[00:00:00] **Michael:** Have you ever noticed the 3 classic career paths of people who start new architecture and engineering firms: you have the small firm veterans, the corporate professionals, and the early entrepreneurs. [00:00:10] What's your founding story?
[00:00:11] **Michael:** In this episode, you're going to hear how Danielle Elzahr and Bryan Anthony Alzati left a large corporate firm to start Rescale Design Collab and discovered something [00:00:20] surprising about running their own business.
[00:00:21] **Michael:** They'll explain how they set up their firm in thirty days, get paid in twenty-seven days on average, and actually spend less time on administrative work than they did as corporate [00:00:30] employees.
[00:00:30] **Michael:** Welcome to Architecture and Engineering Business Strategies, hosted by Monograph.
[00:00:34] **Michael:** If you're a corporate architect or engineer wondering whether independence means drowning in spreadsheets and business tasks, [00:00:40] this episode will show you it doesn't have to work that way.
[00:00:43] **Chris:** As employees in a big firm, you'd never think that becoming a business owner, you'd do less admin.
[00:00:48] **Danielle:** I know. Yeah,
[00:00:49] **Bryan:** [00:00:50] I,
[00:00:50] **Danielle:** yeah,
[00:00:50] **Bryan:** agreed.
[00:00:51] **Danielle:** I know, because it's funny, like when we talk to people like after I had left initially and we talked to some folks, it was like, oh, just wait.
[00:00:59] **Danielle:** You know, having [00:01:00] your own company, it's such a headache and it's so much work and whatnot, and I really haven't found that to be the case in comparison to what we came from. Because where we were, we were [00:01:10] very involved in running the business. But it was harder.
[00:01:13] **Danielle:** We both were at a large firm that had invested in building their own tools and as much as they had [00:01:20] invested in building their own tools, it wasn't as seamless as monograph, but,
[00:01:24] **Bryan:** and it wasn't as
[00:01:24] **Bryan:** quick as updating as Monograph.
[00:01:26] **Danielle:** It was not. And so, but when we left the large firm. [00:01:30] That was one of our concerns, like what are we gonna use, right? Like we know the benefit of using a tool that helps you plan out the financials, the staffing, the [00:01:40] productivity, and all those things, and the revenue and the fact that that even interlinks into your accounting and your invoicing.
[00:01:48] **Danielle:** Has been phenomenal. Like it's been [00:01:50] great. But when we left before we knew about monograph, that was one of the big concerns. Like, okay, if we run a firm, how are we gonna do this? So when we found monograph, it was a match made in heaven [00:02:00] because we, I mean, we were, we were able to use that from day one, even when we were just running this as one person when I left and he hadn't even left the other firm.[00:02:10]
[00:02:10] **Danielle:** I used it for all of our invoicing, for all of our, you know, revenue planning, everything. It's been fantastic.
[00:02:16] **Chris:** You've been sophisticated. You didn't really live that small [00:02:20] business experience where you're managing tons of spreadsheets and word documents for invoices,
[00:02:25] **Bryan:** we knew the importance of finding a good like project management tool, but also something with invoice and [00:02:30] billing like that. I mean that was fundamental, like that's kind of one of the things that that kind of really ran the ship and saw things smoothly and we knew that.
[00:02:37] **Bryan:** Finding something a program that did [00:02:40] that would be hugely, uh, an accelerator for us, make it really much easier. 'cause we really wanted to, and I, I wanna say you guys even talk about it. Like we [00:02:50] wanna, we wanna focus more on the design side of things than the business side of things. Like this really lets you kind of autopilot some of the business things.
[00:02:56] **Danielle:** When we were at our former firm. They had those internal tools that [00:03:00] they built, but we spent more time updating those internal tools than we did actually doing the work. Like once you're at a management level, it was [00:03:10] all administrative. So that's what Brian's saying, like, by taking the leap and leaving and actually usually Monograph
[00:03:17] **Danielle:** we've been spending all of our time on [00:03:20] projects and very little time having to manage the tool, like it's very simple. It's very easy. Now granted, are we maximizing all the things that we could be with the tool? [00:03:30] Not yet. And as we grow, we're gonna grow with it more, but it's been really effortless and minimal to use the tool and keep things up to date.
[00:03:39] **Chris:** So glad to [00:03:40] hear that. how'd you hear about monograph?
[00:03:42] **Danielle:** I think it was like Instagram.
[00:03:43] **Bryan:** I saw it, I forwarded it to Danielle and I was like, I think we should get this. I went down the video, I saw some things. I'm like, this kind of looks [00:03:50] like what we had in the office.
[00:03:51] **Danielle:** Yeah. And because we knew how valuable those types of tools were, like it was an easy sell for us because we know the value of a tool like that.
[00:03:59] **Bryan:** [00:04:00] Right.
[00:04:00] **Danielle:** We saw like one demo and then we committed.
[00:04:02] **Chris:** You come from a large firm and so you have a sophisticated understanding of when all the systems are at work, but now you have to fit [00:04:10] it into a small shop.
[00:04:12] **Chris:** That's big in mindset,
[00:04:14] **Danielle:** Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was large firm. You have a full accounting team, [00:04:20] you have management teams, you have a lot of layers of support and also leadership. Like we had the tools, but you also have a, a broader network of [00:04:30] folks that are using the tools, right?
[00:04:32] **Danielle:** And you're responsible for a piece of 'em. And so when you take the leap to practice on your own, if you're coming from that type of background, you know, the business [00:04:40] fundamentals. And you know what needs to be tracked, but you need the tool that otherwise you have no support, right?
[00:04:49] **Danielle:** Like you're going [00:04:50] into unknown and you need the tool and you need a simple way also to take the planning and then also translate it to the invoicing. And uh, you know what I [00:05:00] like about it? We've been able to offer clients options where either they can pay through stripe. The fees are better if they paid through Stripe.
[00:05:09] **Danielle:** The fact that you [00:05:10] get some free transactions and that there's a limit on the percentage versus if we use QuickBooks, the fees are significantly higher. So we don't, we don't use, we use [00:05:20] QuickBooks for some of the backend, um, accounting that monograph can tie into. But we don't use QuickBooks for any actual invoices or payments with our [00:05:30] clients because our invoices are commercial type of.
[00:05:35] **Danielle:** contracts and invoices where it's fewer invoices for higher amounts of money. It's not like [00:05:40] small amounts where those little fees are not a big deal. So that's been really critical for us and key for us. Um, it's, it's been great. I, we've used that literally since [00:05:50] our first invoice. We used monograph.
[00:05:51] **Chris:** Your very first invoice was with monograph. Yeah. So you must have really prioritized getting a system like this in place it sounds like you really started up [00:06:00] quick
[00:06:00] **Danielle:** within 30
[00:06:00] **Danielle:** days we had Monograph and, yeah, yeah.
[00:06:03] **Bryan:** Like we both came from a big commercial background and we knew that already the clients that we were transitioning [00:06:10] to were already gonna follow us to, to begin with.
[00:06:13] **Bryan:** We were looking already for a system that was similar to what we had that was more malleable to [00:06:20] us , but also be able to service the bigger firms. 'cause we are, we are working with bigger clients that are used to having everything set for their standards, set through their emails, set to their accounting [00:06:30] departments. They have their checks and balances. And so this really worked out like we were specifically looking. Like, I think it was almost like a happy circumstance when Instagram showed it, I guess to me because it was [00:06:40] like I was actually looking for different programs.
[00:06:41] **Bryan:** 'cause we were kind of thinking going into QuickBooks. But when we saw this and it also had like scheduling and it also had the planner, we were like, no, let's just get this. [00:06:50] This seems like exactly what we need.
[00:06:51] **Danielle:** Yeah. And it looks nice. The invoices look nice. They're very clear. We've actually gotten paid, like our average age [00:07:00] of your invoices, the 27 days?
[00:07:02] **Danielle:** Like, we didn't have that at a large firm. We didn't have that kind of like payment speed by clients, [00:07:10] but the invoices are extremely clear. It has the right backup. Like I, like you can attach the consultant invoices, you can attach reimbursables, all of that. And the way that it's [00:07:20] organized is super clear and it's been very easy and streamlined.
[00:07:24] **Danielle:** Like we have an accountant that does. Our taxes are more detailed stuff, but we don't have an accountant that handles our [00:07:30] invoicing because it's been so simple to just handle it ourselves from monograph.
[00:07:35] **Chris:** So was that really the big thing you needed? Like I gotta invoice someone, I gotta figure out how I'm [00:07:40] gonna do it.
[00:07:40] **Danielle:** Yeah. That's what pushed it to like, make a decision and sign up. Yes. That was it. That was like the catalyst. But we knew with all the other [00:07:50] tools that it offered, it was also what we wanted to use to plan as we grow. And then I noticed that another collaborator that we were working with, a lighting designer that we have on that same project, [00:08:00] they used monograph because when I started to get their invoices, that was also monograph too.
[00:08:04] **Chris:** So it was a fast decision.
[00:08:05] **Chris:** Did you look any other, uh, softwares?
[00:08:08] **Bryan:** We
[00:08:08] **Bryan:** did, and I don't really [00:08:10] remember what they were,
[00:08:11] **Danielle:** I wanna say
[00:08:11] **Danielle:** like, uh, Asana Monday,
[00:08:14] **Bryan:** we looked at Monday
[00:08:15] **Danielle:** We had been given other recommendations from other folks, [00:08:20] but for us, the operations piece, the operations and invoicing piece was key. Like we understood the value of that.
[00:08:27] **Danielle:** and that drove our decision.
[00:08:29] **Michael:** Small [00:08:30] firms can punch way above their weight when they have the right tools from day one.
[00:08:33] **Michael:** The difference between struggling with spreadsheets and running professional operations isn't about firm size anymore, it's about [00:08:40] choosing systems that actually work for how architects and engineers do business.
[00:08:44] **Michael:** When your business operations run themselves, you can focus on design and client work instead of constantly managing [00:08:50] administrative tasks.
[00:08:51] **Michael:** If this conversation changed how you think about what's possible for small firms today, share it with a friend who is running a firm as an employee or as an owner.
[00:08:58] **Michael:** they'll want to hear this perspective. [00:09:00] Thanks for listening.
[00:00:11] **Michael:** In this episode, you're going to hear how Danielle Elzahr and Bryan Anthony Alzati left a large corporate firm to start Rescale Design Collab and discovered something [00:00:20] surprising about running their own business.
[00:00:21] **Michael:** They'll explain how they set up their firm in thirty days, get paid in twenty-seven days on average, and actually spend less time on administrative work than they did as corporate [00:00:30] employees.
[00:00:30] **Michael:** Welcome to Architecture and Engineering Business Strategies, hosted by Monograph.
[00:00:34] **Michael:** If you're a corporate architect or engineer wondering whether independence means drowning in spreadsheets and business tasks, [00:00:40] this episode will show you it doesn't have to work that way.
[00:00:43] **Chris:** As employees in a big firm, you'd never think that becoming a business owner, you'd do less admin.
[00:00:48] **Danielle:** I know. Yeah,
[00:00:49] **Bryan:** [00:00:50] I,
[00:00:50] **Danielle:** yeah,
[00:00:50] **Bryan:** agreed.
[00:00:51] **Danielle:** I know, because it's funny, like when we talk to people like after I had left initially and we talked to some folks, it was like, oh, just wait.
[00:00:59] **Danielle:** You know, having [00:01:00] your own company, it's such a headache and it's so much work and whatnot, and I really haven't found that to be the case in comparison to what we came from. Because where we were, we were [00:01:10] very involved in running the business. But it was harder.
[00:01:13] **Danielle:** We both were at a large firm that had invested in building their own tools and as much as they had [00:01:20] invested in building their own tools, it wasn't as seamless as monograph, but,
[00:01:24] **Bryan:** and it wasn't as
[00:01:24] **Bryan:** quick as updating as Monograph.
[00:01:26] **Danielle:** It was not. And so, but when we left the large firm. [00:01:30] That was one of our concerns, like what are we gonna use, right? Like we know the benefit of using a tool that helps you plan out the financials, the staffing, the [00:01:40] productivity, and all those things, and the revenue and the fact that that even interlinks into your accounting and your invoicing.
[00:01:48] **Danielle:** Has been phenomenal. Like it's been [00:01:50] great. But when we left before we knew about monograph, that was one of the big concerns. Like, okay, if we run a firm, how are we gonna do this? So when we found monograph, it was a match made in heaven [00:02:00] because we, I mean, we were, we were able to use that from day one, even when we were just running this as one person when I left and he hadn't even left the other firm.[00:02:10]
[00:02:10] **Danielle:** I used it for all of our invoicing, for all of our, you know, revenue planning, everything. It's been fantastic.
[00:02:16] **Chris:** You've been sophisticated. You didn't really live that small [00:02:20] business experience where you're managing tons of spreadsheets and word documents for invoices,
[00:02:25] **Bryan:** we knew the importance of finding a good like project management tool, but also something with invoice and [00:02:30] billing like that. I mean that was fundamental, like that's kind of one of the things that that kind of really ran the ship and saw things smoothly and we knew that.
[00:02:37] **Bryan:** Finding something a program that did [00:02:40] that would be hugely, uh, an accelerator for us, make it really much easier. 'cause we really wanted to, and I, I wanna say you guys even talk about it. Like we [00:02:50] wanna, we wanna focus more on the design side of things than the business side of things. Like this really lets you kind of autopilot some of the business things.
[00:02:56] **Danielle:** When we were at our former firm. They had those internal tools that [00:03:00] they built, but we spent more time updating those internal tools than we did actually doing the work. Like once you're at a management level, it was [00:03:10] all administrative. So that's what Brian's saying, like, by taking the leap and leaving and actually usually Monograph
[00:03:17] **Danielle:** we've been spending all of our time on [00:03:20] projects and very little time having to manage the tool, like it's very simple. It's very easy. Now granted, are we maximizing all the things that we could be with the tool? [00:03:30] Not yet. And as we grow, we're gonna grow with it more, but it's been really effortless and minimal to use the tool and keep things up to date.
[00:03:39] **Chris:** So glad to [00:03:40] hear that. how'd you hear about monograph?
[00:03:42] **Danielle:** I think it was like Instagram.
[00:03:43] **Bryan:** I saw it, I forwarded it to Danielle and I was like, I think we should get this. I went down the video, I saw some things. I'm like, this kind of looks [00:03:50] like what we had in the office.
[00:03:51] **Danielle:** Yeah. And because we knew how valuable those types of tools were, like it was an easy sell for us because we know the value of a tool like that.
[00:03:59] **Bryan:** [00:04:00] Right.
[00:04:00] **Danielle:** We saw like one demo and then we committed.
[00:04:02] **Chris:** You come from a large firm and so you have a sophisticated understanding of when all the systems are at work, but now you have to fit [00:04:10] it into a small shop.
[00:04:12] **Chris:** That's big in mindset,
[00:04:14] **Danielle:** Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was large firm. You have a full accounting team, [00:04:20] you have management teams, you have a lot of layers of support and also leadership. Like we had the tools, but you also have a, a broader network of [00:04:30] folks that are using the tools, right?
[00:04:32] **Danielle:** And you're responsible for a piece of 'em. And so when you take the leap to practice on your own, if you're coming from that type of background, you know, the business [00:04:40] fundamentals. And you know what needs to be tracked, but you need the tool that otherwise you have no support, right?
[00:04:49] **Danielle:** Like you're going [00:04:50] into unknown and you need the tool and you need a simple way also to take the planning and then also translate it to the invoicing. And uh, you know what I [00:05:00] like about it? We've been able to offer clients options where either they can pay through stripe. The fees are better if they paid through Stripe.
[00:05:09] **Danielle:** The fact that you [00:05:10] get some free transactions and that there's a limit on the percentage versus if we use QuickBooks, the fees are significantly higher. So we don't, we don't use, we use [00:05:20] QuickBooks for some of the backend, um, accounting that monograph can tie into. But we don't use QuickBooks for any actual invoices or payments with our [00:05:30] clients because our invoices are commercial type of.
[00:05:35] **Danielle:** contracts and invoices where it's fewer invoices for higher amounts of money. It's not like [00:05:40] small amounts where those little fees are not a big deal. So that's been really critical for us and key for us. Um, it's, it's been great. I, we've used that literally since [00:05:50] our first invoice. We used monograph.
[00:05:51] **Chris:** Your very first invoice was with monograph. Yeah. So you must have really prioritized getting a system like this in place it sounds like you really started up [00:06:00] quick
[00:06:00] **Danielle:** within 30
[00:06:00] **Danielle:** days we had Monograph and, yeah, yeah.
[00:06:03] **Bryan:** Like we both came from a big commercial background and we knew that already the clients that we were transitioning [00:06:10] to were already gonna follow us to, to begin with.
[00:06:13] **Bryan:** We were looking already for a system that was similar to what we had that was more malleable to [00:06:20] us , but also be able to service the bigger firms. 'cause we are, we are working with bigger clients that are used to having everything set for their standards, set through their emails, set to their accounting [00:06:30] departments. They have their checks and balances. And so this really worked out like we were specifically looking. Like, I think it was almost like a happy circumstance when Instagram showed it, I guess to me because it was [00:06:40] like I was actually looking for different programs.
[00:06:41] **Bryan:** 'cause we were kind of thinking going into QuickBooks. But when we saw this and it also had like scheduling and it also had the planner, we were like, no, let's just get this. [00:06:50] This seems like exactly what we need.
[00:06:51] **Danielle:** Yeah. And it looks nice. The invoices look nice. They're very clear. We've actually gotten paid, like our average age [00:07:00] of your invoices, the 27 days?
[00:07:02] **Danielle:** Like, we didn't have that at a large firm. We didn't have that kind of like payment speed by clients, [00:07:10] but the invoices are extremely clear. It has the right backup. Like I, like you can attach the consultant invoices, you can attach reimbursables, all of that. And the way that it's [00:07:20] organized is super clear and it's been very easy and streamlined.
[00:07:24] **Danielle:** Like we have an accountant that does. Our taxes are more detailed stuff, but we don't have an accountant that handles our [00:07:30] invoicing because it's been so simple to just handle it ourselves from monograph.
[00:07:35] **Chris:** So was that really the big thing you needed? Like I gotta invoice someone, I gotta figure out how I'm [00:07:40] gonna do it.
[00:07:40] **Danielle:** Yeah. That's what pushed it to like, make a decision and sign up. Yes. That was it. That was like the catalyst. But we knew with all the other [00:07:50] tools that it offered, it was also what we wanted to use to plan as we grow. And then I noticed that another collaborator that we were working with, a lighting designer that we have on that same project, [00:08:00] they used monograph because when I started to get their invoices, that was also monograph too.
[00:08:04] **Chris:** So it was a fast decision.
[00:08:05] **Chris:** Did you look any other, uh, softwares?
[00:08:08] **Bryan:** We
[00:08:08] **Bryan:** did, and I don't really [00:08:10] remember what they were,
[00:08:11] **Danielle:** I wanna say
[00:08:11] **Danielle:** like, uh, Asana Monday,
[00:08:14] **Bryan:** we looked at Monday
[00:08:15] **Danielle:** We had been given other recommendations from other folks, [00:08:20] but for us, the operations piece, the operations and invoicing piece was key. Like we understood the value of that.
[00:08:27] **Danielle:** and that drove our decision.
[00:08:29] **Michael:** Small [00:08:30] firms can punch way above their weight when they have the right tools from day one.
[00:08:33] **Michael:** The difference between struggling with spreadsheets and running professional operations isn't about firm size anymore, it's about [00:08:40] choosing systems that actually work for how architects and engineers do business.
[00:08:44] **Michael:** When your business operations run themselves, you can focus on design and client work instead of constantly managing [00:08:50] administrative tasks.
[00:08:51] **Michael:** If this conversation changed how you think about what's possible for small firms today, share it with a friend who is running a firm as an employee or as an owner.
[00:08:58] **Michael:** they'll want to hear this perspective. [00:09:00] Thanks for listening.
