Director's insight: The vision behind 24/Three

We sat down with the director, Shelly, to understand more about the back story of 24/Three and his ambitions for the future.

How did 24/Three come about and what inspired you to start up an architectural practice in 2021?

There are so many aspects to this. I was at a place where I was doing multiple roles with no sign of progression and it didn’t equate to salary or title. From a personal perspective, my wife and I had just moved from Nottingham to Northampton and I was working remotely. We were engaged at that point, looking to buy a house, get married and start a family. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it after we had kids, so I spoke to my wife who was in a public sector job and asked her to give me six months to see if I could make it work – without hesitation, she agreed and I took the leap. Six months after, I had enough work for another six months and that’s only when I started taking a salary from the business. And now here we are!

What is the story behind the name 24/Three?

This is something that is very close to me. One thing I didn’t want to do was name it after myself, because to me it felt egotistical and there would be no reflection on the business and the potential future staff. So I wanted it to mean something – I wanted it to reflect back to where I saw development first.

I grew up in Sri Lanka – my parents bought an empty plot of land and designed our house, my dad’s office, my dad’s factory and then later an apartment scheme, which were all built on the land. My dad named the factory after my sister and I, so when naming my business I wanted to pay homage to my parents, as they risked quite a lot to come to the UK to give me and my sister a better life. The address of the factory in Sri Lanka was ‘24 upon 3’ – hence 24/Three, with the forward slash representing the ‘upon’ of the address.

How did you find it starting out as a young director?

Very tough and very lonely, which wasn’t helped by the fact we were in COVID. I couldn’t see clients and I couldn’t even see friends to get advice. I also think my age as a young director was a difficult thing – people naturally assumed that I wouldn’t be capable. It was hard to build a client base. Except the 2 clients that I brought with me from my previous job, I actually didn’t have that many clients to start with. I tried to do things to abide Boris’ restrictions at the time, like sending beer or coffee to people at home and then virtually having a coffee together online. That worked well. Then when things opened up more, I started going for walks (at a 6m distance!) with clients to network. I just went to everything I could, with events in the day time and catching up with work and emails at night time.

Sounds like you worked very hard in those early days! What was the first new job or client you got through at 24/Three that made you feel proud of your business?

There’s a few that comes to mind. I think the biggest one that I thought ‘ yeah, this is going to go somewhere’ was when I met Robbie Locke at my wedding tasting (he won’t mind me name dropping him). He came with his friends to this tasting session and he wasn’t even getting married! We got talking and I found out he was a planner. So we met up for a business lunch after and it was around the time when he was moving to work for a developer. That connection was the first proper link I made myself. We kept in touch and then he sent me a feasibility layout to do, and then we did several more feasibility layouts for them. That was probably one of my first clients that I worked with in the ‘resi’ world that was a brand new client. Robbie’s done great for himself since – he’s moved now to a highly respected company at a senior level and we’re still friends now - super proud of him. That client relationship came out of nowhere – it just shows that you can meet potential clients outside of work too.

What does success look like to you as a business owner?

I had a moment in summer 2023 when I was invited to a barbeque. I was with an old colleague at the time and a couple of other people I didn’t know were sat around the table after the barbeque food was served and we all introduced ourselves saying where we were from. I introduced myself as Shelly from 24/Three and someone I had never met said ‘oh, you’re architects aren’t you?’. At that point, I was so proud – people knew who we were. Success to me is people knowing who we are and when clients start coming to us directly because they’ve heard how good we are at what we do.

Final question! What are your future plans for the practice?

That’s a tough one – when I started the business I did a 3-5 year business plan. I looked back on this a couple of months ago when I was setting targets for next year, and we have already massively surpassed my previous 3 year target. My original 5 year target was to have 6 people and an office with a turnover of £500k. We’ve almost tripled all of those numbers already and we’re only at the 4 year mark. What I’d like to do is sit down with the senior team and do a ‘lessons learnt’ session on what we’ve done well, what we could do better and what we now want to aim for. Ideally for me, in another 5-7 years, I want us to be around 40 people with potentially another office based on the location of the majority of our work. And maybe another specialism to add to our bow that complements our service to our clients.

Nice! Thank you Shelly for sitting down with me and being so open. Is there anything else you would like to add?

I read somewhere that a very successful business is self-sufficient. It runs itself with a little bit of guidance. I’d like to get to a point where the right people, clients, and projects are there – and that’s just repeated over the years to come.

So you don’t have to do as much work then?

Exactly!