Business of Architecture Podcast · Enoch Sears & Rion Willard

How to Track Time, Set Profitable Fees, and Grow with Confidence | EP647

August 11, 2025·58 min·5 clips

Mike Lin explains why architects' obsession with perfect books costs them more time than they realize.

Payroll is the squeeze. The cold open puts the episode in familiar small-practice territory: profit leaking while owners juggle clients, projects, people, and money. Mike Lin comes in as the numbers person, with a licensed CPA background, more than two decades in public accounting and bookkeeping, and work now focused on architecture firms. The useful bit is hiring. Instead of treating a new staff member like a leap of faith, he models the decision through direct costs and likely billable capacity. Payroll taxes count. So do technology fees, utilization assumptions, training time, and those uneven early months when someone is still getting up to speed. The calculator gives owners something calmer to look at: can this hire become profitable, and how soon? Mike looks backward at past utilization, then turns that pattern into a month-by-month model. That can change the feel of the whole decision. A hire who seems financially scary may look like a planned investment once the multiplier, billable potential, and early training costs sit on the same page. Ryan Willard keeps pulling the math back to the owner who is buried in details and should be out winning work. Time tracking is the quiet base layer here. Without cleaner hours, an owner has weaker evidence for staffing, capacity, and profitability. The episode does not pretend a spreadsheet removes risk. It makes the risk easier to see before payroll gets painful.

As heard by us

A practical look at payroll pressure, project-level thinking, and hiring with more confidence.

Payroll sits at the center of the pressure here, and the episode uses that pressure to ask whether a small architectural practice is running on instinct or on numbers.

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Why you'd press play

Turn payroll pressure into a clearer hire-or-wait call.

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