Call For Proposals - AIANYS Virtual Small Firm Symposium 2026

About the Symposium

Small practice is anything but small.

For six years, the AIANYS Small Firm Symposium has brought together professionals from across New York State to explore the realities of building, running, and sustaining a small firm.

Small-firm practice is about much more than design. It’s about business. People. Leadership. Technology. Money. Marketing. Clients. Risk. Time. And figuring out how to keep moving forward when you’re often doing a little bit of everything.

That means the best ideas can come from anywhere.

We’re looking for speakers who can offer practical insights, new approaches, hard-earned lessons, case studies, or fresh perspectives that will resonate with professionals working in small firms and as sole practitioners.

Whether your expertise is in architecture, business, technology, law, finance, marketing, leadership, or another field, you likely have something that can help navigate today’s small practice challenges and opportunities. We want to hear from you.

Bring an idea. Share an experience. Start a conversation.

Subject Areas

Proposals are invited in three broad areas. These are not rigid categories, and the examples below are meant to suggest range rather than define limits.

1. The Business of Small Firm Practice

This is the business of running a firm, learned on the job, seldom formally taught.

• Business development and building relationships. A strong session here covers the process of finding the next client. Presenters might explain how a pipeline is built and maintained so that it actually produces ongoing work, or what it takes to get onto a shortlist. Address how to talk with a prospective client about your unique value without sounding like a brochure, or how to win work without competing on price alone.
• Fees, contracts, and getting paid. Profitability is the challenge AIANYS members name more often than any other. Many practitioners report that fee pressure is the constant background noise of running a firm. Sessions might cover the true cost of service and how to calculate it, alternative fee structures, reading and revising a contract before signing it, pricing scope creep instead of absorbing it, collections, and what to do when a client stops paying.
• Technical tools that a small firm can actually afford. Software, workflow, documentation, and visualization, with the emphasis on affordable and practical. A ten-person firm may not be able to afford what a two-hundred-person firm deploys, and the tools that fit at that scale are a subject in themselves.
• Attracting, hiring, and retaining good people. Talent is among the top challenges AIANYS members report, and a great deal of the available guidance on the subject assumes resources that a small firm does not have. Useful sessions here might address how to move emerging professionals from supporting projects to taking on greater responsibility, how to attract and retain talent when larger firms can offer higher salaries and benefits, and what mentorship looks like across a small team.

2. Design, Craft, and Building Science

This is where the focus shifts to how the work gets done; from project workflows and documentation to the tools and technology that support it.

• Building science and detailing. Sessions in this area can take up assemblies and the building envelope, including waterproofing, thermal bridging, and the control of air and vapor. A presenter who has investigated a façade failure can walk an audience through what went wrong and what the repair taught the people who carried it out. Materials are worth examining for how they perform over years of service rather than how they are described in the product information, and how things actually get built deserves the same treatment.
• Accessibility, universal design, and designing for a wider range of users. Accessibility is consistently among the topics AIANYS members find most valuable, because it is knowledge that applies to a live project the same week. Sessions that go into specifics land hardest here: ANSI A117.1, accessible restrooms and showers, handrails, egress and circulation, aging in place, and the accessible renovation of existing housing, where the constraints are real and the code was written with something else in mind. Universal design beyond bare compliance is welcome, grounded in projects that were actually built.
• How people experience buildings. The neuroscience of the built environment draws unusual enthusiasm from members, as does work on how people actually perceive space, light, sound, and material. This is the subject that sends practitioners back to the office thinking differently about the drawing in front of them.
• Existing buildings and residential work. Many small-firm practitioners spend more time on existing buildings than on new construction. Retrofit, renovation, adaptive reuse, and repair make up the daily work. Residential work is welcome, single-family included.

3. The Small Firm Advantage

In a small firm, one person is often the designer, the project manager, the business developer, the bookkeeper, the technology department, and the person who answers the phone. The work competes with itself and everything seems urgent. That is the reality of the practice, and it is worth addressing directly.

But small firms hold genuine advantages. They can be nimble. Their clients talk to the person doing the work. They can decline a project that does not fit. They control what the firm takes on and what it stands for, and the people inside them get a broader range of experience that takes years to accumulate elsewhere. This is craft, and it concerns how a practice and a life are run at the same time.

What Makes a Strong Proposal

What will be selected:

• Depth. The sessions that Symposium attendees single out afterward are the ones that went deeper than expected.
• Actionable information. Practitioners describe the value in concrete terms: a detail they took back to a current project, a number they could compare against their own, a contract clause they had never thought to include, a failure someone was candid about. A useful test while drafting: what will an attendee do differently on Monday morning?
• Fresh perspective. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

What will not be selected:

• Product pitches. Manufacturer expertise is genuinely welcome, but manufacturer marketing is not. A session that teaches only one product line is not a fit for this event.
• Overviews. A proposal titled “An Introduction to X” will not be selected. Attendees are practicing architects and will be treated as such.
• Death by PowerPoint: slides read aloud. Sessions are built around what the presenter knows, not what fits on a slide.

A Note on Perspective

We welcome a wide range of voices—emerging professionals and seasoned practitioners; small firms, mid-size firms, and sole practitioners; architects working in traditional practice as well as those applying architectural training in non-traditional roles. Strong proposals will demonstrate not only what was done, but why it matters, what was learned, and how that knowledge can inform future work.

Presentation Format

Seminars will be 90 minutes in duration and will be presented virtually over Zoom. All chosen presenters will be required to attend a virtual tech rehearsal approximately one week prior to the date of their presentation. We will be hosting this event over four dates during the first two weeks in December. Each speaker and/or panel member must be listed separately with all contact information provided.

Continuing Education Submittal

Once selected, AIANYS will submit your program to the American Institute of Architects Continuing Education Services to ensure that the appropriate LU and HSW credits within AIA and New York mandatory education guidelines are applied and to avoid any possible confusion of credit. At times, the submitted learning objectives and/or presentation description need to be edited slightly to best position the presentation for CE credit approval.