Navigating Tenders and Fees Is Key for New Practices

By Ray Molony

Start-up practices are often very creative – but they can find the business side of lighting design more challenging. Here, veteran lighting designer Mark Sutton-Vane of Sutton Vane Associates advises on how to navigate fees, tenders and recruitment.

Designers with real world experience of design, the ability to communicate about lighting clearly, and an understanding of real ways that light works on site are invaluable, says Mark Sutton-Vane.

Lighting design is an exciting and creative industry – but the business of lighting design has to be navigated carefully.

Obviously, the first thing a start-up practice has to do is get commissions. Once the principal starts building a reputation for delivering good projects then, with luck, work will arrive. Nothing is more satisfying than a client coming back for another project.

Often the designer has to pitch against other more established practices to win a project. The client putting together the list of pitching practices may not have much knowledge of the reputations of the designers. And sometimes, the independent designers are pitching against companies who supply fittings. The latter is a valid way of working, but both approaches give the client different results.

The independent design practice has to be paid a fee, which should give a higher quality result as it can choose whatever equipment is best for the job. The company supplying fittings will have a tiny or zero fee but will only specify what they supply and will be tempted to specify as much as possible. This can end up costing the client more.

Some wise clients buy a small amount of a reputable lighting designer’s time to advise them on the process of hiring a designer. They sometimes keep this designer on board through the project to keep an eye on the lighting designer and make sure they are doing everything properly.

Some clients will choose a designer on aspects that are irrelevant to the quality of the final job, like the age of the designers, or ‘showing inspiration’ when the project needs solid lighting experience, not inspiration.

There is a truism in all kinds of business that there are three aspects to a project: quality, economy and speed, and the client can only have two of these at once.

So, for example, a project where quality is not needed can have economy and speed. In a tender process the pitching designers will usually be rated on quality and price. The higher the quality of the designer, the more likely they are to win.

And the lower the price, the more likely they are to win. Most projects have a fixed speed – it is known when the project will be completed. But high quality is unlikely to have a low price, which is why the tender process often does not always award a project to the best designer for the job.

Then there are projects where the design team has to re-tender half way through a project. It’s really frustrating – a lot of work. And pride in doing a good job can be destroyed. If the designer who started the project loses the project half way through, then who is responsible for the design? It’s hard to see the advantages of re-tendering half way through as a matter of course. Yes, if a designer has not performed, then take them off the project and re-tender. Clients seem to forget that the memories of all the details, and why decisions were made, are very important and much of that gets lost when a designer is changed.

Lighting design companies all suffer from designers moving from one practice to another too often. Young designers can get told at university that it is good to change jobs after a year. But, this isn’t what employers want and say it looks bad on a CV. Many projects last longer than a year, so the designer often doesn’t see their work finished. That’s a huge part of the learning process and it’s exciting to see your design built. In one year, a young designer has hardly settled in and become familiar with the details of projects.

It would be wonderful if the education establishments could teach designers what they need to know in the real world of design. That is clear communication of lighting written in an appropriate style, experience of the real world – not academic process. An understanding of real ways that light works on site. And knowledge of costs and manufacturing methods. What a positive effect that would have on the lighting design industry. ■

Sutton Vane Associates’ strategy for York Minster in the UK was named winner of the Heritage Project of the Year in the Lighting Design Awards. A major part of the lighting and servicing strategy was to conceal the luminaires, associated drivers, cabling and containment as much as possible to ensure that the visible services were kept to a minimum, whilst allowing the ‘lighting effect’ to take centre stage.

Photo Credit: James Newton

Mark Sutton-Vane is the founder of London-based practice Sutton Vane Associates Lighting Design, www.sva.co.uk.