I AM [actually] AN ARCHITECT

The good news about founding a professional services firm is that you don’t need a lot of equipment.  If you were founding a manufacturing company, you’d need a building with a bunch of expensive machines.  If you were founding a shiny bauble shop, you’d need a storefront and storage space.  But architects need little more than a good computer, some software, and a reliable print shop —especially since “the cloud” has emerged.

Here are the resources I used to hang our electronic shingle:

Website - I bought the domain name www.BoiledArchitecture.com as well as www.BoiledArchitecture.net and www.BoiledArchitecture.org (to make sure no one would set up a website with a similar name that would confuse my customers) from GoDaddy.  I only did that because I didn’t know any other services to go to.  Advertising works!  After that, a more informed friend told me I shouldn’t go through them for hosting.

For hosting, I’m using 1&1.com.  I could have bought the domain names from them if I had known, which would have saved me some time.  Because I bought the domain names from a different company than hosting, I had to change the DNS settings.  Luckily, I have some friends with more knowledge about these mysterious things than I have, because it was beyond my skills.

But now that I have the hosting set up through 1&1.com, I would recommend them.  They have a lot of good features, like the ability to embed slideshows, charts, analytics, polls, etc.  The interface to edit their website templates is very easy to use, even for me.  Also, once I had to call support to help me figure something out and they answered right away (no lengthy navigation through tons of electronic menus), were very friendly, and solved my issue in a second. 

The template website from 1&1 had pretty good stock images for architecture, but I wanted to use an image of leather on my website’s header.  I purchased a stock image from Shutterstock.com for this purpose.  

Cost for stock image: (I bought a package allowing me to use up to 5 of their stock photos at high resolution) $49

Cost for 3 domains for 5 years from GoDaddy: $230

Cost for hosting through 1&1.com: $9.99/month

Logo - Many architects would/should be able to do their own graphic design, but it’s not my strong spot.  I placed a contest on 99designs.com for the design of my architectural stamp.  I received 46 entries for that contest, and some of them were actually good.  The design that I chose became not only my stamp, but the basis for the company logo.

Cost for stamp and logo design: $195

Business cards - Using the image I bought from Shutterstock and the logo, I ordered premium-grade business cards from Vistaprint.com.  The premium grade has full color printing on both sides, with heavy paper.

Cost for 250 business cards: about $50 (I paid about $10 because I got a LivingSocial coupon for Vistaprint)

Email addresses & Other Cloud Computing - Even though both GoDaddy and 1&1 offer email services, I wanted to use Google Apps.  With Google Apps, they’ll make you an email address that ends in your domain name, and you can access it through the Gmail interface.  I like the interface, so I wanted to stick with it.  Also, Google Apps has a bunch of 3rd party services that run on the cloud, which I’m still picking my way through and discovering. 

Cost for Google Apps: $5/user/month

One of these services that I’m using so far is Zoho.  It has just about everything you need to run a small business: bookkeeping, wikis, conference chatting, invoicing, CRM (customer relations management).  Their billing is a little annoying because they nickel and dime you.  In other words, you pay for each of these services, and they each cost about $5/user/month.  So far, I’m trying out the free versions to see how I like them.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Phone number - We don’t have a dedicated administrative assistant yet, so we don’t have anyone to answer the phone.  I suppose that person could be me, but the idea of the CEO answering every phone call just seems wrong.  I wanted something more professional than that.

After putting out a call on both Twitter and a LinkedIn forum, as well as reading a couple of articles reviewing the options, I decided to go with Grasshopper.  I also chose the professionally recorded voice greeting, instead of recording the greeting myself.  You get to listen to several voice artists and choose your favorite.

After the automated answering service, the caller chooses which of us they want to talk to, and the connection rings through to our cell phones.  When the company grows, we can add departments, in addition to employee extensions.

I like how you can choose whether to have your messages sent via phone, text, email with writing, or email with recorded mp3.  Each of your employees can choose his or her preference for how to receive voice messages.

You can choose whether you want a toll-free number or a local number.

One-time cost for professional recording: $75

One-time setup fee: $25

Monthly cost for the answering/routing service with 500 minutes: $24/month

We haven’t purchased any computers or software yet, as we haven’t pulled in our first project.  We’ll let you know how that goes.