Whether you work with large, national brands or local retailers, remodels are par for the course in the A+E industry. Throughout our more than three decades of experience in the A+E industry as a firm, we’ve helped to cultivate, run, and update remodel programming for many of our clients. But what’s the key to a successful program? While many things factor into success in remodeling, we’ve pinpointed a few key areas that have proved essential and non-negotiable while staffing and supporting these clients and their remodel programs.
Customizing Your Remodel Strategy to Fit Your Needs
A truly customized remodel strategy relies on thorough and tailored planning. This planning often involves an in-depth analysis of a location’s existing conditions. While the brand may be the same, the site-specific conditions will vary. Scanning and scoping are obvious and often undervalued pieces of the remodeling puzzle, but they prove to be invaluable in the long run. By engaging your A+E firm early in the process, perhaps even before purchasing a site, they can conduct due diligence to save you a headache down the road.
Taking care to understand your building inside and out can have you reaping the rewards when the time comes for your project to get underway. This does not simply involve just looking at the state of the building but digging into its infrastructure, too—for instance, what engineering limitations exist and how can your team work to overcome such constraints and rework your preferred building to suit your needs?
Here are a few things (some more obvious than others!) to think about when scanning a proposed remodel site:
- Consult a skilled scanning team.
To get the right data, working with a scanning team with extensive skills and experience in remodeling and retrofit projects is critical. Not only should this team be well acquainted with the latest scanning technologies, but they should also be intimately familiar with the scope of the project at hand. Often, finding and partnering with an A+E firm with an in-house scanning team is the best way to ensure that this aspect of the project (which accounts for the bulk of the essential work on a remodel) is a success.
- Clearly define both your project’s purpose and scope.
Scanning is the most efficient and effective way to ensure that your A+E team can confirm existing conditions before beginning the remodel. Doing your due diligence at the front end allows you to avoid costly change orders, RFIs, or timeline disruptions. Keeping your firm and the scanning team (if they are a third party) up to date on the project’s scope and your desired project outcome helps them ensure that these scans don’t miss the mark.
- Get more information than you think you need.
With anything in life, and especially when it comes to the A+E industry, more is more. You’ll never regret having more captured information at your fingertips, but you will regret having to go back in and rescan because you didn’t get everything you needed the first time around.
The use and general accessibility of good technology can create a more robust and integrated remodel program. Consider things like 3D or laser scanning, point clouds, and interactive Revit models the entire team can access. Having this at your fingertips gives your A+E team a higher level of confidence in their plans and generally speeds up the process, which, in the end, means a lot fewer roadblocks, or as we lovingly refer to them, change orders or RFIs.
Understanding the engineering infrastructure and engaging your engineers early in the process will help better define and level set expectations from the beginning. Not only that, but it will also have a great impact on costs and how they trickle down to you. In many cases, alternative equipment recommendations can be made and used to achieve the same goal without the monetary impact on your bottom line.
“Something we've done with some clients in the past is partnering early, which was great. We'd gotten in front of the lease, and when those agreements were happening, we worked with our client to develop a lease checklist so they could see from the design perspective that this is the infrastructure we must have to operate at a bare minimum. So, then we were able to get in front of the lease before those agreements were signed, and if those sites didn't have the bare minimum infrastructure, then it wasn't the best deal for them. Even earlier in the process, with that checklist they could determine whether a space was worth looking at seriously or not,” said Kelly King, Team Lead / Designer at HFA.
By establishing your remodel program with the above best practices as your foundation, you and your A+E team can successfully partner together to scale for future growth, no matter how big or small your program is.
For more information about our experience with remodel programming, please reach out to Bo Ebbrecht, Vice President, at bo.ebbrecht@hfa-ae.com or visit our website.
Thank you to Bo Ebbrecht (AIA, NCARB, RIBA), Brent Tweedy, Steven Baker (AIA, NCARB), Courtney Ayres (NCIDQ, RID), Shaun Black, and Kelly King for their contributions to this article.
