Ware Malcomb Chairman Lawrence Armstrong: How a $3M Firm Became a $240M Company

yeah no absolutely i think that A couple things that I learned along the way that ended up being foundational to the growth and the strategy is, first of all, number one, we are great at what we do, which is what inspired our clients to ask us to go other places, which we're experts in commercial real estate.

We understand our client's business.

We understand how to design buildings that sustain over the course of time and can evolve with the marketplace.

remain relevant years after we designed the building.

And so clients value that, right? And so that was sort of one.

And that resulted in us being asked to go to other markets where maybe that expertise in the design industry didn't exist.

And so that's been a great thing.

The second one was, you know, we were given this amazing opportunity to take over lead by this company and lead it.

And we didn't want to just, you know, take the company and keep it where it was, which was in a good spot.

We were a really strong, good Southern California architectural firm.

It's basically what we were specializing in commercial real estate, but it, the inspiration, it was so inspiring to be given this opportunity that we wanted to create as many opportunities for our people to grow in their careers as we possibly could so when you marry this idea that you know we've defined what we're great at better than anybody and our clients are asking us to go places to open new offices and serve them in other markets and then we take our existing talent pool and continue to build it to inspire people and give them opportunity to go out and run these offices and build departments within these offices and grow a whole bunch of leaders that end up building our business.

So that whole thing works together as sort of a foundational strategy for the firm.

And like I said, over time, I've relied on some metaphors and some different business books and certain leaders throughout history.

My biggest influence is Leonardo da Vinci.

The ultimate whole brain thinker.

And so, you know, these are the kind of things that we think about as we build the company.

Cool.

I love that.

I was trying to see, you know, like from the commercial landscape place that you're creating spaces while they're commercial, they're people to like live in.

be part of and so like the intentionality of a good commercial space is critical and so you need to be able to be good at that but what it sounds like really like one of the foundations of where I'm welcome is you're good at developing people and actually you said didn't say good you said great and so great at developing people

where did you

have the idea for the leadership academy? At what point did you say, actually, you know what, we're in the building business, but we're really in the people business.

At what point did that turn for you and how did that shape the leadership decisions you made with hiring and developing leaders?

Yeah.

So, um, it, it, it's definitely foundational and, and really, um, I talk about a very, you know, We all read business books and you know etc and we early on decided we were going to become students of business and not just look at inside our industry at what other design firms are doing, but you know other great businesses, and so we read a lot of business books and the one.