Managing a building or renovation project is actually managing a number of different, interrelated tasks. Something as small as a kitchen remodel can involve half a dozen contractors, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and painters. The complexity often leads to cost and time overruns.
On the other hand, “Architecture is a passionate business,” says Moe Amaya MA ’14. “Most people don’t get into it because they want to run a company’s operations. They just want to design buildings – that’s the real value you want to bring to the world.”
Now, start-up Monograph, co-founded by Amaya and two others, helps architects execute projects with a suite of business tools that make it easy to understand if a project is on track. Architects use Monograph to create budgets, assign tasks to different team members, send out invoices, and create timesheets. On the go, they can view real-time reports on any project to fix issues before they become revenue-sapping delays.
The idea is to remove uncertainty from the construction process while giving architects the tools they need to run a successful business.
“A good 50 percent of architects are self-employed, but there is a gap in education around architecture and business,” says Alex Dixon, co-founder of Monograph, MA ’14. “When architects explain their business processes to us, they often ask, ‘Is there a better way?’ They kind of make it up as they go because they don’t have much business training. We help them run and grow a profitable business.”
Since its inception in 2019, Monograph has attracted more than 800 clients, the vast majority of which are architectural firms with fewer than 50 employees. Co-founders Dixon, Amaya and Robert Yuen believe their success is due in part to Monograph’s ability to help architects focus on what brought them to the profession in the first place: designing better buildings.
“I look at Monograph as the level that helps architects understand finance — not through the lens of spreadsheets and graphs and accounting metrics — but through design,” says Amaya. “We’re giving them what they need to know as designers to get these projects across the finish line.”
Building design solutions
Dixon and Amaya met in 2010 during their freshman year of the MIT Masters of Architecture program. They quickly became friends and would live together by the second year. In the summer before his third year at MIT, Dixon worked at MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy’s company to help with the design of his website and to teach himself to code on the side.
The experience prompted Dixon and Amaya, who had no formal programming experience, to enter a software competition at MIT. They didn’t have the most polished code in the competition, but they ended up winning an award for their design skills.
The recognition further inspired them to try their hand at software design and over the next two years they explored different website ideas and in 2014 they participated in the Martin Trust Center’s Delta v Summer Startup Accelerator to build a business that helps architecture firms design theirs sites supported.
“We just started hacking together, ventured into writing code, and that’s where the entrepreneurial journey began,” says Amaya.
The founders also took a course at MIT, 4.222 (Professional Practice) taught by the late MIT professor Philip Freelon, which taught them a great deal about how to run a good architecture firm.
“We loved Philip because he put everything into how he structured his entire business,” says Dixon. “He was a big inspiration for us. We were captivated by his lectures. He has run an incredible business and we see his spirit in a lot of the things we do at Monograph.”
After graduation, the two moved to San Francisco and joined many of their classmates from the architecture program who later went into architecture firms. They kept in touch with the new architects, and during the MIT alumni happy hour, they asked their former classmates about their projects.
“We heard a constant refrain: You have no idea,” recalls Dixon. “They said, ‘I think we’re going to be on time and on budget.’ But it was obvious that things were based on anecdotes and hopes. It was a confirmation to see this trend among everyone involved in architecture. That fueled the idea of creating more of a business dashboard for architects to help them manage the performance of their projects so they can improve their forecasting and better understand the business as a whole.”
It was around this time that Dixon and Amaya partnered with Yuen, and the founders began creating tools to help companies manage the business side of an architecture firm, using their design skills to create tools that could handle multiple processes streamline and give architects real-time snapshots into projects.
Today, when an architect creates a new project in Monograph, they enter the phases of the project, the timeline for each task, assign roles to each team member, and create a detailed budget.
Once the project is underway, Monograph visualizes cost and time data so architects can easily see if a project is on track. Team members enter timesheets and add expenses directly in Monograph, making it easy to create invoices for clients. Monograph can also create project reports and forecast income and expenses.
“What’s unique about the service industry is that your time is money — it’s all billable hours,” says Amaya. “Many of the typical task management tools don’t involve money. Alex developed this [bar chart] this shows you how far you are in the budget based on the timesheet entries. For architects, these are two very important data points that other professions might not care about: the joint visualization of money and time. That is still one of our strongest differentiators.”
Better business architecture
The founders say that one of the main reasons clients use Monograph is that they are interested in growing their architectural practices – and many of Monograph’s clients have done just that. Their customers’ desire for growth guides the founders in deciding which features to develop next.
“Today, Monograph is primarily focused on being business performance software that allows architects to review the day-to-day performance of their projects,” says Dixon. “But the ultimate vision of business is forecasting, so you can look ahead and ask tough questions like, ‘Do I have enough work?’ can answer. and ‘Do I need to hire more people?’”
Also this year, Monograph will begin developing tools for contractors and consultants who work with architects and face similar challenges.
Ultimately, Monograph aims to expand the type of data collected on projects to give everyone a clearer picture of progress.
“We want to be the complete end-to-end record-keeping system for the construction industry,” says Dixon. “Architecture is part of it, but architects work with many consultants who support the project, from bidding to construction and management of the building. There are hundreds of people working on the same core project, the building, but each uses a different system. There is an opportunity to bring all this information together so there is a lot less double entry and a lot more collaboration.”
