Saying No to Growth

Noor Fasi: You're listening to Small Practice, on The Rightup. I'm Noor Fasi. Elliot Graves is one of three partners in a practice in Bristol that has had exactly three people since 2014. Not three partners and staff. Three people. Elliot, welcome.

Elliot Graves: Hello, Noor. Three people and a dog, if we are being precise.

Noor Fasi: Eleven years without a hire. Was that a decision or a drift?

Elliot Graves: A decision, made on a specific evening. In 2014 we had a school extension that needed a fourth person, and we sat in a pub and worked out that a fourth person meant a bigger office, a second phone line, a practice manager within three years and one of us managing instead of drawing. None of us wanted that job.

Noor Fasi: What do you turn down?

Elliot Graves: Anything with a programme shorter than about a year, and anything over roughly six million in construction value. We cannot resource two large jobs at once. On average we say no once a month. Last year it was fourteen times.

Noor Fasi: Do you keep a list?

Elliot Graves: We do, in a spreadsheet called Not Ours. Client, project, value, and who we think got it. It is a humbling document. There is a riverside housing scheme on it that won a national award.

Noor Fasi: Does that sting?

Elliot Graves: For a week. Then I remember that the firm who won it now has forty staff and two of their founders have not drawn a line in five years. I asked one of them.

Noor Fasi: How does the money work with three?

Elliot Graves: We each take the same salary, around fifty two thousand, and split any profit equally in March. Overheads are tiny. Our studio is a former dental surgery we rent for nine hundred a month. We use one plotter, one model saw, and a shared server in a cupboard.

Noor Fasi: Clients must ask what happens if one of you leaves.

Elliot Graves: Every time. The honest answer is that every project has two of us on it, always, so no client depends on a single person. It means we are each on about four jobs, not six.

Noor Fasi: What would make you hire?

Elliot Graves: Succession. Two of us are over fifty. At some point the practice either takes on someone who could own it, or it closes gracefully. We have not decided which, and I would rather say that than pretend.

Noor Fasi: Elliot Graves, thank you. That's Small Practice.