Architecture & Engineering Solutions

There is a statistic from the AIA Firm Survey that should concern every small firm principal: the average architecture firm with fewer than ten employees spends 38% of its total labor hours on non-billable work. Not design. Not documentation. Not project management. Administrative tasks: tracking RFIs, logging submittals, chasing consultant responses, preparing invoices, coordinating schedules, and filing correspondence that nobody will read until a claim is filed three years later.

I have worked with architecture and engineering firms for fifteen years, first as a project architect and then as a technology consultant for AEC practices. The firms that sustain 1.4-1.6 net multipliers (the benchmark for healthy small firms) are not necessarily better designers than those struggling at 1.1. They are firms where the principals spend 70% of their time on billable work rather than 50%, because the administrative machinery does not require constant manual intervention.

The AEC industry in the United States generates over $490 billion in annual revenue across approximately 120,000 architecture and engineering firms. The vast majority — roughly 78% — have fewer than 20 employees. These firms compete for projects against larger practices with dedicated project coordinators, BIM managers, and administrative staff. And yet their per-project administrative burden is proportionally higher, because the same tasks (RFI responses, submittal reviews, billing, insurance certificates, consultant coordination) exist regardless of firm size.

The technology landscape in AEC has improved dramatically for design work. Revit, ArchiCAD, Rhino, and their associated plugins have transformed how buildings are designed and documented. BIM coordination tools like Navisworks and Solibri have improved clash detection. But the administrative and coordination layer — the workflow between receiving an RFI and issuing a response, between receiving a submittal and returning a review, between completing a project phase and issuing an invoice — remains stubbornly manual at most small firms.

PSMJ Resources, which benchmarks professional services firm performance, reports that top-quartile A/E firms achieve a utilization rate (percentage of total hours that are billable) of 62%, compared to 52% for median firms. That 10-percentage-point gap represents roughly 200 hours per employee per year — hours that are consumed by administrative tasks rather than billable project work. For a six-person firm with a blended billing rate of $165 per hour, that utilization gap translates to $198,000 in unrealized annual revenue.

The tools that small AEC firms use — Revit or ArchiCAD for design production, Procore or Newforma for project information management (at firms that can afford it), Gmail for day-to-day communication, Google Sheets or Excel for everything else — each serve their primary function. Where they fail is at the seams. An RFI arrives by email. Someone manually enters it into a log. Someone else assigns it to a reviewer. The reviewer responds by email. Someone transfers the response back to the log. The response gets sent to the contractor. At each handoff, time passes and accuracy degrades.

The most successful small AEC firms I work with have not adopted elaborate enterprise software. They have systematized the handoffs. The RFI that arrives by email automatically creates a tracked entry. The submittal that arrives creates a review assignment with a deadline. The project that hits 50% design development automatically triggers a billing calculation. The connective tissue between their existing tools eliminates the administrative dead zones where work stalls, deadlines slip, and billable hours evaporate.

For firms exploring what automation can do for their practice, the areas with the highest return are RFI and submittal management (where response time directly affects client satisfaction and contractual compliance), project billing (where delayed invoicing directly reduces cash flow), and consultant coordination (where missed deadlines cascade through the entire project schedule). Each of these can be systematized using the tools you already have — without adding another platform to your technology stack.