The fee is not just the fee

This is the second installment of The Other Drawing Set, a series on self-advocacy and leadership in the architecture profession. Read the first installment here.

Over the years, I have developed an instinct with new clients. When working with couples, I watch how they treat each other in our first meeting. If there is strife in the room, if there is a sharpness in how one speaks to the other, or if the respect is thin, I find myself suddenly too busy for the project. 

I do not always follow that instinct. When the pipeline is slow and the pressure is on, the instinct gets quieter. I have regretted every single time I did not listen to it.

“Insane”

At the start of a project some time ago, I sat on an initial Zoom call with a potential client and clearly explained what their concept would cost per square foot. The number was specific, and it was based on experience and current construction data, not optimism. The client told me I was “insane.” The word “insane” is not a paraphrase.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up—the architect version of what Spider-Man has. Every professional instinct I had told me to thank them for their time and end the meeting. Instead, I said something I have thought about many times since. I told them we could use their number, but I was confident it was wrong. I said we would address it at the end of the project. 

My firm designed the house and got through almost the entire project. The final estimate was within $3 per square foot of the number I gave them in the first meeting. That was about 1% off, and I was proud of the work we did! 

They refused to pay me. They said I never told them how expensive the house would be, so I sent them the Zoom recording with the minute mark where I did. They still refused to pay. 

Getting what we were owed was going to cost more in time and legal fees than the money itself was worth, so I held the drawings, filed the copyright, and walked away. The fee I did not collect was nice-car expensive. The time spent fighting for it would have been even more expensive. The lesson about what happens when you stay in a room after your instincts tell you to leave was a costly one.

The language of fee problems

Architects talk about fee problems as though they are math word problems from sixth grade. The solution is always framed as a better contract, a cleaner scope, a more detailed proposal. Those things matter. They don’t address the core problem.

To be specific: The core problem is that most architects have been trained, from their first day in the studio, to subordinate their judgment to the project. The work comes first. The client comes second. The architect comes last. That hierarchy produces beautiful buildings and terrible negotiations. 

When a client pushes back on a number in that first meeting, the architect who has spent five years in a studio absorbing critique without resistance does not suddenly know how to hold a position. The reflex is not there. It was never built.

Lawyers do not have this problem. Physicians do not have this problem. A surgeon who tells you a procedure will cost a certain amount will not renegotiate that number because you found it surprising. The fee is the fee because the expertise behind it is not in question. 

Architects have the same level of expertise and almost none of the same professional authority when it comes to pricing it. That gap is not accidental. It is trained.

Self-awareness in architecture

Emotional intelligence is a concept that we in architecture rarely name. In Daniel Goleman’s Harvard Business Review framework on emotional intelligence, the first of the five domains he identifies is self-awareness, or the ability to read a room and recognize what you are walking into. The second domain is self-regulation, which translates to the ability to hold your position rather than immediately succumbing to discomfort when a client calls you insane. 

These are learnable skills. They are not taught in architecture school, and they are not covered in most professional practice courses. They get built the hard way—that is, through experience—or they do not get built at all.

The instinct I described at the start of this article is a form of self-awareness accumulated over a career. It is the pattern recognition that comes from having been in enough rooms to know which ones to leave. The profession needs to start building that instinct earlier and deliberately, so that when a client calls you insane in the first meeting, you already know whether to pick up the pencil or click “end meeting for all.”

The remaining articles in this series will cover how architects can get a seat at the table during local planning, how to have tough conversations about regenerative design, and how to reclaim our own authority in the rooms where the decisions get made. 

Jeff Seabold, FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP, is the founder of Seabold Architectural Studio and S5 Construction in Jackson, Mississippi, and serves as an AIA at-large director for 2026–2028.