Forum Advisory Board · Est. 2021
TheRoom
You'veBeen
Missing.
A peer advisory board where licensed architects sit across the table from other principals — not consultants, not coaches. Equals who've navigated the same battles.
You've outgrown mentorship.
You haven't found equals.
You eat lunch at your desk reviewing RFQs. The last honest strategic conversation you had was with yourself, at midnight, in a project file you'll never send to anyone.
You know what a good firm looks like. You've built one. But somewhere between the staffing crisis of 2019 and the public project that bled margin for eighteen months, you stopped asking the hard questions out loud — because there was no one in the room worth asking.
That's not a character flaw. It's an infrastructure problem.
“The loneliest seat in any firm is the one at the top of a table with no one across from it who understands the view.
73%
of principals report making major firm decisions without a trusted peer sounding board
18 mo
average time a strategic problem festers before it reaches a breaking point
1 in 9
founding partners have a peer they can call about a staffing crisis at 10pm
$2.4M
median value of decisions made in isolation per firm per year
A table with eight seats.
No room for spectators.
Forum boards are small by design. Eight principals. No observers, no advisory emeriti, no one in the room who hasn't navigated a staffing crisis or watched a public project erode their margins in real time.
The model is simple and uncompromising: once a quarter, one member brings a live problem to the table. The room asks questions. Not suggestions. Questions. The kind you only think to ask when you've been in the same seat.
Eight Members Per Board
Each Forum board seats exactly eight founding principals. No consultants. No coaches. Every seat is a licensed architect running a firm between eight and forty people.
Quarterly Full-Day Sessions
Four times a year, your board convenes for a full working day — a facilitated table where one member brings a live strategic challenge and seven equals interrogate it without agenda.
One Hot Seat Per Session
The presenting member doesn't get advice. They get questions — the kind that only someone who's reviewed the same RFQ at midnight knows to ask. The answer always arrives before the session ends.
Professional Facilitation
A Forum moderator holds the process. They don't contribute strategy — they protect the quality of the question and keep the room from drifting into sympathy.
Quarterly sessions, four per year. Every principal in the room has earned their seat.
Member Criteria
This room is for people who've already done the work.
- Licensed architect (AIA or equivalent)
- Founding or managing partner of an 8–40 person firm
- Minimum 10 years in practice
- No competing firms within the same board cohort
- Committed to four sessions per year
- Willing to be the person in the hot seat
IbroughtafeenegotiationproblemI'dbeensittingonforeightmonths.Fortyminutesintothesession,oneoftheotherprincipalsaskedmeasinglequestionI'dbeentooclosetosee.Wesettledthecontractthefollowingweek.
Rebecca Harmon, AIA
Harmon + Bauer Studio · Portland, OR
22 years in practice
“What I didn't expect was how much I'd learn from being the person asking the questions. Watching someone else in the hot seat taught me more about my own blind spots than any coaching engagement.”
Priya Nair, AIA
Nair + Okafor Design · Chicago, IL
“I was skeptical of anything that called itself 'peer advisory.' I'd tried peer groups before — they drift into commiseration. Forum doesn't allow that. The facilitation is strict. The questions are surgical.”
Thomas Brauer, AIA
Brauer Civic Works · Minneapolis, MN
A practice that runs
with clarity.
Not because you finally hired the right people, or landed the right project, or found the right consultant. Because someone finally asked you the hard question — and you were ready to answer it.
Strategic Clarity
Principals report making firm-level decisions with greater confidence within two sessions — not because they have more information, but because someone finally asked the right question.
Margin Recovery
Fee negotiations, scope creep conversations, staffing decisions — the problems that erode margin in silence get surfaced and solved in the room, not after they've already cost you.
Peer Infrastructure
For the first time in years, you have a number to call. Not a consultant. Not a coach. A principal who ran a twenty-person firm through a recession and came out knowing what mattered.
The Practice Runs
Members consistently describe the same transformation: the practice starts running with a clarity it hasn't had since the founding year — because someone finally asked the hard question out loud.
Forum Advisory · Applications Open
There may be
a seat for you.
Forum boards seat eight principals. Cohorts form twice a year. The application overview will tell you whether you qualify and what to expect from the process.
6
Active Boards
48
Principals in Practice
4×
Sessions Per Year
100%
Licensed Architects