Mark Wight of Wight & Company: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect

...The final key to success is to be impactful. The desire to be impactful is at the heart of why many of us are in this industry and what drives us when we come into work. It's not to push paper to get the job done, but it's about the impact of the work that we produce, specifically with our mission at Wight & Company.

As a part of my series about the ‘Five Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect’, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Wight, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Wight & Company, an award-winning architecture, engineering and construction firm that has been in business for more than 80 years.

Mark Wight earned his Bachelor of Arts from Reed College and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. While Mark was never formally trained in architecture, engineering, or construction, he has been a determined student of the industry for the past 36 years. Under Mark’s leadership, Wight & Company disrupted the industry more than two decades ago by pioneering Design Led-Design Build, an integrated model of project delivery that promises design and delivery excellence at unrivaled schedule and cost savings. This multidisciplinary approach connects architects to the cost implications of their design decisions and centers the collaborative process as the key to discovering the most creative and responsible solutions.

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Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this particular career path?

My grandfather, Raulin B. Wight founded Wight & Company in 1939 as a civil engineering and land surveying business. As the business started to grow, however, the world had other plans, and my grandfather left to serve his country as a Colonel in the Army Air Corps. When his tour was over, he brought his military engineering experience back home and reopened the doors of Wight & Company.

When my grandfather’s tenure came to an end, my father took over the business. He merged his architecture firm with my grandfather’s engineering firm, and a new iteration of Wight & Company was born.

I had no interest in leading the family business, but then my father got sick here in Chicago. He asked me to come back to help him organize the sale of his company to the people who worked there. However, when I came back and looked into the company, it had more debt than revenue. We needed a different solution since my entire family was wrapped up in it.

When I took over the company in 1987 it was very small and in trouble. It was through luck, good people, and a healthy dose of determination that we were able to win a couple of big jobs and here I am today.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or take away you took out of that story?

In the years between graduating from law school and hanging up a shingle at my law practice in Seattle, I took a rather unconventional turn and did something that dramatically changed my perspective and altered my career trajectory.

I accepted a job as in-house counsel at a company in Portland, Oregon, handling international trade. The pay was going to be great and the future was limitless. There was only one glitch: it was June and the company didn’t need me to start until January. Plus, I was penniless.

Looking for temporary work, my friend Steve and I drove to Idaho and applied to work on a firefighting crew, but they stopped taking “walk-ons.” So we headed back to Oregon, and at a local coffee shop along the way, I saw an ad for a job as a ranch hand and decided, on the spur of the moment, to apply. I interviewed, got the job, and bought gloves, boots, and a cowboy hat. The ranch was an old homesteader’s place with a house, a barn, and a workshop.

Just before Christmas I called the company and told them that I wouldn’t be joining their legal team. There’s a certain rhythm to life on a back country ranch, and it just wasn’t time for me to leave. The cows had started to give birth and I decided I was going to stick around to finish the job. I stayed on that ranch for almost two years.

It’s funny how moments in life come along and something as benign as reading an ad in a local paper can change your life in profound ways. My time on the ranch was priceless and there’s a whole book I could write on my two years there.

That moment between school and “real life” is one that never comes around again. I strongly encourage people to take some time off to travel, experience different cultures and places before clambering up the workplace ladder. Taking time won’t hurt your career; it will provide a context for what you want to do and add perspective to your life that you would not otherwise have. I would be a dramatically different person today if I had taken that job in Portland. Everything is better because I didn’t.

Do you have a favorite “life lesson quote”? Can you share a story or example of how that was relevant to you in your life?

Two of my favorite life lesson quotes are “culture trumps strategy” and equally as important, “character trumps talent.” I actually thought I made both of those quotes up. I use them so often, but I learned that Peter Drucker beat me to the line, “culture trumps strategy.”

It’s hard to build a functional team unless everyone shares the same values, and the functionality of the senior leadership team, in my opinion, is the single most important aspect for a team’s success.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’re working on an innovative new project in Doha, Qatar, called Renad Academy, that will provide education and specialized services to 476 autistic students between ages 3 and 21. Wight & Company was selected from an international competition to design this visionary and sustainable campus integrating innovative Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC) design concepts.

To do that, we’ve assembled an international team of experts that is forward-looking and visionary, to design a facility that responds to the unique sensory needs of the students and prepares them to learn as they move throughout the building. Wight & Company’s expertise is supported by autism design experts and educationalists in a collaboration to balance the specific environment needs, current and future educational methodology and world-class architecture in service to this specific population.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

One Friday afternoon I decided to take a drive to one of the projects I took on very early in my career. I didn’t announce I was coming and didn’t have Wight & Company on my hard hat or anything else to identify me. I’ll never forget walking into this one room and listening to the superintendent tell a pipe fitter, “don’t worry about it, we’ll pay you to put it in, we’ll pay you to take it out, and we’ll pay you to put it in again.”

That moment was the genesis of how Wight & Company disrupted the industry by pioneering a method of project delivery which we now call Design Led-Design Build. This method is a more integrated approach than traditional models and it more closely resembles the historic role of the architect as “master builder.”

The traditional method of project delivery is known as “Design-Bid-Build”, in which design and construction are contracted separately. In the model, the owner hires an architect to design a project, and only once the design is “finished” does the owner seek out the construction industry for bids on the drawings. In this model, the lowest bid wins and that company carries on to build the project.

This is where the problem comes into play. Many times, particularly on large projects, the price that a contractor submits is at or lower than their own opinion of the cost of the work. So the lowest-bid contractor is selected and then, by contract, paid to find problems with the drawings. The contractor is obviously highly motivated to find change orders because that is how they profit. However, this creates a very unhealthy tension between the owner, the architect and the builder and drives up the cost of a project significantly.

What’s driving that tension is the fact that the first order of business for each company that is participating in the design and construction of a building is to protect themselves. They’re not interested in what’s best for the client or what’s best for the project.

With Design Led-Design Build, you have one team working together from the same company to drive quality and value from the very beginning of the project until the very end. This multidisciplinary, integrated approach also connects architects to the cost implications of their design decisions and centers the collaborative process as the key to discovering the most creative and responsible solutions. Compared to the more traditional approach, clients can save about 20 percent in cost and even more in schedule..

Today, the construction value of Wight & Company’s work in progress is around $1 billion and it is continually ranked among the top firms in the country. We lead the industry with a visionary and vibrant culture that has attracted some of the best and brightest minds in the industry, who constantly work to enrich the human experience and elevate the spirit of community.

Our team includes about 200 design, engineering, and construction specialists, each dedicated to creating meaningful impact in the world today and in perpetuity. And it is the collaborative culture at Wight & Company that has positioned us as one of the only companies regularly using Design Led-Design Build to drive quality and to save our clients money and time.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

From someone on the outside looking in, one might say that I have no business in this business — I’m not an architect or engineer by training. But I believe that architects that want to work for themselves would be wise to find a partner that is not an architect.

My partner, Kevin Havens, and I went to the same high school, and he actually was an intern at Wight & Company when my father was there. When I came back to Chicago in 1987, he was working for Helmut Jahn. I tracked him down, took him out for drinks and asked him if he was ready to become a design director. He said yes and we’ve been at it ever since.

I would have had no chance in this business without people around me, and I have been blessed with the best partner on the planet who is a remarkably gifted designer, and who fortunately wanted to work with somebody with my kind of management and sales skills.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Soon after I took the helm at Wight & Company, I formed a small team and together we figured out a model that worked for our early years. As the firm grew, I needed to hire more people and I was only looking for the best and the brightest talent. I didn’t have room for anything else, or so I thought.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that there was a major issue brewing under the surface. In my quest to hire the best and brightest people, I discovered that I was neglecting to consider the importance of character and fit. I hired a bunch of Type-A personalities. They were smart people, but I quickly learned that a firm full of Type-A personalities doesn’t function.

I realized that I needed to take a step back from the hiring process. So I hired a professional with a method of interviewing for consistent character traits. Ever since then, nobody — and I mean nobody — gets hired that doesn’t talk to this hiring consultant. She interviews our job candidates for character to determine if they will make a good fit into our culture.

Through this one-of-a-kind character trait assessment, we started to build the blocks of what character meant to Wight & Company. I learned that the traits of honesty, transparency, and positivity are what lead to success.

Ok. Thank you for all that. Let’s now jump to the main core of our interview. Can you share 3 things that most excite you about architecture and the Real Estate industry in general? If you can please share a story or example.

I love that architecture is becoming progressively more sustainable. When we were hired by the Navy to do the Bachelor Enlisted Quarters at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, the Navy wanted this project to be sustainable and was interested in a President’s award for sustainability. The BEQ was a pilot project in the United States Green Building Council’s Sustainable Showcase — the first project in Illinois, and one of the first in the nation, to earn such a designation. During the same time, Wight & Company became founding members of the USGBC and then that project became the first LEED certified building in the country. That kicked off a real focus on sustainability at Wight & Company.

I also love the notion of new urbanism and contextualism that is happening in the industry in general. That is, the notion of community-based planning and design that is rooted in the environments in which structures are built. We need to move away from what I would call “arrogant modernism” and instead be more deliberate with the natural materials used in construction to be more sustainable.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest? Please share stories or examples if possible.

Not to sound dramatic, but architecture is under attack. Property management is an entire industry, and these companies are coming in and commoditizing architecture — for example, handing an architect a whole design brief. That takes all the knowledge, all the inspiration, all the expertise out of the equation and really dumbs down the project.

The solution is to emphasize the Design Led-Design Build approach. When architects are connected with the cost implications of their decisions, their product is simply better, and that better serves the owners, the tenants, and the patrons who utilize the space for decades to come.

Ok, here is the main question of our interview. Can you please share with our readers the “Five Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful Career As An Architect?” If you can, please give a story or an example for each?

I’ve found that the first key to running a successful business is… luck.

In the late 1980s. I was having lunch at a restaurant and someone sat down at the bar next to me and ordered his lunch. While we were waiting for our food, I struck up a conversation, and it turned out that this man was the president of a waste management company.

We hit it off, and over the next year or so I’d keep in touch, sending him newspaper articles I thought were interesting, looking for reasons to remind him of me. I put myself in situations where I might run into him again, giving me the opportunity to build that relationship further.

Several months later, this company wanted to expand its headquarters. The president and his team knew me, so they thought to interview Wight & Company for the job. Luck may have put this man and I at the restaurant bar years earlier, but I’d recognized it and done the work to create other situations where luck could strike, leading to this opportunity to pitch and win a big job.

The second key to running a successful business is the people. If you’re going to build a successful practice, you’ve got to be able to sell your vision to people who are smarter than you, more creative than you, and get them to invest their career in your leadership. As I like to say, “our assets walk out the door every day and it’s important that they come back in.”

Another key to success is trust. The importance of being able to put your trust in your team and know that they will deliver for the client, and therefore the company, cannot be overstated. A company is only successful if it’s invested in its people and culture, built relationships of trust between them, and a relationship of trust between them and the clients.

The fourth key to running a successful business is an obsession with detail and quality. Some have said that this might be best described as a touch of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and I’d have to say I agree, because when you’re building a firm of your own you cannot imagine how hard you have to work, and how many hours you’ll be putting in sweating the small stuff.

Before the waste management company’s team came to tour the office and meet with us, we restaged our own space. We put up sketches of the comps that inspired us in the potential client’s plans. We strategically placed photographs, sketches, and note pages at key places in the office, knowing that the company’s decision-makers would walk by and see them. This kind of obsessive attention to detail, while also maintaining the high-level vision to create and sell a concept, is work-intensive.

Our props left out around the office worked like a charm — the waste management people would see something and ask what it was, and we’d be able to use that as an opportunity to talk about how it fits into our vision for their project. The entire office was all about them, and practically nothing about us.

The final key to success is to be impactful. The desire to be impactful is at the heart of why many of us are in this industry and what drives us when we come into work. It’s not to push paper to get the job done, but it’s about the impact of the work that we produce, specifically with our mission at Wight & Company.

We have a robust sustainability group and it’s the focus of a lot of our projects. How we can sustain our environment and provide for the wellness of inhabitants is one of the main things we look to do when we’re designing a building.

We also strive to create inspiring spaces. This is interesting in a certain way because it’s difficult to point and say if something is inspiring or not — we, like our clients, know it when we see it. And that makes striving for it a uniquely creative and fun challenge.

To have spaces that inspire people is the great impact we can have on a community — it is legacy work. And our multidisciplinary team approach means that we are well positioned to achieve inspirational success.

Because of your position, you are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

In my time at Wight & Company, I’ve learned the importance of building an enterprise based on core values. We’ve talked about the values of honesty, transparency and positivity but equally important is the value of charity.

For almost 25 years, I have had the privilege of serving on the Board of Trustees for Glenwood Academy, a non-profit boarding school for at-risk children who are academically capable, but come from very challenging circumstances. One of the most remarkable things I’ve observed working with Glenwood Academy is how effective the organization is in giving students a sense of self-confidence and a can-do attitude.

I am passionate about improving the lives of children. My wife and I never had any children of our own, so for me, there is no greater reward than helping a child and Glenwood Academy is a beacon for the power of residential education to dramatically change the lives of at-risk children.

As the well known Biblical proverb states, “to whom much is given, much will be required,” which I take to mean that I must take responsibility for what I have been given and use that privilege to help others. In the midst of a global pandemic and rising economic insecurity, there is no better time than now to fully appreciate what we have and to lean on our values to help others.

If I could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, it would be one that encourages charity, especially when it comes to lifting up future generations.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Please go to?www.wightco.com?for more information about our award-winning architecture, engineering and construction portfolio, or follow me on?LinkedIn?for articles about Design Led-Design Build, our culture at Wight & Company, as well as some personal stories and anecdotes.

Thank you for your time, and your excellent insights! We wish you continued success.