A Conversation With ... Abbye Bobbett

You and partners Adam Kreher and Griffin Bobbett left your dad John Torgerson’s firm, Togerson Design Partners, last year to start Kinetic. Why did you want to create a firm of your own?
It was kind of threefold why we left, and it was a hard decision. It took about a year to decide. We wanted to create a firm that was very people focused. We’re trying to put our staff first, put our clients first over profit – and sometimes that can be hard in this industry. Along with that comes work-life balance. When the construction industry is really busy, so are we, and we’re trying to keep up, but we don’t want to see the burnout that we were seeing. That’s why we’re trying the four-day workweek, which has gone really well. Then, we also wanted to grow the development services side. One of our partners, Griffin, my husband, he’s a commercial real estate broker, but his passion really is in development. We’ve really been able to grow it to a new scale here, doing everything from lease negotiations, site selections, demographic studies in the beginning to find the right site all the way down through the architectural design and then through construction. We’re a turnkey process for developers. We’ve hired development coordinators and project coordinators. The third piece was being innovative. We want to be a firm that’s always forward thinking in technology, whether that’s the software we’re using or even the processes that we’re putting in place to work with clients. Adam is really passionate about product development. Eventually, we would love to grow an innovation lab within our company that researches products and develops.

What are the main areas of architecture you focus on? And what are projects you’ve taken on in your first six months?
We do a lot of retail. We specialize in corporate clients. Finding a client like O’Reilly Auto Parts or Bass Pro and just building a team to champion their work, we’re really good at it so they continue to come back to us. We work with a lot of developers all over the country that are putting up Dollar Generals, 7 Brews, Chipotle, Qdoba, Starbucks. They’ve realized how nice it is to kind of push that [development] work off onto us. We’ve gotten off to a really good start, a fast start, and we’re really solid in the corporate client realm. But I really want to grow our local base. That’s probably our biggest goal for this year. We’re working with Nixon & Lindstrom insurance, that’s one of our local projects, and helping with the remodel and addition.

Were you able to bring clients from Torgerson Design Partners?
We are working with some of the same clients.

What trends are you noticing in your industry?
The whole process is changing. A lot of firms want to stick in the more traditional realm of the design-bid-build process, where the client comes, you design their building, it goes out to bid, it gets built. But we’re seeing a lot of our projects that are more negotiated bid. So, the contractor comes on very early in the design process, and we’re working very closely with him or her to just help navigate the weird construction realm that we’re in and we’ve been in since COVID with material supply chain issues. We were, not too long ago, seeing HVAC units that were 60 weeks lead time. That’s not going to work for a lot of projects that we’re on.

We’ve heard that technology companies are getting involved in the process much earlier now, to outfit buildings for tech from the start. What other ways have you seen collaboration?
That’s huge, what you hit on with the IT companies. We love to get the owners and vendors involved as soon as possible, whether that be IT, whether that’s security figuring out where cameras go and what kind of locks they want. If we can get that in early on in the bid or in the bid drawings, it definitely helps make all the process a lot smoother. If they’re coming in during construction or even after construction, having to re-retrofit or rewire things obviously is a waste of time. The environment is a lot more collaborative.

Has the firm’s people-first approach been good for business?
I think so. We’ve been in business for six months now, and we just looked at some of the historical data of how many people we’ve hired, which is 21, and how many projects we’ve worked on, which is in the 250 range. It’s just been incredible to see the amount of work we’ve done and still how happy our people are. I’ve heard a lot of good feedback about our new policy on work-life balance. We have six or eight hybrid workers, some fully remote. That has not been widely accepted in the architecture field. Everybody has the same view that you really need to be in the office collaborating, and there is a lot of value with that, but with today’s technology we can still do a lot of that. We have one in California that’s fully remote and one in Kansas that’s fully remote.