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

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So, after working for large architectural in 1997 he decided to venturse out on his own and started what was then callec and is now Inventure Design LLC, specializing in corporate and healthj care interior architectural design. Although the company workede onhealth care-related projects early on, it wasn’ until 2005 that the medical side of the business reallty took off, O’Neill says. Since then, Inventure’xs revenue has increased by more than 50 percenftto $4.3 million in 2008 from $2.6 millionm in 2005.
Recognizing the firm’sx strong suit was a learning experienc efor O’Neill, who admits the firm did strah at times into areas it probably shoul d have left alone. “Oncw I get out of business linesthat aren’t my true he says, “it tendxs to be a mistake.” For example, in 2001, Inventur won a contract with the City of Houston. In an attempg to get more government O’Neill hired several people and “spent a bunc h of money getting intothat business.” But “thwe passion wasn’t behind it, so it never took he says. After about 18 months, O’Neill cut his losses and dropped that lineof business.
“We don’ t have the luxury of a big company to make an invest some money andset timelines,” he says. “Thingw become pretty apparent quickl yif they’re working or not O’Neill was head of the interiors group at 3D Internationalp when he decided to start his own company. He savede six months’ worth of salary and planned to spend at least six months gettinh the company offthe ground. But, on the company’es second day in operation, a former client called with a new project he specificallywantex O’Neill to work on. So he hit the grouncd running, basing his new company out of a bedroom in his home for thefirsf year.
Recognizing that some potential clients woulrd not take his firm seriously untill it reached acertain O’Neill made it his goal to grow the company From his first year with just one he gradually added more over time. Today, his firm has 22 O’Neill was determined that his company woule provide clients with the same resources they could get at alargr firm, but with a “more personal hands-o approach.” And while Inventure Design today is significantlhy smaller than some of its competitors, like San Francisco-basec Gensler — which has a Houston office, O’Neill believezs it’s big enough.
“I didn’t set any boundaries or any kind of obligationx for myself about what size the firm was goinhto be,” he says. “I based it on the fact that I wantedr growth. To do larger projects, you need to be of a specifidc size.” One of O’Neill’s biggest challenges has been “toi convince people that we’re small enougj to give them personalizede service but big enough to complete a he says. His backgrouncd in architecture has servedhim well, he says, because he is able to take a structure’se architecture into consideration when designing the interior.
“My clients never feel our designs don’g belong in the building,” he What attracted O’Neill to the field to begin with was its immediacyt andpersonal nature, he says. “You can get passionats about a building, but it’s arm’s-length O’Neill says. “With interiors, it’s thinges people can actually touch. And in reality, peoplr spend as much, or more, time in the office than they do at By theearly 2000s, corporate interiors still representesd 90 percent of the company’zs work.
And although Inventure workes on ahuge 800,000-square-foot project at the Clinical Care Centerf of Texas Children’s Hospital in 1998 — for whicjh it won many awards — it wasn’t until the mid-2000ds that the firm really found its niche in the health care industry and got “heavy into medical,” O’Neill says. The succesds of the Texas Children’s Hospital project led to another large projectf with The University ofTexas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center for the 800,000 square feet of clinic interioras at its ambulatorycare facility.
In 2005, the firm which in 2000 had changed its nameto O’Neill Hill afte r Mollie Hill joined it as an additionalp principal — merged with the interiors department of FKP Architects and changeed its name to O’Neill Hill and In January 2009, following Hill’e departure, the company was relaunched as Inventure Design LLC. This year 50 percentt of Inventure’s work will be health accordingto O’Neill. “The medical side is stil doingvery well, while the corporate side is takintg a breather as Wall Street figures out wherse it’s going,” he says. But rapied growth was accompanied by mistakex that impacted thebottok line, O’Neill says.
Since Inventure hit the grounds running from veryearly on, O’Neill says he didn’ get around to hiring an accountanty until much later. “That was a big he says. “By the time I brought one on, we ended up spending a ton of money trying to unravep three or four years of me doingthe Never, ever again.” Today, Inventure occupiews nearly 7,000 square feet of space in Greenway Moving to the space from a 2,500-square-foot office, “was a giant leap,” according to With the growth of the O’Neill recognized he needed help in addition to an In August 2007, he hirede a chief operations officer.
“kI get to do marketing and clientr contact and designcertain projects,” O’Neill says, “but I sit at the bottom of the pyramide now.” Kyle Kelly, a senior vice presidengt with CB Richard Ellis, has worked with Inventure on a number of projectsw over the years. “They’re one of the bettet groups in town,” he “Very client-oriented. They’re good from a desigbn perspective and from anorganizational perspective.” Kelly also appreciateds the way Inventure has held its own despite being smaller than some of its “I think they’re large enough to handle biggef projects,” he says.
“They’re also smalkl enough to be very entrepreneurial in their he adds. “It’s to theit benefits and their clients’.”