of the studio’s stage-fee model, which replaced an hourly arrangement that nobody, clients included, ever found predictable. Fee disputes have effectively disappeared since.

Robert coaches a youth basketball team on weekends and claims it is the better preparation for a tender negotiation.

Before joining the studio he spent four years running his own consultancy, which he describes as the most useful and least profitable period of his career.