Ask Rob Glisson how he came to be running his own fast-growing architecture firm, and he’ll tell a tale that starts with following footsteps — and ends with blazing his own trail. “My dad was a CPA with his own business, so I grew up with that model in mind. I went to college to get an accounting degree, but after a year or so I realized I wasn’t enjoying accounting. Because,” he chuckles, “there’s not a whole lot there to enjoy.”
Glisson’s mom — who’d been watching him draw precociously accurate floor plans from memory since he was a kid — urged him to try architecture. “Ultimately, I kept my dad’s entrepreneurial desire, and took my mom’s suggestion to follow my instincts. And certainly, a lifetime using Apple computers and software has helped me do both.”
Building The Buzz, By Hand
Glisson is one of three principals in Rojo Architecture, a firm he cofounded in Tampa, Florida in 1998. With a diverse clientele including commercial projects, schools, churches, and private homes, Rojo’s business has doubled nearly every year. Today, Glisson oversees 27 employees and nearly $3 million in billings. And runs his business on a network of more than 30 Mac computers — often creating his own websites, presentations, and portfolios with a range of Apple software. Perhaps the most empowering of those tools is the iWork software suite — Pages for creating documents and publications, and Keynote for creating cinema-quality presentations — which helps him lure a steady stream of new clients with customized, targeted communications.
“Moving to Pages and Keynote was an instant success for us,” says Glisson. “The growth of our business depends on the principals’ ability to persuade. We’re creating the proposals. We’re delivering the presentations. We don’t have a dedicated marketing staff. In fact, it’s crucial that we maintain control of this personally. So the ability to just turn on these intuitive tools, and get compelling results out the door very quickly, is a huge factor for us.”
The Unexpected Power of Templates
To streamline that process, Glisson and partners make abundant use of the Apple-designed templates in both Pages and Keynote. “Which is,” he admits, “something I never thought I’d do.
“As an architect, there’s a part of me that says: I want to do my own layout. because I can do better. I can make it look my way. But the templates in both Pages and Keynote are so good-looking and flexible that we thought, ‘why create something from scratch?’ Having that headstart turns out to be a tremendous benefit, because it’s easy to mold those templated layouts for different audiences very quickly.”
Intuition Rules
For Glisson, working with Pages and Keynote is “fluid, flexible, and intuitive” in all the ways he’s grown to expect from Apple software: “There are a lot of little things that make a world of difference. If I drag a picture off my desktop into a document, Pages immediately starts wrapping the text around it. If I drag a contact from my Address Book into a letter, Pages automatically brings it in and places it correctly.”
Glisson is equally impressed with Keynote’s ability to integrate graphics, photos, and videos with drag-and-drop ease: “You just drag any file, from anywhere, and Keynote makes the smart assumption about what you want to do with it. Creating beautiful, cinematic transitions is a breeze, too.”
Bottom-Line Benefits
For Rojo, that high level of productivity, completed personally by the firm’s guiding hands, translates to all sorts of competitive advantages. “Because iWork lets us be so hands-on with our sales tools, we reduce costs for marketing and administrative help,” says Glisson. “And we save vast amounts of time by eliminating the usual back-and-forth process of working with a design vendor.
Photo Gallery
Rojo’s iWork Tip
Template Themes and Masters
“As you build a presentation,” says Glisson, “inevitably you’re going to want a variety of layouts for your individual slides: One that features more pictures and fewer words, or simply a different arrangement of these elements. These options are already made for you and viewable as thumbnails from the Masters pull-down menu. You just select the one that suits your content, and keep working. So your thoughts just keep on flowing into the presentation — without pausing to worry about layout, and knowing that formatting tweaks can always be easily made at any point thereafter.”
