Читать книгу Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm - Patrick MacLeamy - Страница 39

When Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum founded HOK in 1955, Hellmuth was determined to avoid the shortcomings he had observed at traditional partnerships. Remember, the first flaw was that most partnerships distributed all cash profit to the partners at the end of each year, leaving little to no cash for operating the firm the following year. Of course, it's better to take a portion of your capital and invest it back into growing or improving your firm. The second defect was that when the partners were ready to retire, no one working in the firm could afford to buy them out. The partners were left with the choice of selling the firm to outsiders or closing it down.

Hellmuth had seen this pattern with his own father and uncle and wanted to avoid it. That's why he and the other founders established HOK as a corporation instead of a partnership. This was highly unusual for an architecture firm at that time and meant that HOK's ownership would be in the form of stock. Hellmuth, as the senior founder, received 50% of the shares, whereas Obata and Kassabaum each received 25%. Seven years later, Obata and Kassabaum both bought some of Hellmuth's stock so that each owned an equal third of HOK.

The founders wanted to design a world-class architecture firm and adopted some farsighted stock-ownership restrictions to support their vision. These included ideas that could be valuable to other designers as well: