Smart Design Starts with Smart Business.

 

Adia believes in people with passion to change the world. The company was founded as a venue for blossoming entrepreneurs and exceptionally talented individuals—regardless of age—to introduce their ideas and inventions to improve lives around the world.

We believe that many great ideas, innovations, and efficiencies are drowned by traditional corporate structure. Innovation doesn’t happen in corporate settings. It happens in conversations, in coffee shops and dorm rooms. It begins with curiosity, and soon a spark becomes a flame.

In order to encourage a spirit of innovation and offer solutions at prices average people can afford, Adia utilizes a revolutionary business model. (Read more below...)

The Global Adia Network

Rather than maintain large staffs in centralized offices, Adia maintains a network of experts in strategic locations across the globe. We feel that this encourages diversity and flexibility while minimizing overhead costs and creating an atmosphere conducive to creative thinking. Frequent travel between states and countries keeps us constantly exposed to new ideas and different ways of thinking, and encourages a spirit of "always learning and always innovating."

Whereas many companies rank by age, we rank by talent. We have found that students and young professionals are often the best equipped for truly innovative work. They have fresh ideas, youthful energy, up-to-date education, and a passion to make their world a better place. We strive to maintain close connections to the top universities around the world, and currently have clusters of members in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and Milan.

How Adia Saves You Money

No matter how you look at it, expertise is expensive. If you want the brightest minds, you have to pay for them. But we’ve found a way to get the best talent at the best prices for our clients.

Most of our competitors employ large full-time staffs. They pay substantial annual salaries, benefits, insurance, and tax for their employees—whether the company has work for the employee on a daily basis or not. Other companies take the opposite approach. They employ a small permanent staff and use outside consultants whenever necessary.

The problem with large staffs is that they entail high overhead costs and tend to make companies bulky and inflexible. Small staffs limit a company’s abilities and performance, and necessitate dependence on outside consultants (at significantly inflated rates). There are often procedural inefficiencies, oversights, and delays.

At Adia, we get the best of both worlds. We keep a lean and diversely talented full-time staff, but have partnered with small companies and creative entrepreneurs around the world to form an integrated network of “experts on demand.” Whatever a project demands, we have experts who can do it. We bring business and publicity to our partners, and in exchange we receive in-house pricing and priority processing whenever we need their services. It’s as if they were our own staff, without all the expenses.

Lower overhead allows us to focus more money on what matters to us: research, innovation, and great design. It means that we never have to waste time with mundane projects just to pay the bills.

The close, congenial relationship we maintain with our diversely talented partners also means that we all learn a little bit about everything. It promotes casual “coffee shop conversations”—and even better, conversations across continents and cultures. It helps create sparks, and provides the way to turn sparks into flames.

Our Secret to Staying Innovative

It’s really a simple cycle here at Adia.

We employ top talent and take on problems/projects which seem impossible. Our ideas and creative solutions get attention because our work makes headlines and our clients are usually eager to show it off. As the world becomes aware of our abilities, we receive more exciting requests for work.

Exciting work makes us happy because it makes our jobs fun. It keeps us constantly challenged and forces us to be innovative. It also attracts top talent to Adia.

Knowing that our work makes a difference in the world gives us a reason to always do our best. With enough knowledge, creativity, and will power, “impossible” problems turn into incredible solutions. And that’s what Adia’s all about.

Creating Value and Cutting Costs

Thomas Edison is considered by many to be the greatest American inventor of all time, and is well known for his maxim: “genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Invention, innovation, revolutionary design—these all take time and do not come by accident. We put a lot of thought and time into our work. Our goal is not “cheapness,” but maximum value for our clients.

Some who have seen our lowest-priced architectural works tend to think we are magicians. We are not magicians. We are a group of people who know how to create value through design. Every hour we spend designing a solution saves many hours and dollars implementing it.

Like everyone else, we cannot work for free. We employ primarily graduates of top-ranked universities like Harvard, MIT, USC, Rice, etc. In order to continually attract top talent, we must compete with market rates. We also believe in rewarding good work.

What We Mean by “Affordable”

"Affordable" can mean a lot of things, and carries a lot of connotations. So what do we mean when we call ourselves the “affordable” design, innovation, and architecture company?

On the one hand, we strive to provide prices for our services that are below industry standards in an effort to make exceptional design and innovation accessible to everyone. Our efficient business model helps us achieve this. However, it is not primarily our services that are intended to be affordable, but our solutions.

We cannot work for free, but we can create smart designs and solutions that save money and cut overall project costs significantly. Our service fees may seem expensive to some (due to the time we spend and the level of talent we hire), but they are small compared to the savings we achieve in overall project costs.

For example, in the case of a home, we may spend three times as many hours designing it as the average architectural designer. Some might scoff and say “just buy a floor plan online.” But we believe that design influences people, and that if people are going to live in a home for decades and let their life be defined by it in so many ways, the least we can do is spend the time to design it to be the best it can be. And we also believe that smart design saves money.

All of our clients can testify to this. With a little money for our services, we were able to save them a lot of money—and produce an incredible product. That’s why we call it value-adding design, and that’s why we consider ourselves “affordable."

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