There is a version of residential architecture firm growth that most small firm owners picture when they imagine success. More project types. More services. A broader reach. A bigger name. The logic feels sound: the more you offer, the more clients you can serve, and the more the firm grows.
I want to challenge that picture.
In my conversation with Lauren Thomsen, founder and principal of Lauren Thomsen Design in Philadelphia, I heard a different story. One about building a firm that goes deep instead of wide. One about choosing a clear lane, staying in it, and building enough expertise and trust within that lane that the work itself becomes the engine of growth. Ten years in, six people on staff, projects running from dense urban row houses to suburban custom homes, and a new interior design company folded into the client experience. Not because she chased every opportunity. Because she committed to one.
That distinction matters more than most firm owners realize.
The Trap of Doing Everything
Early in a practice, the instinct to take everything that comes through the door makes sense. You need the revenue. You need the experience. You say yes to the commercial tenant fit-out even though your heart is in residential. You take the institutional project because it pays. You tell yourself it is temporary, that you will narrow your focus once you get stable.
The problem is that stable never quite arrives. And in the meantime, you have built a firm with no center of gravity.
Lauren made a different choice when she came back to Philadelphia with two young kids, a husband who had taken a new job, and a decision to make. She could have gone to work for a large firm and kept her options open. Instead, she went out on her own and committed specifically to residential work, the project type she had always cared most about. She did not wait until she had a full book of business to declare what kind of firm she was building. She declared it first, then built toward it.
That sequencing is not incidental. It is the foundation.
What Deep Focus Actually Looks Like
Staying focused on residential did not mean Lauren stopped growing or stopped challenging herself. The depth of her focus is what created room for genuine complexity.
Working in Philadelphia, she built expertise in dense urban row houses, projects where every inch is spoken for, where the envelope is constrained on two sides, where you open walls and find 200 years of lives stacked inside them. That context demands a specific kind of technical fluency. You have to understand building assemblies in ways that a generalist never has to. You have to know how to work with constrained geometry, how to introduce high-performance strategies into a structure that was never designed for them, how to communicate clearly with clients and neighbors and contractors when the unknown unknowns surface mid-project.
That expertise compounds. Each project makes the next one better. The reputation you build in a specific context travels in ways that a scattered portfolio never does.
Lauren also diversified within her focus, not outside of it. Urban row houses and suburban custom homes are genuinely different design problems, and working across both keeps the firm’s creative capacity sharp. The two project types, as she put it, buoy each other. When city work is slow, suburban work carries the load. When suburban work slows, urban projects fill the gap. But the common thread is always residential. The expertise always stacks.
That is a very different diversification strategy than chasing commercial work or institutional projects to smooth out the revenue curve. It is diversification in service of depth, not in retreat from it.
High Performance as a Differentiator, Not a Specialty
One of the things I found most useful in Lauren’s approach is how she handles high-performance building in the context of residential renovation. She does not position it as a specialty offering that clients have to opt into. She introduces it as the baseline. She explains to clients that what is called high performance today will likely be code in ten or fifteen years, so the question is not whether to build to a higher standard. The question is whether to do it now, when the investment is already happening, or later, when it will cost more and disrupt more.
That framing is worth sitting with. It is not a sales pitch. It is education, offered with enough conviction that the client begins to see their investment differently. And when the client sees their investment differently, they trust the firm differently.
That trust is not a soft outcome. It is a business asset.
The Real Business Development Strategy
Lauren’s closing answer when I asked what one thing a small firm architect could do to build a better business was not about marketing or systems or technology. It was simpler and harder than any of that.
Do everything you can, the best you can.
She acknowledged it sounds like something you tell a four-year-old. But her point was that in the day-to-day pressure of running a small firm, with metrics and margins and project management pulling at your attention from every direction, it is easy to lose sight of the thing that actually builds a firm over time. Your reputation. The trust your clients carry out the door when the project is done. The referrals that come because someone who worked with you tells someone else that the experience was worth it.
That is not a romantic notion. It is a compounding mechanism. And it is one that a small firm can actually build, in a way that a large firm cannot replicate with marketing spend or brand recognition.
The practical implication is not to ignore the business side. Lauren has worked deliberately to build out the infrastructure of her firm, including bringing on someone specifically to support marketing and business development, launching an interior design company to deliver a more complete client experience, and thinking carefully about how to bring contractors in earlier to manage expectations and budget alignment across complex projects. She is not running the firm on good intentions alone.
But the infrastructure exists in service of the work, not the other way around. The systems are there so that the work can be as good as it can be. That priority is not accidental. It is the culture of the firm.
The Question Worth Asking Your Own Firm
Residential architecture firm growth does not have to mean expansion into new project types or new markets. It can mean going deeper into the work you already do best, building the kind of expertise that makes your firm the obvious choice for a specific client with a specific problem, and doing that work so well that the clients themselves become the marketing.
Lauren spent ten years building that kind of firm. It was scrappy at the start, working out of an apartment, teaching to stay connected and generate income, starting with an addition on her parents’ house because that is what was available. What carried her through was not a growth strategy in the conventional sense. It was clarity about what she was building and the commitment to do it well.
That clarity is available to every small firm architect. It does not require a large team or a large market. It requires the willingness to choose, and then to honor that choice in the work every day.
That is the kind of firm worth building. And you can start building it today.
Listen to my full conversation with Lauren at https://entrearchitect.com/661 and hear more about how she built her practice, how she approaches high-performance residential work in dense urban environments, and what she has learned after ten years of running a small firm she is genuinely proud of.
If you are ready to build a better firm alongside other small firm architect business owners who are doing the same work, join us at the EntreArchitect Network.
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