As an architect, Marc Teer has found success, having won awards while practicing at Gensler and ascending to the rank of Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. As an entrepreneur, he has also found equal success. He founded Black Spectacles, a Chicago-based e-learning platform for architects, which he also runs as CEO.
At Black Spectacles, Marc Teer has guided a team of 15 people to operate one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States, as judged by Inc. From 2015 to 2018, the company has seen its revenue growth jump by 739%. Marc’s background as a practicing architect gave him a special look at how many professional architects and students weren’t being guided or served. New software learning tools may come out, but students don’t exactly get to learn how to use them. In terms of the Architecture Registration Exam (ARE), many test prep companies “had not updated their materials or approach, which were all old-fashioned print materials like books and flashcards.” To fill the gaps, Black Spectacles developed a “fully-online test prep approach,” which is the first of its kind in the field.
With Black Spectacles, Marc Teer has created a space for architects and designers to “develop and expand their careers.” If you are an architect or a student, you can access the company’s content on demand on any device. All you need is an internet connection. The company offers courses which are taught by “licensed and practicing architects from some of the most renowned firms in the world,” including SOM, Gensler, and Krueck + Sexton.
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Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Marc Teer: First of all, Black Spectacles was the first to develop a fully-online test prep approach and that was the primary key to our explosive growth. Our test prep materials are created by architects, for architects so students are gaining access to real-time practitioners in the field. Early on when you start any sort of business, you ask yourself, ‘what is our key differentiator?’. We got our start as a software learning platform, and at the beginning, we had to decide who would be teaching the programs. I had a lot of really great relationships with architects and firms, and we thought it was really important and different to have architects being the ones teaching architects.
Our competitors often used teachers who don’t practice day-to-day, but we think that’s a really important piece to learning architecture and design. We’ve pulled in architects from some of the best firms around the world to teach our customers and that makes a difference. When we started our business, that was our early judgment, and our instincts proved right. People want to hear and learn from others who are actually working in the field. Today, 50% of candidates who take the ARE use Black Spectacles, and 75% of the top 50 architecture firms subscribe to Black Spectacles. Even more revealing is the fact that the pass rate for those who used our company’s prep services is 75% in 2019 while the national average of the 2019 pass rate is 54%.
We also stand out due to our subscription services, which are available in several tiers, including individual, firm, school, and AIA chapters.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Marc Teer: I think one of the most important elements to preventing burn out, especially in the tech industry, is communicating with your superiors, whether you’re feeling stressed, overloaded or just frustrated in general. We’ve established a healthy company culture by scheduling one-on-one, bi-weekly meetings between staff and their manager to talk about any issues that arise. These meetings, which have become virtual since the start of the pandemic, have been excellent for discovering problems and working through them so they’re nipped in the bud. Building trust stems from frequent communication.
Jerome Knyszewski: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Marc Teer: I joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) — a support network of thousands of entrepreneurs — in 2016. Many people talk about how it was a life-changing organization and based on my personal experience, I can confirm that it is! They provide a variety of multi-dimensional learning opportunities that changed the trajectory of my business. Through EO, I was put into a forum with several other CEOs, who had a significant impact on both my personal and professional life.
As part of EO’s mentoring program, I was specifically partnered up with Bud Arquilla and he helped mentor and teach me a variety of things. The most powerful lesson he taught me was how to have my team develop our company’s core values, which we did over the course of six weeks in 2018. That has since been the most impactful thing we’ve done as a company, as we use those core values to guide us in everything we do.
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?
Marc Teer: What separates a good company from a great company begins with its people. Bringing together a group of intelligent, hardworking, dedicated, and respectful individuals is key to company growth. In the technology industry, the greatest hurdle is finding the right leaders to scale the growth of the company. We’ve been fortunate enough to gradually build our team with successful leaders over the years, resulting in a 739 percent revenue growth from 2015 to 2018. Despite hurdles presented by the pandemic, we doubled our number of employees in the past year. And our pipeline for finding new candidates has exploded once we made the recent decision to become a fully-remote company permanently. We’ve founded highly skilled candidates to fill some of our recent positions, including Director of Marketing, who are based throughout the country. We are no longer restricted to geographic locations during the job search process as we grow our business.
Jerome Knyszewski: What would you advise to a business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?
Marc Teer: In my opinion, being a purpose-driven company is the starting point for boosting growth. I look for folks who align with our company values and who believe in starting with the purpose first. Secondly, I surround myself with people who can be a good coach and manager and help people achieve their goals. I think one of the main reasons employees either lose motivation or quit their jobs is because they don’t like their manager. Our goal is to have world-class managers with excellent soft skills. In addition to industry knowledge and domain expertise, that will help us boost growth and be successful.
Jerome Knyszewski: Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
Marc Teer: I always think of the analogy of starting and growing a business to climbing a mountain. You’re so focused on getting to the first base camp, and once you do, you’re excited, but then you keep looking at the mountain, and there’s still so much more ground to cover. It’s a process that has to be repeated over and over, slowly climbing the mountain and getting to the various base camps. Black Spectacles started with nothing and we’ve built something valuable over the past 10 years on our way up the mountain. We’re still climbing and we view turbulent times or obstacles on our path as an opportunity to really assess what we’re offering. Like many other companies, we saw a slow-down in business due to the COVID-19 pandemic but it also made us really aware of the impact on jobs in architecture. We began asking ourselves as a company, ‘Is there a way we can help architects connect with work and continue to put their best professional foot forward by expanding our offerings?’ That mentality and thought process has helped us identify new areas of growth for the company and certainly accelerated a new offering that we may not have otherwise offered for years to come.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Marc Teer: Structuring and building a team! I had never built a marketing department or a sales department or an engineering team before, so when figuring out how to do that, I relied on my network of mentors and peers to help me. That’s been the hardest challenge: figuring out what the organization is supposed to look like at each stage and figuring out the right way to build a team without having done it before.
Jerome Knyszewski: Great customer service and great customer experience are essential to build a beloved brand and essential to be successful in general. In your experience what are a few of the most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience?
Marc Teer: Make sure your approach to customer experience is something to be designed and iterated upon. Each quarter, we have what we call a “process day” where we ask our employees to spend some time documenting one of their key processes so that we can assess and potentially refine it. Each department, including customer experience, is consistently iterating on the way they do things meaning nothing is ever set in stone or done just because it has always been done that way.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are your thoughts about how a company should be engaged on Social Media? For example, the advisory firm EisnerAmper conducted 6 yearly surveys of United States corporate boards, and directors reported that one of their most pressing concerns was reputational risk as a result of social media. Do you share this concern? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
Marc Teer: Today’s consumers want to know what companies stand for. Because of that expectation, I think it’s smart to share your company values on any public channels that you engage in. It goes well beyond social media. With anything we do — whether writing a tweet, producing our content videos, or developing new copy — we always have to consider our reputation. I think you have to stay true to yourself and your company’s purpose and core values and ensure everything you do aligns across the board.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Marc Teer: I have spent a lot of time at 1871, a well-known technology and entrepreneurship center in Chicago. While there, I’ve met with lots of early-stage startups, and I often noticed that their most common mistake was not finding a significant, “big” problem to solve. Lots of people spend years trying to solve problems that no one cares about. In order to avoid this losing endeavor, my advice is to make sure you understand the problems your target market or customer have and try to build something around solving that specific problem.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Marc Teer: Follow Black Spectacles on social media here:
https://www.facebook.com/blackspectacles/
https://twitter.com/blackspectacles
https://www.instagram.com/black.spectacles/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/black-spectacles/
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
