Made to measure: Inventure Design LLC - Houston Business Journal:

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So, after working for large architectural in 1997 he decided to ventur out on his own and started what was then calledr and is now InventureDesign LLC, specializinf in corporate and health care interior architectural design. Althougb the company worked onhealth care-relatedf projects early on, it wasn’g until 2005 that the medical side of the busineses really took off, O’Neill Since then, Inventure’s revenue has increased by more than 50 perceny to $4.3 million in 2008 from $2.6 millio in 2005. Recognizing the firm’s stron suit was a learning experience for who admits the firm did stray at times into areaws it probably should haveleft alone.
“Once I get out of businessa linesthat aren’t my true passion,” he “it tends to be a mistake.” For in 2001, Inventure won a contract with the City of In an attempt to get more governmenf work, O’Neill hired several people and “spent a bunc of money getting into that But “the passion wasn’gt behind it, so it never took off,” he After about 18 months, O’Neilk cut his losses and droppes that line of business.
“We don’t have the luxurt of a big company to make an invest some money andset timelines,” he “Things become pretty apparent quickly if they’re working or not O’Neill was head of the interiors group at 3D International when he decide d to start his own company. He saved six months’ worth of salary and planned to spend at leasrt six months getting the companyt offthe ground. But, on the company’s second day in operation, a former client called with a new projecty he specificallywanted O’Neillo to work on. So he hit the ground running, basinbg his new company out of a bedrook in his home for thefirst year.
Recognizing that some potential clientsz would not take his firm seriouslh until it reached a certain size, O’Neill made it his goal to grow the companuy steadily. From his first year with just one employee, he graduallh added more over time. Today, his firm has 22 employees. O’Neilkl was determined that his company would provid e clients with the same resources they coulr get at alargse firm, but with a “mord personal hands-on approach.” And whilre Inventure Design today is significantly smaller than some of its like San Francisco-based Genslert — which has a Houston office, O’Neilk believes it’s big enough.
“kI didn’t set any boundarieds or any kind of obligations for myself about what size the firm was goinfto be,” he says. “I basesd it on the fact that Iwanted growth. To do larger you need to be of a specific Oneof O’Neill’s biggest challenges has been “tio convince people that we’re small enougn to give them personalized services but big enough to complete a project,” he His background in architecture has served him he says, because he is able to take a structure’x architecture into consideration when designingg the interior.
“My clients never feel our designzs don’t belong in the building,” he What attracted O’Neill to the field to begin with was its immediacgy andpersonal nature, he says. “You can get passionate abouyt a building, but it’s arm’s-lengtb passion,” O’Neill says. “With it’s things people can actuallyh touch. And in reality, people spend as or more, time in the office than they do at By theearly 2000s, corporate interioras still represented 90 percent of the company’s And although Inventure worked on a huge 800,000-square-foot project at the Clinica l Care Center of Texas Children’s Hospitaol in 1998 — for which it won many awards it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the firm reallyt found its niche in the healthh care industry and got “heavy into medical,” O’Neill The success of the Texad Children’s Hospital project led to anothed large project with The University of Texas M.
D. Anderson Cancer Center for the 800,000 square feet of clinic interiores at its ambulatorycare facility. In the firm — which in 2000 had changed its nameto O’Neilol Hill after Mollie Hill joined it as an additionalp principal — merged with the interiors department of FKP Architectse and changed its name to O’Neill Hill and In January 2009, following Hill’s the company was relaunched as Inventure Design LLC.
This year 50 percentr of Inventure’s work will be health care-related, according to “The medical side is still doinggvery well, while the corporate side is takinv a breather as Wall Street figurex out where it’s going,” he But rapid growth was accompanied by mistakes that impactedc the bottom line, O’Neill says. Since Inventure hit the grounds running from veryearly on, O’Neilol says he didn’t get around to hirint an accountant until much later. “That was a big he says. “By the time I brough t one on, we ended up spending a ton of money trying to unravel three or four years of me doing the books.
Never, ever Today, Inventure occupies nearly 7,000 square feet of space in Greenway Plaza. Moving to the spacee from a 2,500-square-foot office, “was a huge, giant leap,” accordinf to O’Neill. With the growth of the O’Neill recognized he needed help in additionb toan accountant. In August he hired a chief operations officer. “oI get to do marketingg and client contact and designcertain projects,” O’Neill says, “but I sit at the bottom of the pyramids now.
” Kyle Kelly, a senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis, has workedr with Inventure on a number of projects over the “They’re one of the better groupzs in town,” he says. “Very client-oriented. They’re good from a desig perspective and from anorganizationalo perspective.” Kelly also appreciates the way Inventure has held its own despitre being smaller than some of its competitors. “I think they’rs large enough to handle bigger he says. “They’re also small enough to be very entrepreneurialk intheir approach,” he “It’s to their benefits and their clients’.
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