Few companies presume to know more about their clients’ businesses than the clients themselves.
But Chicago architecture and engineering firm OWP/P thinks it doesn’t hurt to try.
Through a concerted training effort, OWP/P staffers strive to walk in the shoes of those who will use the buildings they design. Its health-care group shadows hospital workers to learn how to help doctors and nurses do their jobs better. And members of its education group have traveled to European schools, bringing back design ideas.
“One of the challenges for any design professional is to continue to increase your knowledge by studying your subject from more perspectives,” said John Syvertsen, president of the 47-year-old company.
Syvertsen encourages his 260 employees to take advantage of the firm’s training programs, knowing that their depth of understanding has become a point of differentiation for the firm, which had sales of about $37.2 million last year. Syvertsen is expecting 5 percent to 10 percent growth this year.
OWP/P, which a few years ago saw sales stall in a tough building environment, has centered its growth plan on developing expertise in high-value areas, such as health care and environmentally sustainable design. The firm invests about 2 percent of revenue in corporate training each year to establish that expertise, Syvertsen said.
Just about any small business should strive to better understand its customers and their needs, and formal training is one way to do that, said Steven Rogers, director of the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“The closer you stay to your customer, the easier and the greater the chance of getting more business from them,” Rogers said. “When their business need changes, you are immediately aware” and can adapt to serve them better, he said.
But OWP/P isn’t satisfied with quick reaction. It has immersed its staff in the study of environmental design, a topic that is catching on among a growing number of clients, said Rand Ekman, head of the firm’s environmental design group.
Each fall, the firm holds an “environmental week” of seminars, bringing in experts from other cities to discuss developments in sustainable design with OWP/P and its clients. Throughout the year, the firm holds frequent luncheon seminars with guest speakers.
“The idea is to take that leading information and bring it back to our clients,” Ekman said.
Establishing expertise is an ideal way for a small business to boost its credibility in the market and earn repeat business, Rogers said.
“You want to define yourself as the expert in the field, so your customers rely on you,” he said.
OWP/P’s educated inquiry often leads to change, said Charles Stevenson, director of project development and planning at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, who has worked with the firm for more than a decade on several dozen projects.
By questioning how the hospital operates, and whether it might operate better through a design change, OWP/P makes a difference, Stevenson said.
“They’ve helped lead us through our process changes,” he said.
Even seemingly small decisions, such as where to place blood-pressure cuffs and otoscopes in an examining room, or how do best dispose of used needles, can make a big difference in the daily routine of doctors, nurses and patients, said Deb Sheehan, director of health care at OWP/P.
That why OWP/P built a simulated medical room on the firm’s premises that helps health-care clients visualize its plans. The approach stems from the growing realization that though clients are shown drawings and asked for their feedback, they often don’t know what to look for, Sheehan said.
“We assume they can read our drawings. They can’t,” she said, noting that distance measures on paper can be deceiving.
By staying well versed in the industries they serve, small businesses are better able to anticipate needs and develop innovations, Rogers said. Ultimately, businesses want to become so valuable to their customers that they become regarded as an extension of those companies.
But it takes time and investment, Rogers said. Many entrepreneurs don’t understand the potential return from funding training programs to learn more about their customers’ businesses, he said.
OWP/P, on the other hand, has made training a priority. At a firmwide role-playing exercise last year, staff members were assigned parts as heart-attack victims, cancer patients and car-accident trauma patients to get a feel for what patients and their families go through in the hospital.
The awareness raised during that exercise proved useful when the firm’s designers and architects later shadowed hospital staff in a trauma center, Sheehan said. Typically, OWP/P staffers arrive at the emergency room at 4 p.m. and stay through midnight so they can observe medical workers, patients and family members during peak volume, she said.
From that, OWP/P has learned that bigger is not always better in a trauma setting, where doctors and nurses need everything within reach and always in the same place so they can find it quickly.
“You want everything within 3 feet,” Sheehan said.
But finding the time to devote to training can be a challenge.
“It’s easy to become overwhelmed by daily work,” Syvertsen said.
As a result, the training “only works because people are inspired,” he said. “It’s not instead of, it’s in addition to.”
