Magnus is heading to ArchiCon

Magnus is speaking at ArchiCon in Melbourne on 8–9 October. The organisers call it “the only unboring business conference for architecture firms”, and that’s roughly the pitch. It’s about business. How an architecture practice actually runs, what works and what doesn’t. It’s about systems, about branding, and about AI and how we adapt to the new world it’s created. Not the finished buildings. The messy stuff behind them.

His talk pulls from sixteen years of running Ström Architects: what he’s learned, what’s gone wrong, and how to keep the thing going. There are the wins, but also the harder calls, like redundancies made too late and projects that collapsed in the Middle East. A lot of it is about the structure and systems that took years to get right, and how tracking real timesheet data changed the way the practice charges for its work and runs day to day, rather than guessing at it.

He’ll also get into the personal side. Why he’s building his own brand separately from the firm’s, what “brand” even means for a small practice, and why he stopped trying to do everything himself. At some point he stepped back from running the business, narrowed his focus to design, and handed the parts he’s less suited to over to people who do them better than he does.

ArchiCon runs 8–9 October in Melbourne. Worth a look if you’re anywhere near it.