Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 14 /Nov 7, 2025
Why subscale can quietly kill an architectural practice's growth
Matt Cooper, BQE Software
Nov 7, 2025 /The Business of AEC
Why subscale can quietly kill an architectural practice's growth
Matt Cooper is the CEO of BQE Software, which makes firm-management software for architecture and engineering practices: time, billing, projects and clients. He came to the job with a view most software executives lack, that the firms buying his product have every reason to distrust him. This conversation is about why small firms lose on data, and what a vendor owes them.
Matt Cooper, CEO at BQE Software, BQE Software
In this conversation
Matt's account of what firms actually use today, from QuickBooks to spreadsheets to legacy systems with roots in the 1980s.
Why the barriers to switching are as much about trust as about money.
How BQE stays close to customers as it grows, and what practical uses of AI its team has found.
The subscale problem in his own words: data and efficiency matter most when you cannot hire your way out.
If firms end up being subscale, data and efficiency are the things that often matter most.
Matt Cooper
Chapters
Running BQE
What it is like to run a software company that serves architects and engineers.
By the numbers
Average net billings per employee at U.S. architecture firms in 2023
Matt's subscale argument is that small firms live or die on efficiency per person. This is the benchmark.
Source: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 ↗The firm's best alternative
The tools firms use when they are not using a purpose-built system.
Barriers to switching
Why firms hold on to old software, and what it takes to move them.
Staying close to the customer
How a growing vendor keeps its ear to the ground.
The subscale problem
The specific risks of being a small firm, and how to think about them.
Legacy solutions, frankly, have their roots in the 80s at a time where most households didn't even have personal computers.
Matt Cooper
Takeaways
Around 75 percent of a firm's business comes from existing clients, and a single client can be 20 to 30 percent of billings. Managing clients well is the core of firm management, not an add-on.
Subscale firms feel the data problem most: without a specialist for every function, efficiency and insight into what is happening in the business are what keep them alive.
Firms have been burned by painful implementations and nickel-and-dime pricing. A vendor earns trust over a decade, shipping improvements every few weeks.
It doesn't mean the customer is always right, but it does mean everything we do is in the service of building better product.
Matt Cooper