Christopher Brown, Chief Operating Officer, PVEDI

In an interview with Invest:, Christopher Brown, Chief Operating Officer at PVEDI, talked about the firm’s decision to unify and rebrand its services, the importance that they place on building a great work environment, and the challenges created by increasing competition in mergers and acquisitions across the industry. “You create a space where people enjoy the work and then the rest can happen organically”, he said.

Over the past 12 months, have there been any changes in the firm?

For the last 12 months, we have been working on creating a new Design Professional Corporation, a DPC, which allows us to provide all of our services under one brand called PVEDI. This is a combination of our two former brands, PVE, our engineering division, and EDI, our architecture division, which has allowed us to operate on a multi-state level under one entity. I’ll give a shout-out to our Chief Compliance Officer, Jessica Lakomy, who’s also an attorney in our Pittsburgh office. She did the majority of the heavy lifting.

How does pulling all the brands under one umbrella set the firm up for success or growth going forward?

The greatest advantage is that we can write one contract that includes all our services. It streamlines processes and makes it easier for clients to understand. We can also cross-sell services a lot more easily. PVEDI gave us a platform to share all the various services that we offer with existing clients. We’ve had many situations where clients hired us exclusively for architecture services having no idea we offered the other service lines, which include Civil Engineering and Land Development, which also includes our Land Survey Group; the Architecture services group, which focuses primarily on Multifamily Residential in addition to some Hospitality, including Hotels, Clubhouses, and Interior Design; our Structural Engineering group, which has some other subsets including Geotechnical and MEP engineering; and Environmental services, which is my group, focusing on Remediation and Compliance. 

Are there any trends in environmental services?

There have been some recent consolidations and acquisitions in the convenience store market that have started to drive some work for us. We have a series of projects that involve convenience store upgrades including fuel storage and tank management.

Our activity in the Act 2 Program has increased, and developers are more willing to take on contaminated real estate in denser populated areas. But the biggest hurdle with that program is that there are no significant tax incentives. The pressures on real estate in Pittsburgh aren’t exactly the same as in other places like New York, for example, but they are increasing, especially in the hotter markets like Lawrenceville and the Strip District. There’s pressure from the City of Pittsburgh to increase affordable housing construction.

In the last couple years there has been a bigger push to being back in office, so how has your firm approached that?

We don’t have a hybrid work schedule, and flexibility is evaluated case by case and remains a regular topic of conversation among senior leadership. Collaboration between employees drives the success of our day-to-day work. As soon as we had the opportunity to safely get people back in the office after the pandemic, we did, which created a lot of value. Actually, we had signed a lease for new office space in New York City at the end of 2019, with the goal of combining two existing offices into one. And when we were able to put people back in offices in July of 2020, we had a brand-new office space ready to go, and that worked out really well for us.

It seems that Pittsburgh would like to mix business and residential areas to emulate what happens in cities like New York, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, that would drive part of the downtown economy, if you had locals dropping into hotel bars and restaurants. Pittsburgh has some sections that are relatively dense in residential with some restaurants and other stores or commercial components in the fringes, but not a lot of residential in the downtown space. I think there are lots of opportunities for residential development and maybe office-to-residential conversions. While it’s a lot more costly to convert an office building to a residential one, it can help drive an economy, and older buildings seem to be better suited for it. I think that local governments need to get behind it and start to push it by creating some incentives and rezoning, in addition to modifying some of the more stringent building codes and offering financial assistance with streetscape improvements to help offset costs.

Last year the firm was ranked a top workplace by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, how do you build a culture like that within the firm?

Our philosophy is to create a great work environment. If you create a space like that, employees create good work and they make the clients happy. And then, when clients are happy, they refer us or give us more work. So, the growth of the firm is a function of the first piece: you create a space where people enjoy the work, have autonomy to be productive, and then the rest can happen organically.

What are some challenges that you see on the horizon?

We are actively pursuing acquisitions, and it has been a challenge. Some firms are willing to pay higher multipliers than traditionally seen in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) world, driving up pricing and creating a value imbalance. At the end of the day, what it really boils down to is the people, whether you have good employees who are well trained and dedicated to the work that they do and enjoy it.

What would you like to see the firm accomplish over the next five years?

We’d like to grow, but there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market space in the AEC world. Interest rates started to come down a little bit. There’s not going to be an immediate impact, but 80% of our work is tied to private-side land development, so that needs to soak in. Our clients have started to engage in new projects, and I think that the tariff situation has started to stabilize a little bit. All of those things point to the economy still being strong. So, we will keep an eye on things and hope to be expanding our team within the next few years.