So many times I read articles related to business management and feel that the author just doesn’t know how to relate to the small and mid-sized Architectural firm. There’s no denying that I have a particular passion for the small firm. It’s where I spent 14 years of my own career, but it’s also the group of practitioners that are most in need of appropriate business advice. Well, this morning I read an article by Jack Reigle  published in the AIA Practice Management Digest Fall 2008. It’s an extract from his new book Silver Bullets and discusses one of my favorite topics - business intelligence.

Jack’s company, SPARKS, The Center for Strategic Planning, provides design firms with valuable and comprensive strategies and services that strengthen them, help them work through business problems and grow. From a review of Jack’s client roster, I wouldn’t have expected to see such straight talk as is found in Silver Bullets. However, the voice I heard coming through in the article published in the AIA Practice Management Digest was so clear and on-point that I immediately purchased my own copy of Silver Bullets. It should arrive in a few days and aI can’t wait to dive in.

As I’m always looking for new and better ways to help the architecture community provide their services and manage their business, I believe I’ll be able to learn much from Jack’s book. As always, we’ll do our best to take great business management ideas an manifest them within our software so that all our users can benefit from best practices that we find. Sometimes, in some of the most unlikely places.