Knowing when to walk away

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 came in about 1% off the number I gave them in the first meeting, 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. Losing the fee hurt. Chasing it would have hurt more because a fight like that follows you home and sits in the next client meeting, whether you invite it or not. The lesson about what happens when you stay in a room after your instincts tell you to leave was the most expensive 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. 

I am not talking about what anyone should charge. What I charge is my own business decision, made alone, and what you charge is yours. Nobody should want it any other way. I am talking about what happens in your head during the 10 seconds after a client tells you your number is wrong.

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 tell the difference between a client who is negotiating and a client who is telling you exactly who they are. 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 that you need a procedure does not revise the diagnosis because you did not like hearing it. The judgment is the judgment because the expertise behind it is not in question. 

Architects have the same level of expertise and almost none of the same confidence in our own judgment. That gap is not a personality trait. It is a product of how we were trained.

Self-awareness in architecture

Emotional intelligence is a concept that we in architecture rarely name. In Daniel Goleman’s original 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, or the ability to stand by your own judgment when a client calls you insane, rather than abandoning it to make the discomfort go away. 

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. 

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the position of AIA or the AIA Board of Directors. Nothing in this article is intended as guidance on fees or pricing. Those are independent business decisions for each firm to make.