Building an Architecture Practice Franchise ft. Lisa Raynes at Pride Road

Lisa Raynes, founder of Pride Road Architects, joins Stephen Drew for a practical conversation about building and running a residential architecture practice, and the franchise model she created to make it repeatable. Approximate listening time: 33 minutes.

Listen to the full conversation:

Who this is for

Architects and Part 2 assistants thinking about setting up on their own, anyone curious about running a residential practice as a proper business, and professionals weighing up how to build a flexible career that fits around family life. It is also useful for practice owners who want to sharpen their niche, systems and client communication.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

1. Explain how a franchise model can be applied to an architecture practice.
2. Describe how a residential practice can define and serve a specific niche market.
3. Identify the systems a new practice needs at launch, including brand, website, SEO, templates and fee proposals.
4. Assess which overheads a small practice genuinely needs, including software.
5. Recognise the barriers that push architects, and women in particular, out of the profession, and how flexible models respond to them.
6. Apply simple tools to explain design options clearly to residential clients.

What Pride Road is

Pride Road is an architectural practice franchise. Franchise models are familiar from food and retail, but they also exist across professional services such as accountancy and bookkeeping. Pride Road applies the same idea to architecture: an architect joins under the Pride Road brand and systems, trading as their own limited company, for example Pride Road Lewisham, after a period of due diligence on both sides.

Choosing a niche: residential done well

Pride Road is deliberately narrow. It serves homeowners on relatively small domestic projects, roughly between twenty thousand and a quarter of a million pounds. Lisa argues this is a large, underserved segment that many practices overlook in favour of higher-value work, which makes it easier to build a trusted, repeatable service.

Why the franchise model exists

The model grew out of a problem Lisa saw first hand. Architecture loses women as they move up, and careers often stall after having a family, alongside a drop in confidence when returning to work. Having systemised her own practice and run it as a business, she built Pride Road as a flexible route to practise architecture while keeping control of time and workload.

What a franchisee actually gets

A franchisee pays for a licence to trade under the brand, described in the conversation as ten thousand pounds for the trademark, licences and rights to practise for five years. In return, the franchisor provides the launch package: website, SEO, social media, business cards, templates, graphics, logo, portfolio, web content, fee proposals and briefing automations, plus coaching and ongoing support. The aim is to remove the administrative burden that usually gets in the way of doing the architecture.

Keeping overheads honest

Pride Road questions the costs many practices treat as unavoidable. Architects in the network are client facing and hand draw, while back-office technicians handle CAD work. That means expensive software licences are not sitting on every machine, keeping overheads low while the business stays profitable.

Communicating with clients

Because residential clients are usually not from a building background, Pride Road leans on plain visual tools. Hand drawings and simple Lego models are used to explain concepts such as gable and hip roofs, two-storey side extensions, terracing and subservient roof forms, so clients can grasp the options quickly, including over video calls.

Pivoting the business online

When the pandemic hit, Lisa restructured the delivery model in a week, moving from face-to-face to online consultations. She trialled it with an existing client, unpicked what worked, wrote it up as a procedure, then turned that same shift into marketing. The business continued with minimal interruption and grew its turnover through lockdown as homeowners invested in their spaces.

Being found: SEO and the website

Visibility is central to the model. Pride Road runs a deep website, described as around three hundred pages, and each franchisee gets a landing page within it. New pages benefit from the authority and backlinks of an established, well-optimised site, which helps local clients find them through search.

Growth and territories

Territories are exclusive and defined by population rather than raw geography, described as roughly seventy thousand owner-occupier homes within a twenty-minute travel radius. Pride Road was looking to recruit further franchisees, with inbound demand from London, Cheshire and Birmingham that it could not yet serve. The profile that thrives is entrepreneurial, comfortable being client facing, and motivated to control their own time.

Key terms

• Franchise: a business model where you operate under an established brand and systems in return for a licence fee.
• Territory: a defined, exclusive area, here measured by number of owner-occupier homes within a travel radius.
• Niche: a focused market segment, in this case small domestic residential projects.
• Fee proposal: the document setting out scope, stages and fees for a client.
• Subservient roof: a lower roof form stepped down from the main roof, often used on extensions.

Reflective prompts for your CPD record

1. What is your niche, and could you describe it in one sentence a homeowner would understand?
2. Which overheads in your current or planned practice are genuinely essential, and which are habit?
3. How do you explain design options to non-technical clients, and what could make that clearer?

About the guest

Lisa Raynes is a RIBA Chartered Architect. She set up Raynes Architecture in 2010, founded the urban architecture outreach festival Manchester Curious in 2015, and created Pride Road, an architectural practice franchise for the residential sector. She has served on RIBA Council and chaired Women in Property North West, and Pride Road has featured on the AJ100 disruptor list. The practice is based in the Manchester area and licenses architects to practise under its brand across the UK.