Reimagining the architecture industry
Over the past decade, Equip Studio has been designing more than the country’s most thoughtful places of worship — they’ve also been redesigning what’s possible in the architecture industry.
The company has been named one of the country’s best small workplaces, they’re a destination employer for young architects, and they’ve already grown out of multiple office spaces for their team. None of this is by accident.
From year one (2014), Equip’s four founding partners decided to reject the “pay your dues” burnout culture that the architecture industry is famous for. Instead, they reimagined what was possible in the architecture industry, naming its brokennesses and designing their business in the direction of human flourishing.
They asked questions like:
What if young architects felt honored and mentored, instead of minimized and over-worked?
What if life outside work was just as important as what happens at the office?
What if everyone — not just partners — enjoyed access to career paths and clear ways of improving their value?
It’s been our privilege to support and guide Equip from their first year on. Since 2014, we’ve worked together to:
Discover, document, and share the Equip Identity
Define an aspirational culture and design it into the company
Navigate the tough new decisions that arose along the way
Train groups of future leaders to become “Rehumanizing Leaders”
“From the onset of our company, Align has helped consolidate our hundreds of ideas into a single vision that unified our leadership.
Without Align, we could have easily had our multiple owners chasing multiple goals in different directions. But through focused direction and experienced guidance, Align was able to help us funnel our vision and core values into an Equip brand and voice that provided clear direction.
I would recommend Align
• to any company that doesn’t have a clear vision and direction
• to any company that wants a foundation and structure for guiding long term thinking
• to any company that feels pulled in dozens of directions and doesn’t know which way to point their time and energy.
Because of Align, we have a vocabulary of leadership that everyone speaks and aims towards. The training our leaders have gotten through Align have paved the way for our next generation of leadership to navigate the difficulties of business at a very young age.
We have matured much quicker as a company and as leaders because of the “parenting” and coaching we have received from Align.”