FUTURE PROOF/Coady Partnership Architects:When the Irish property market crashed, Coady Partnership Architects had to look for work away from home – and it has produced results, writes PAMELA NEWENHAM
ANNE FLETCHER lost her job as an architect in the last recession in the 1980s. The MD of Coady Partnership Architects (CPA) was not going to let the same happen when the current crisis hit. Instead she faced the downturn head-on and actually expanded her business by cutting costs and looking to new markets abroad.
CPA was a thriving business at the height of the boom. The Dublin-based firm grew from 10 employees to 38 and had public and private projects under its belt from second-level schools to university buildings, hospitals to sports centres.
Among the buildings it had designed were the John Hume building at NUI Maynooth, Leitrim Arts Centre, Hartstown community college and Griffeen Valley primary school. The company had also been focused on sustainability and energy efficiency. It designed the first second-level school to be air-pressure tested in 2004.
In 2008 though, the property market crashed and nearly took the firm with it. There was less work out there and, of the work that was there the firm was not getting it. The company’s revenue dropped by 40 per cent and staff numbers reduced from 38 to 22.
“We were competing for a lot of tenders, especially in education, but we were not winning them. It became clear at the end of 2009 we were being shortlisted the whole time but our financial bid was too much so we weren’t winning,” Fletcher says.
The company had no choice but to reduce the amount it charged for work in order to win tenders. At the same time however, it was still having to pay the high rents and wages.
“We made very, very harsh salary cuts for all of us, especially at a higher level. We needed to be able to bid for tenders at a level to win the job but we couldn’t bid so low that we would be out of business.”
Fletcher says CPA reduced its overheads for everything from the paper it bought to coffee and detergent. This got overheads down by 60 per cent. It also asked staff to work longer for less money. “We also upskilled our staff. The idea was if anything went wrong, our staff would be the best-skilled staff on the market and that would ultimately help them. They bought into that wholeheartedly.”
The firm began the staff upskilling by introducing Building Information Modelling (BIM). This was a big improvement to traditional drawings on paper and computers. It allowed designs to be viewed on a 3D scale.
The company then started looking for business abroad. Having previously tendered for a lot of State contracts, it found the process to be very expensive. Tendering for EU contracts was a lot less expensive, though, about one-third cheaper than tendering for Irish contracts, says Fletcher.
CPA joined a European network of architectural practices, Perspective, to enable it to bring its expertise to a wider market. With the collapse in the Irish market, joining Perspective allowed CPA to target several markets with its European partners.
The company has now won nine tenders with a capital construction cost of €60 million. This includes four schools in Belgium, which represent a fee income of 20 per cent of annual turnover. This has involved a key number of staff going to work in Belgium each week to oversee the design and construction.
As a result the business is fast expanding and has recently increased its workforce by 33 per cent. CPA has also lined up a few new graduates to join the firm.
Fletcher’s message, not just in terms of architecture but also business, is that if Irish businesses are to survive the recession, they have to look at winning contracts abroad in order to keep Irish staff employed in Ireland.
“We started looking abroad for business when we weren’t getting enough in Ireland,” she says. “We needed to broaden our market base and we’re still doing that. You have to constantly expand your market base, so we’re looking to move into designing data centres and office refurbishment.”
