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Each year, architect Ed Shriver gets on an airplane and travels to a place where he might seem - at least, professionally speaking - like a stranger in a strange land.
That place is Las Vegas, where each May, 30,000 attendees - mostly developers, real estate brokers and retailers - convene for the International Council of Shopping Centers' spring convention.
There, Mr. Shriver believes "maybe 1 or 2 percent of all the architects in the country go to ICSC at most," adding, "you could probably set of a nuclear bomb and not kill an architect at ICSC."
Yet there he is hot on the sometime elusive trail of business development.
Beyond the business basics of submitting requests for proposals for new development projects already committed to be built, some architects leapfrog that process to find new projects they can pitch to developers to take on, using their designs.
Mr. Shriver, the managing principal for Strada Architects LLC, a Downtown-based architecture firm, is out looking for opportunities for which his clients can hire him.
"A big part of the reason I do that is just to understand what drives my clients and what their issues are so we can be in a position to try and help our clients," said Mr. Shriver. "So we can add value."
For Mr. Shriver, the strategy is long term, with the idea of developing relationships and connections that will later result in new work.
After helping to start his firm about five years ago,...