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Designing the Future of Operations: A Look Ahead with COO Ryan Salvas

How do you prepare a design practice for growth while respecting and preserving its internal culture?

In 2022 Sasaki affirmed its commitment to this balance by bringing on a Chief Operating Officer to head internal operations. We sat down for a conversation with Ryan Salvas, Sasaki’s COO, to learn about his vision for the company and the journey that led him here. Ryan’s background stretches from academia to real estate, architecture to technology, all linked by a focus on creating systems and teams that operate at scale. 

Now Ryan is applying that experience to Sasaki’s internal operations, pushing the culture of integrated design even further and setting the practice up for continued financial and creative success. He believes there are values and methodologies that a modern Operations team should borrow from other disciplines in order to more nimbly adapt to the practice’s changing needs.

 

Ryan, you’re Sasaki’s new Chief Operating Officer. What does that mean for a design firm like Sasaki? Why should we have a COO?

A COO signifies that a company is moving to that next phase in their growth and their trajectory. Sasaki has seen rapid growth and change during the past few years, including moving its headquarters to downtown Boston and opening three new offices. Now it’s time to leverage all the exposure the firm has received and build the business around new markets and project opportunities. 

The COO creates the capacity for continued growth so operations can run smoothly in the background. The COO puts a new kind of rigor and process in place so the company can focus on continuing to improve design quality and maintaining a strong culture as they grow.

The CEO is a kind of visionary. They’re the steward of the culture of the company. They set the tone of where we’re going, the future, what’s going to happen. And then the COO is the person behind the scenes who makes that vision a reality, making sure that the ducks are in a row and things are organized.

 

What goals are you and your team working toward?

We’re trying to externalize to the disciplines what operations can be. We’re asking how we can be more proactive. Can we be a bit more above the fray of design cycles and hiring, like when we need to hire 40 people because we’re really busy in the next three months? Can we grow operations to the point where we have enough of a holistic portfolio, then we can hire and grow more organically and less reactively? That’s how we can meet some of our board’s growth projections and come back to the idea of integrated design.

How do we get there?

One great place to start is building up communications between the different disciplines to reinforce our integrated design culture. Unfortunately, in our industry, the way RFPs and contracts are traditionally written, new projects are often channeled into individual disciplines. We want to change that. How do we rise above that? We want to take the burden off of an owner so that they don’t feel as open to risk if they hire us for both landscape and architecture. We want to make sure we can do that work right out of the gate and knock it out of the park.

For instance, how do we staff for projects that have one contract, with a little bit of scope in architecture or interiors and the majority of it in landscape architecture or civil engineering? It’s often one contract, so then we have to figure out how to spread around that work. 

One thing that’s unique to Sasaki is the visibility of individuals and our emphasis on team efforts. My mission is to continue showing that we’re all part of the same team. We’re all working toward the same goal. We all want to be inspired by our work and to live up to our values, and one of the ways we get there is by fostering a vibrant business. When we are profitable, we can do all the fun stuff that we hope to do. I’m inspired and excited by those opportunities. 

 

What led you to the COO role at Sasaki?

I started as an architect, and I got frustrated with how slow things go and constantly battling over fees, and I thought to myself that there must be a better way. There must be a different way of doing this. And so I moved over to the owner side, the real estate side and construction side. I started to see best practices from other industries that can really help our work. 

"To me, what’s interesting is how do you design the process, not design the building. And that's what I've tried to do in my career. I’ve asked, how do we treat other things as a design problem that aren't necessarily design problems."

As an architect in New York I worked at SHoP. Their mantra is: architects are continually under-leveraged. Their contracts get smaller and smaller and smaller every year. How do we use technology and our knowledge of finance and real estate to carve out more scope for architects? It came back to investing in our own projects. Let’s be part owners of a multifamily building that we’re designing. SHoP’s model creates a greater incentive to make exciting design work that people want to buy into. If we’re part owners, we’re even more invested in that outcome and incentivized to make the best designs work.

I also worked at Front, which is a facade consultant—it was very technology focused. How do you do a completely digital model and then send that model out for fabrication? The whole model goes out to China, everything gets built, shipped over, it’s all modular, that kind of stuff.

Two firms with really unusual business models for the design industry!

Yeah, I thought the SHoP model was interesting, like how do we develop a bigger scope through rethinking the mechanisms that traditionally hold designers back? I enjoyed thinking through design as not just a singular exercise. You’re not just looking at a novel form or how to increase the floor area ratio or what kind of window to use, but really carving out more scope so that we can do better designs.

To me, what’s interesting is how do you design the process, not design the building. And that’s what I’ve tried to do in my career. I’ve asked, how do we treat other things as a design problem that aren’t necessarily design problems.

 

I believe you were also involved in academia, is that right?

My wife and I had our first child and wanted to get out of New York, so we moved down to Alabama (the polar opposite) and that’s when I got involved in Auburn’s architecture and construction management program. I began teaching second year architecture studios and also re-developing the materials and methods curriculum for the program, which places a very high level of emphasis on architects knowing how to build, not just theorizing about design. Auburn has the Rural Studio which is a world-renowned program where students work with local communities in the design, construction, and operation of buildings and infrastructure. In that program, students design and construct very ambitious projects that people actually inhabit, so it’s critical that students have a solid background in building and material physics.

 Along with another professor, Robert Sproull, I reworked the curriculum to partner with actual construction manufacturers. At the same time students were learning about various building materials (i.e. how to build with masonry vs. timber), they were applying that knowledge to small scale studies in collaboration with manufacturers. 

I also worked with the school of Building Science to develop the first graduate degree in Integrated Design and Construction, which was focused on the challenges and opportunities of an integrated project delivery methodology and served a mixed cohort of Building Science and Architecture undergraduates. 

Like the Rural Studio, much of their curriculum centered around working on real projects with underserved communities with building needs or non-profits. Post-Katrina New Orleans was a popular venue for some of the built projects. I contributed much to the sustainability aspect of the curriculum and worked with the students, as they were in charge of engineering, designing, and coordinating the building systems in the designs they were bringing to life. 

I look back fondly on the work I did and the students I had. I love the academic environment, and after Auburn I continued teaching as an assistant professor at Northeastern University, which took us back to the Boston area. I especially loved it when the curriculum had an opportunity to engage with communities while also educating. It was a testament to the real power of architecture.

And then what did you bring from your work in real estate?

I worked at EQ Office, which is the commercial real estate arm of the private equity firm Blackstone. They would buy up distressed buildings and use Blackstone’s leverage to operationalize them and optimize their functionality and relevance in the market. We built a lot of data analysis tools that would look at leading indicator data that many thought were outside of the typical indicators for real estate (i.e. job posting data, home rental data, commute pattern data) but actually created a ton of value to understand what markets were on the verge of blowing up. 

As an example, this type of analysis led to investing in a number of distressed office parks in Oakland , the suburbs of Chicago, and in Orange County. We would renovate those assets, invest heavily in creating space and amenities that would drive leases and stickiness, and then once things were moving in the right direction, move to divest that money. Once they are really popular and people love their new spaces, we sell them to a buyer who values our work and the people in the building. It’s a buy, fix, flip formula.

But the challenge there is it’s heavily reliant on data. How do we get everything into one area and figure out what’s going to be the next big area to invest in? I was working on the data side and figuring out where we invest. My role was to keep the operational costs of hundreds of buildings across the country as low as we can so that we’re not investing money in a bespoke system every time. So we have one access control software that we use for every building in the country. It’s trying to figure out how we leverage all these simple systems, connect them all so that we don’t have to manage millions of different things across the portfolio, and then make it better for the people who are in the buildings. It’s lots of thinking about how we make this project or system work at a larger scale.

What do you want people to know about the direction we’re going in?

I think the biggest thing that Sasaki can achieve is living up to our value of integrated design. My vision is that all our projects should have some degree of interdisciplinarity, and teams are rewarded for expanding scope to be inclusive of our collective expertise. The biggest benefit is the in-between stuff—between the architecture and the landscape and the planning. The design challenge is getting a company to think holistically in that way and support everyone as they do that work. The industry has not historically thought in those terms before, especially in regards to contracts and risk management, so normalizing this on more projects is a big focus moving forward.

We have the opportunity to showcase and communicate the full breadth of what we can offer. We are moving toward a “one Sasaki” brand and have the ability to share what we are capable of in different markets. We have to be very strategic around where there is the most benefit. I’m excited by the work ahead as we kick off that integrated conversation. We have the potential to design, build, and plan across markets, and I want to leverage my role to help get us there.

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