The blueprint-to-finished-building analogies are unavoidable when speaking both personal and corporate growth, with Jeffrey Sackenheim, the visionary CEO of SHP. Jeff is an architect's architect, and he's turning a 123-year-old design and architecture firm into a national trailblazer in educational design in both a humble and talented way.
Jeff's journey from hands-on architect to leading a firm with adaptability and innovation, punctuated by resilience and strategic foresight, gives insight into both the human side of architectural design and the importance of authenticity to fuel the evolution of a business within ever-changing landscapes.
Don't miss this conversation that connects the personal with the professional, a symphony of lessons in strategic growth and genuine leadership.
The blueprint-to-finished-building analogies are unavoidable when speaking both personal and corporate growth, with Jeffrey Sackenheim, the visionary CEO of SHP. Jeff is an architect's architect, and he's turning a 123-year-old design and architecture firm into a national trailblazer in educational design in both a humble and talented way.
Jeff's journey from hands-on architect to leading a firm with adaptability and innovation, punctuated by resilience and strategic foresight, gives insight into both the human side of architectural design and the importance of authenticity to fuel the evolution of a business within ever-changing landscapes.
Don't miss this conversation that connects the personal with the professional, a symphony of lessons in strategic growth and genuine leadership.
Welcome to the third growth option podcast, where we talk with business leaders and innovators hungry to drive growth that can be faster than internal organic growth and less risky than acquisition. Your moderator is Bernal Duncan-Spuller, chief Sherpa and CEO at Realign, who has led private equity owned distributors through turnarounds and growth. With battle proven leaders from all frontiers, we want to provoke thinking about business growth beyond conventional wisdom and binary choices.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm Bernal, your host, talking today with Jeffrey Sackenheim, a thoughtful architect passionate about the design process. I really think of you as an architect, architect and CEO of a 123 year old design and architecture firm with some 120 employees in Cincinnati, ohio. Jeff, welcome to the third growth option podcast.
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for calling me an architect's architect. It's very flattering. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Look, you and I got to know each other through Vistage, the CEO leadership group, for the last four years plus or minus. I just love your creativity mixed with this authenticity. I want to dig into both your personal career journey and then also the evolution of the firm, which there's not too many 123 year old architect firms in the world probably. You earned your master's in architecture in the first few years while you were at SHP. Is that kind of how that worked? You've been at SHP for like 21 years now, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, correct. So I joined the firm in 2002 after earning an undergraduate degree in architecture from Miami University in Oxford, ohio. I worked for a few years and then had one of those moments in my life where I wanted to make a change in the type of work that I was doing and also, due to registration requirements, knew that I had to earn a master's degree in architecture. So I started a job search and started a school search for graduate school. And some stars aligned and I was accepted at the University of Cincinnati their second ever master's in architecture class, so a relatively new program for them and also accepted a position here at SHP 21 years ago. So for the first two and a half years of my journey here at SHP I was also in graduate school, which, thankfully, was just a mile and a half up the road.
Speaker 2:So it ended up being pretty convenient, yeah, correct, yeah, great program. So lots of growth and evolution. You know again, both personally in your career in the firm and also how you're approaching sort of the next decade or decades with, you know, this combination of what I think of it as Midwestern humility. I see that as a Midwestern transplant who was not born and raised in Cincinnati but has been calling it home for the last almost 20 years and at the same time, you know you said earlier, just the stars aligned. You are definitely reaching for the stars with your firm. I mean the way you're talking about sort of going forward. Just tell us a little bit about the evolution of SHP, this 123 year old company.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were founded in 1901. The last time we benchmarked it, we were the 40th oldest architecture firm, in the United States at least, so there's a tremendous legacy of practice here, very deep portfolio. We joke sometimes that we've done renovations of renovations of renovations of buildings that we designed in the early 1900s.
Speaker 3:They tend to come back, which is cool, and you know we're also still working with some of our very earliest clients from the early nineteen hundreds, particularly on the education side of our practice one of the first education projects we ever did as a firm. We still call that, still have that that group as a client today, which is really awesome story to be able to tell that we've worked with them for more than a century. We probably started to really transform and evolve as a practice to CEOs prior to me so I'm replacing Lauren Della Bella, who's been our CEO since 2008. Prior to her was a gentleman by the name of Jerry Hammond.
Speaker 3:Really, under Jerry's tenure is when the firm started to grow from a Hamilton based office working in just a couple of surrounding counties to you know, beginning to practice at a statewide level and then to begin to practice at kind of a tri-state regional level, working predominantly in Ohio, kentucky, in Indiana, and that was really true for the most part, I would say, with the exception of the occasional one-off that took us out of that core geography.
Speaker 3:That was pretty much true up until about the last big recession, which hit us a little bit later than everybody else around, maybe 2011, first quarter 2012. So one of the benefits of our biggest market sector being working with educational clients is that those tend to be big building programs. They tend to be in our office for several years between design and construction and they tend to be funded well in advance of the work starting. So we got hit a little bit late? We definitely were. We did not come out of the recession unscathed. We did a lot of strategic planning immediately as we started to rebuild coming out of the recession, and one of the one of the big goals that we set for ourselves as a firm, as a leadership group, at that time, was to really lean into what we felt like was a point of view and a position as architects and designers working in the education space to become the preeminent national design firm for pre-K-12 learning environments.
Speaker 2:It was a pretty lofty goal, if I could interrupt us for a second here, because I recall that the majority of your work for I'll just say the first century right of the 123 years, was engineering, commodity work. I mean, there's a shift from commodity work to trying to differentiate yourself in this sort of education design.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know that I would use the word commodity, but I think the work that we were doing at the time was not super special. We were doing what a lot of other good, competent design firms were doing. There wasn't anything. Even as I reflect back on the earliest couple of years here again, with, with a few rare exceptions that would surface each year the majority of our work that we were doing kind of anybody you know if I'm being really candid could do in getting back to that.
Speaker 3:The strategy conversations that we were having coming out of the recession and setting that lofty goal of this is going to be our north star of how we want to position our firm. We have always committed to research. We have always committed to advocacy. We have always committed to doing quality design work. Our work is the best when it leverages all three of those things.
Speaker 3:And so we set ourselves on a journey of year over year incremental improvement in our design processes, in design rigor, in our commitment to research and advocacy. And even though we had a centuries worth of educational expertise built up public, private, early childhood through higher ed, all building typologies under kind of a big educational umbrella, we definitely knew that the K-12 vertical studio offered the biggest opportunity for us to grow our client base and leverage our expertise up to that point. So that was about not quite 10 years ago, and I think what we've realized over the last couple of years is that we are, I'm really happy to say, like well on our way on that journey. There are a couple of industry publications that rank design firms in certain markets and geographies, and last year we were ranked, I believe, either 25 or 26 in the country you know, and we still think of ourselves as just this little small design firm in Cincinnati.
Speaker 2:There you go with that Midwestern humility. Oh shucks.
Speaker 3:And we've talked about that a little bit before. But I think, as our geographic footprint has expanded and we've now worked, I think, in again like 28 or so of the 50 states we routinely find ourselves in competition with some of the largest firms in the industry. We have five offices in Cincinnati is our biggest, we have 125 people, but we're competing against firms that have 30 offices and 2,000 people in a global footprint. And I think one of the things that has definitely and we're trying to stay true to ourselves and who we are and how we like to work but one of the things that I do think has resonated with our clients and the relationships that we try to build is this authenticity and definitely this Midwestern sensibility, like we're not overly pretentious about our work. We aspire to do great work and beautiful work and, of course, we love that third party validation when we receive a design award or something.
Speaker 2:Because you're a human after all.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Yeah, who doesn't Absolutely? But we also really lean into this belief that the work that we're doing does have the ability to improve lives. Like our work, 70% of our work is in the public realm. They tend to be around for a century 50 years would be a short building lifespan in our portfolio and so we know that these tend to be the centers of community. They are 24, seven facilities, 365. Like they really become the identity of the towns and communities that we live in, and so that gives us a tremendous amount of meaning and purpose and joy in the work that we do and really helps motivate our folks to. You know, when things get tough or there's a problem on a job site, we really work our butts off to correct it and deliver the best, you know possible outcome that we can.
Speaker 2:Obviously, in my day job, I help companies grow and growth challenges are created all over the organizational chart. Growth solutions are created all over the organizational chart and one thing that really resonates with what, with how you're describing your growth so far and going forward what you call that North Star is the fact that you are talking about the why you want to grow and the why is you love the work, the architecture, the design process and doing it designing and building a better building that will have better outcomes because people and students and teachers and community members will feel better in those surroundings. It's not putting a square peg into a square hole. You're creating a round hole.
Speaker 3:Most definitely in that same philosophy applies to the other markets that we work in. It just so happens to be that the education one is our biggest one in the one that has has grown to a level of a national reputation. But, yes, absolutely, we know there's certainly like scientific studies you can point to about you know very basic design strategies, about you know something as simple as harnessing natural daylight and the improved test scores of a student in a classroom. Were in the midst of research effort with my university, where I got my undergraduate degree right now in their psychology department, about the tidal wave that were experiencing relative to mental health In the classroom, not just for students but for the staff as well, and so those types of engagements, also directly aligned with our core values and mission, help us create those spaces that are not just beautiful to look at or beautiful to be in, but will help improve people's lives on, give them a better, more authentic experience. So, yes, that is woven throughout everything that we do.
Speaker 2:Better outcomes. Right, you mentioned live music in a conversation that we had a couple months ago, and I think it was in the last in the I don't know if it was during or after covid that you experience live talk. Talk a little bit about what live music means to you and how that sort of effected yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:I mean, that has been something that With music and I think if I Come back in a second life, I hope that it is as a musician, because I would not call myself on, but I love live music in particular and we were pretty conservative during the first year ish of covid In terms of how we ran our business and trying to keep our people safe, and so we stayed pretty distributed for the most part and everybody working from home, and you know, I had been accustomed to, in the course of my day to day, just out and about all day, every day, and meeting with clients and leading teams, and that completely evaporated, you know, for that year.
Speaker 3:And there was a particular evening where I was feeling, I'll say, a little bit depressed about, you know, not having that direct interaction with humans.
Speaker 3:And I happen to be in my basement watching a youtube concert of a band that I really like, that I've seen live multiple times.
Speaker 3:I'm sure I had a beer to, you know, pretending like, pretending like I was at a concert, despite how loud I had it turned up, despite the fact that I I had a beer in my hand.
Speaker 3:It just wasn't the same and the experience wasn't the same and In a moment of that feeling of being a little bit depressed about missing the world really turned into A validation to me about again the importance of the work that we do and I could Imagine in my head and reflect on the experiences and some of the most enjoyable shows I've been to, where it's really hot in your elbow to elbow with people and you know you miss the feeling of. You know it's not awesome, like your feet sticking to the floor because some beer has gotten spilled, like you really miss that immersive Experience of being around people and being in those spaces and places where those things happen and you can play that out to Going to a live baseball game or an experience of having a loved one in a hospital environment and you know good environment, therapeutic environment, versus a not a great environment.
Speaker 3:So Versus the damn hospital room, which I hate exactly, and so so it really for me kind of renewed that commitment to and believe in the power of what we do and creating these places where those memories can be made in, those experiences can be shared and Start off as a negative and feeling low and turned into a really powerful, beautiful thing.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit about. You know the early years. You know in your twenties and thirties you got your master's degree in architecture. You're practicing architect and You're doing the work as opposed to now president elect, soon to be president, co Large company. You know hundred and twenty plus people. You're not spending your day at the drafting table eight hours a day. Right, talk a little bit about what helped you in that transition from drafting table to boardroom.
Speaker 3:I definitely think that my experience as a designer and architect here helped me get to the position that I'm in now. For sure, and I think that and I don't really like talking about myself that much but I think that one of the things that I have always felt comfortable with and I think it is a direct parallel to what I think will be one of the most important aspects of my new role is that I've always felt comfortable with a blank sheet of paper with someone a client, a potential client sharing issues that they're experiencing and problems that they might have, again primarily relative to facilities and real estate, but being able to take those issues and sometimes, depending upon the scale of the organization, there could be a thousand issues and trying to make sense of them and develop what we refer to as the concept, the big idea, the why, the vision for that particular instance, I have always felt really comfortable being charged with that task, and not everybody is, and we have a couple of folks.
Speaker 2:Most people are scared by it, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love it and it's hard and I work at it a lot. It does not come to me typically and just a flash of brilliance. Maybe occasionally I'll get one of those moments where I'll be in my car distracted and say, oh my gosh, what about this? Like in that instance has been given birth to an idea I feel like in terms of setting the strategy for the firm. I feel like that's a very similar exercise in process, in being the person that will be responsible for defining and implementing and leading the strategic vision of the firm as we move forward. And it's obviously not the exact same example, but I think, at its kind of most fundamental level, is something that will feel familiar.
Speaker 2:We actually use in my day job at Realign. We use the blueprint analogy. When we talk about a growth strategy, we describe where are they today, where could they be in the future, the clients, if they go from $50 million to $100 million worth of revenue, or what have you right? And then we say, wow, this is the blueprint. Now here's the framework of this building, that what the $100 million company looks like. We haven't picked out the wallpaper yet, right? We haven't decided the lighting fixtures yet, and some clients are super uncomfortable with this. What is this building you're talking about and what is, you know, like? You're just showing me a blueprint, but I cannot feel what it looks like. I cannot imagine what it feels to walk into the living room or the lobby and, as an architect, that's what you do all day long. So you've taken that approach to the company, to the CEO role as well, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, most definitely. It's, all you know, to me a creative process at its most basic, fundamental level and you know, whether it's a problem or an opportunity coming to, coming at it with a fresh perspective and a creative mindset and problem solving. A lot of the work that we do is very much rooted in problem solving and developing plans. You know, when we design a building for someone, it's the first time it's ever been designed and built. We're not making widgets, we are not rolling out prototypes. We are not an automotive manufacturer that has developed a concept for a new car and then put it through 10 years of research and engineering and invested a billion dollars in working out every single nut and bolt and kink and then bringing it to market and maybe still having a recall because something didn't get properly vetted, like.
Speaker 3:We are designing and building this for the first time ever and we are figuring it out on the creative side and on the technical side for the first time, and then it's being built outside in snow and rain and extreme heat and it's a tremendous responsibility, especially again in like our core markets and working with education clients and we do a lot of work with public library systems and we do a lot of offices for people. There's kind of this through line of learning that applies to a lot of our core markets. That's a tremendous responsibility, especially when we're talking about, you know, a building program that might be 150 or $250 million, like it's a lot of money and again, it's going to be there for a long time and like we have to get it right. I think that we need to take that same again discipline and rigor and how we run our business and how we think about our future and the decisions that we're going to make, to hopefully avoid those recalls.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit about this. You know the next decade or so, this stretch goal I think I'm allowed to say that and say it on this in this public forum of a podcast that your stretch goal is for. You know this amazing group of architects and engineers that you've firmed. It does an amazing design. You guys want to become the number one in K-12 design work in the United States. You mentioned your number 25 or 26, or have been mentioned as such recently and probably five or 10 years ago you were probably, you know, maybe not even in the top 50 or the top 100. So you're getting there. Yet you know to say we're going to be number one as scary as hell, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Tell me a little bit about that process of putting that goal out there and maybe being scared, maybe being excited, I think that's all pretty healthy.
Speaker 3:You know if we set a goal to something that big that while it's big it still feels attainable. You know it's not so abstract that there's no way in hell we're ever going to get there. If we get to number one by the end of my tenure, that'd be amazing. I hopefully have 20 years in this role, not quite 19 years in this role. If we can get to that number one position by the end of my tenure, I will consider that a tremendous success. So I know it's not going to happen tomorrow. I know it's not going to be easy.
Speaker 3:We talk a lot internally as a team and as a firm that if we're being really self-critical, we're really good. We're really good at what we do. To get to that next step, to be a great firm, to be an exemplar firm, that's going to require a whole different level of commitment and focus on the work that we do. And so I laugh a lot.
Speaker 3:One of my first bosses out of school had a saying that.
Speaker 3:The first few times I heard him say it as a young kid right out of school it didn't really resonate with me, but as I've gotten older and taken on more responsibilities within my organization.
Speaker 3:It's carried a lot more weight and I don't know if it was his original thought or he borrowed it from someone else, but he said you know nothing, hard is ever easy and it's like so simple. It's like, well, yeah, it's going to be hard for us to get to number one, but I'm confident enough to think that we can definitely get there. But I know that it's going to take a whole heck of a lot of hard work and I think that we are mentally prepared to do that. I think everybody to a person in the firm is up to that challenge and I think that, honestly, it's also one of the things that has helped us continue to attract people and retain people at the organization is that we're doing great work, but we have this vision of where we want to get to and it's a great motivator for people and it helps rally people and as long as we stay ourselves through the process and continue to work really hard.
Speaker 2:I think we'll get there. Somebody said to me the other day, growth is a retention strategy, and that's true, Jeff. Thank you so much for jumping on this episode. I've really enjoyed hearing about the North Star that you articulated for yourself and for the team, and how thinking about building the future of the company in similar ways as you think about the future of a building and you start with a blank sheet and becomes a blueprint and at the end you're selecting wallpaper. I thank you for sharing your perspective on growth. If folks wanted to reach out to you one-on-one, where might they find you?
Speaker 3:Sure, I think probably the easiest way, given that my last name is Sackenheim and sometimes difficult to spell, would be It'll be in the podcast notes. Yeah, it'll be in the podcast notes, but probably through LinkedIn or all my contact information is also available on our website, which is just shpcom. Pretty simple, shpcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome, this was great. Thank you so much, jeff.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate it. Thanks, Beno.
Speaker 2:Hey, if folks wanted to explore other growth topics, you can find me on our website, realignforresultscom, or just email me, beno b-e-n-n-o at realignforresultscom. Thanks and keep growing.
Speaker 1:You can listen to more episodes on Apple, spotify or Google. We would love for you to subscribe, rate and review it. Share it with your friends or colleagues if you enjoyed the content. This is growing.