Session #2 – Professional Practice

Led by Tamarah Begay, AIA and Laura Anderson, AIA the Professional Practice session of the Christopher Kelley Leadership Development Program featured a wide range of speakers on highly relevant topics. The session focused on the underlying themes that are fundamental to firm productivity, culture, collaboration, and leadership.

The session began with Katie Kangas, AIA (RSP Architects – Minneapolis), presenting on firm culture. Scholars participated in an exercise to help discover their ideal office culture, centered on themes of work-life balance, accountability, collaboration, independence and teamwork. The scholars then scored their current firms on the same scale, to see where alignments or discrepancies were found. By discovering their ideal firm culture, scholars can learn to advocate for values that are important to their lives with their current firm.

Mike Pettengale and Ali Wagner (REDW) presented next on helping participants understand the three main financial statements, in Financial Statement Basics. This presentation introduced important ratios derived from these financial statements so that participants can analyze them in order to understand their business better. Overall, we aim to increase the participants’ understanding of the information in the financial statements and use it more effectively to evaluate financial performance.

Next, Bret Hamilton (Northwestern Mutual) shared thoughts on transition and financial planning. His presentation identified strategies for risk management, employee benefits, exit planning and personal financial security needs.Gary Oppedahl, a serial entrepreneur, spoke about entrepreneurship and his 30+ years of experience with startups, transitions, turnarounds, and acquisitions.

Finally, Sarah Lindenfeld (Payette, Boston) delivered a keynote address on Practice Management. A University of New Mexico graduate, Lindenfeld shared more about her career path and current role as a managing principal at Payette, recipient of the the 2019 AIA Firm Award. While touching on firm culture, risk management, employee relations, finance, and operations, Lindenfeld notes that firm management is “not magic markers and tracing paper,” but instead “doing one’s best to ensure that the firm is around in the next year, in the next decade, and in the next generation.”

This session was sponsored by Cherry/See/Reames and Northwestern Mutual.