The Account Team Model: A Fresh Way of Looking at National Real Estate Strategy

RSP’s Anne Nelson, Katie Petersen and Kathleen Linderkamp share how the account team model and the right workplace strategy helps their clients boost efficiency and face the future. 

Dynamic, multi-faceted organizations have unique challenges when it comes to national real estate strategy and design. With robust property portfolios, every design, strategy or change management decision can have a cascading effect throughout an organization. We developed our “Account Team Model” to support our large, national clients in new ways, emphasizing single point-of-contact clarity and speed-to-street agility. It’s an approach that sets us up to be partners who help clients strategize, solve problems and identify opportunities, often before they know what they need. And our unique position as both “insiders” and “outsiders” allows us to get the big picture, optimize resources, and drive significant cost and time savings across a national (or multi-location) footprint.

Understanding the Insider-Outsider Advantage

Unlike the conventional model where an architect or designer interacts with a client or broker within a narrow project scope, national organizations often need more comprehensive support. The account team model offers a broader framework. We become extensions of our clients’ businesses, ingrained in their operations, culture, and business goals. This embedded approach fosters deep understanding and trust, enabling us to anticipate needs and connect the dots before issues arise.

One national retailer came to us for support with a series of strategically located fulfillments centers that needed to be operational on aggressive milestones. Our approach was to augment their in-house resources—serving as a type of embedded, back-of-house team—that could be deployed quickly, efficiently and with minimal bureaucracy. We knew the organization, had earned their trust on other assignments, and were able to assign the right resources when and where they were needed to meet those aggressive targets.

Harnessing Data for Strategic Decision Making

Implementing a national workplace strategy often requires navigating a heavily matrixed organization and fostering trust, both internally and externally. Convincing stakeholders of the benefits of a unified service provider can be a gradual process, but the results, including increased efficiency and consistency, are worth the effort.

These days, data drives so much, and many of our decisions are informed by a deep mine of information on previous projects and benchmarks. Because the information can sometimes be overwhelming, we typically develop user-friendly dashboards that allow us to identify trends which allow us to address inefficiencies and anticipate issues before they become a major challenge.

As just one example, we analyzed a financial client’s historical data and introduced leaner processes for their smaller projects—which often require the same resources of their large efforts. The outcome was a direct result of the dashboard approach, which made the issue clear and inarguable for the client. In fact, the team successfully executed an increase in small project volume of 170% in 2023 and are expecting the pipeline to continue to grow this year.

Forging Collaborative Partnerships

In the complex ecosystem of large organizations, collaboration is key. We work closely with external partners like JLL, CBRE and others, recognizing that success hinges on a collective effort, but also staying in our swim lanes. We don’t do what they do, and vice versa. By aligning objectives and streamlining communication, we ensure smoother project execution and minimize disruptions for our clients, who also don’t need to keep retraining new design teams for every project.

The trick, of course, is consistency and the infrastructure to deliver the same product (at the same quality level) across all locations. That level of consistency allows these partnerships to extend beyond individual projects, fostering long-term synergies and efficiencies. For one of our national financial clients, to support the 114% increase in project volumes from 2022 to 2023, we leveraged staff from across RSP’s offices to supplement our core team, never missing a beat.

Driving Corporate Transformation

The ultimate goal of a national strategy is not just optimization at a project level but transformation at a corporate level. We try to offer holistic insights, analyzing the entire portfolio to identify opportunities for improvement. We are also able to tap a broad range of experts on our teams across the country as needed—subject matter experts in sustainability and resiliency, engineering, branding and so on. We work on projects from corporate headquarters to tenant improvements, not to mention data centers, labs, distribution centers, retail and banking.

From our perspective, it’s crucial that we actually partner with corporations, not just say that we do. We strive to understand and prioritize broader corporate goals so we can be catalysts for organizational growth and success. Often, we oversee and coordinate the work of other architects, in the best interests of the client.

The account team model isn’t right for every client. But by leveraging our insider-outsider advantage, harnessing data-driven insights, and tapping into our national pool of talent, it gives us the opportunity to deliver tangible results. As organizations continue to evolve, we aim to make the account team model an indispensable way of advancing their businesses.