Partnerships that Go the Distance

It’s risk-taking like this that has made it the multimillion-dollar business it is today, and caused business leaders in the community to take note. The Charlotte County Chamber of Commerce honored it as a Small Business of the Year in 2005.

"We started out as a two-person operation and now we’re at 20-plus," Aquila says.

Their secret? Selecting the right partner from the get-go, they say, and making sure that person is someone you know well—flaws and all.

"If you don’t know who you’re working with and you find out after you become partners, it’s too late," Aquila says. "It helps that we’ve known each other for …"

"Thirty-four years," Marx finishes.

Wiley Parker and Bill Mudgett, Parker/Mudgett/Smith Architects Inc.
To hear Wiley Parker and Bill Mudgett tell it, the worst thing they’ve had to deal with in their business is precisely what most businesses are aiming for: growing into a big company.

"You lose the contact with the clients," says Parker.

"You lose contact all around," adds Mudgett. "You wind up running a company rather than doing architecture."

In the early 1990s, Parker/Mudgett/Smith Architects Inc. landed contracts for three Collier County schools at once. Suddenly their firm was up to 30-plus people, and the partners found themselves dealing with administration as much as architecture.

"We want to build buildings and meet with clients and not get caught up in the business end of things, [like] meeting payrolls," says Parker. "And we worked real hard. We’d find ourselves coming down here on weekends or at night, getting things ready for the next day’s work, because you didn’t want five or six people hanging around doing nothing."

What’s more, adds Mudgett, "We had made absolutely no more profit with 30 people than we had with 10."

Parker and Mudgett, the senior partners at the Fort Myers firm—which now totals nine members, including the four partners—have been working together for 40 years, 35 as partners. It doesn’t take long to figure out how they’ve made it work for so long. They know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences. They laugh a lot. And they’re good friends. In fact, not only do they work in the same office, they socialize together, live within a half-block of each other, sang in the same choir for years, and they and their wives even vacation together.

Shared friendship, values and ambitions make their partnership work, but they know they’re different from a lot of business partners. People considering a business partnership must find a partner with the same goals, they say.

"If you’re after making money, you need to look for someone with complementary skills so you can cover everything," says Mudgett. "If you’re looking to enjoy yourself and be satisfied with your relationship with the person you’re going to spend all this time with, you need to have similar characteristics."

Their similarities surfaced as soon as they met. Parker moved to Fort Myers from Atlanta in 1962 to work on the nascent Edison Junior College (now Edison College). Six years later, Mudgett arrived in Florida from Illinois in search of a job. With long hair and other "hippie overtones," he got a progressively chillier reception the farther south he went. In Ocala, he had his head shaved, "and then I got hired by Wiley, who had longer hair than I did," he says, laughing.

"I almost didn’t hire him. He looked too straight," says Parker.

Bolton McBryde hired Parker, and made him partner after McBryde’s former partner left. Mudgett was hired in 1968, became a partner in 1973, and McBryde retired in 1979. Since then, two other partners have joined them—Roger Smith in 1987, and Mudgett’s son, Jeffrey, in 2000.
Smith, who had worked as a general contractor and draftsman for years, brought "a real construction savvy," says Mudgett.

"And he’s a friend," Parker adds, "so it’s worked well."

Their biggest challenge? Hiring and firing. "We’re both avoiders of confrontation, and we’re willing to take additional work onto ourselves to avoid conflict," says Mudgett.

For all their similarities, Mudgett and Parker do have different, complementary strengths. "Bill is a really good designer and I’m more administrative and hands-on in construction," says Parker.

"We have clearly understood realms," says Mudgett. "We’ve never written them down; we just know what they are."

They also share clearly understood values and commitment to their community, which is reflected in the projects they focus on: public and private commercial projects, including a lot of schools.

They have never had a business plan, in spite of recommendations.

"We do keep abreast of what’s happening in the profession and the economy, but we’re at the size that we can just kind of go our way," says Parker.

"Our way" means accepting projects they believe will help the community and their profession. "Our ultimate client is really the public," says Parker.

As in the economic downturn in the early 1990s, when they had three school contracts, their specialty buffers the firm from the impacts of the current housing slump. "Institutional and public [clients] have to have the money in the bank before they sign contracts, as opposed to [residential] developers. We’ve had our share of bad surprises from [those] clients," says Mudgett.

And residential development is "not very rewarding," says Parker. "It’s generally the accountant that makes most of the decisions when you do those kinds of projects.

"We don’t make a lot of money, like some of those people do, but we don’t have to go through these real downturns," he says. "Florida has a history of boom and bust."