Featuring Eladio Muñoz Tortosa,
Director of Expansion
at GEA Architects
Practice growth is usually described as addition: more staff, more projects, more revenue. Underneath sits an assumption that a larger studio simply does more of what a smaller one did. The experience of firms that have crossed that line suggests something less linear. The work, the clients and the competitors change with size, and those changes are not always chosen.
In this edition of ARQUIBD Voices, the featured guest is Eladio Muñoz Tortosa of GEA Architects, a practice highly focused on residential architecture in the Spanish market. His perspective touches three pressure points that practice growth tends to create: the smallest project a firm can afford to take, the group of firms it is measured against, and the place of the principal and of business development in a larger structure. What follows sets out his positions in his own words, then examines what they imply and what they leave open.
Eladio Muñoz Tortosa
Director de Expansion at GEA Architects, a Spanish practice specializing in residential architecture. An industrial engineer by training, he leads the firm’s expansion strategy and business development, with a particular focus on how growth reshapes a practice’s market position, client base and internal organization.
Connect with Eladio Muñoz
A Floor Measured in Homes
In residential work, practice growth has a very practical expression: the size of the smallest project that still makes sense. For GEA, that size is stated plainly.
It is difficult for us to take on projects with fewer than 25 homes while keeping costs and performance in balance.
Two features of this statement deserve attention. The first is the unit of measurement. The threshold is expressed in homes rather than in fee or hours, which suggests that, for a residential specialist, project scale is the most readable proxy for economic viability. A fee-based threshold would move with market conditions. A unit-based one describes the kind of project around which the practice’s organization has been built. Eladio does not detail which costs drive the figure, so naming them would be speculation. What can be said is that 25 homes marks the point where a project stops fitting the operating model.
The second feature is the candour about what is given up.
We miss out on smaller commissions, some could be attractive because of their location and visibility, but they are difficult to justify financially.
Visibility and location are not minor attractions in a sector where reputation is often built one project at a time. The trade-off is acknowledged without being described as costless. That raises a point the guest leaves open: when a practice declines the work that may once have built its name, what replaces it as a source of reputation? Larger projects can carry their own visibility, but whether they do is not a given, and it probably differs between practices.
Practice growth also turns this threshold into a moving target. A floor of 25 homes describes GEA today. It is reasonable to ask whether such a floor stays fixed or rises with each addition to the team. If it rises, the practice is not only choosing which projects to decline but continuously redefining its own minimum. A useful exercise for any practice is to name their own threshold explicitly. Practices that never state one may still have one, discovered only in retrospect.
Who The Firm Is Compared With
Practice growth also changes who sits across the table as a competitor, and Eladio places that shift at a specific point.
In Spain, once a practice has around 40 or 50 technical staff, it is generally considered a large practice.
The wording matters. The label is one that the market applies, not one the practice chooses. A firm does not declare itself large; clients and peers do, and the label brings a new set of counterparts. The figure refers to technical staff and to Spain, so it should not be read as a universal benchmark. Other markets, and other building typologies, may draw the line elsewhere.
The consequence he describes is commercial.
The size of a practice positions it to work with developers handling high volumes of residential projects.
The relevant developers, in other words, change with the practice, because a promoter handling volume needs a counterpart able to deliver at volume. The scale of the client and the scale of the practice move together.
The more interesting claim is the trade-off. In his words,
Growth clearly opens doors to national developers and may, with some exceptions, take us a little further away from local developers.
Access is stated with confidence, while distance is stated with caution. Whether that distance is a choice, a by-product or something actively managed is not specified. Here practice growth becomes a positioning question rather than a capacity question. A practice that built its relationships on proximity must now decide what it offers a different kind of client. Capacity, delivery record and consistency across many homes are plausible propositions, but they are different from familiarity with a place and its people. Whether the two can coexist in a single message, or whether the firm must choose, remains an open matter.
There is also a tension worth naming between this point and the next. If growth moves the practice toward clients who buy at volume, closeness may be expressed differently or may matter differently. Whether closeness remains a differentiator with national developers, or is mainly an asset with local ones, is not settled by the evidence offered. It is something each practice would need to test with its own clients rather than assume.
Closeness, Delegation and Shared Ownership
As practice growth moves business development away from the principal’s desk, the principal’s role has to be redefined, deliberately or not. The position described here is measured:
The managing partner is not decisive in many projects, although in some cases it is still advisable for them to get involved, as it demonstrates our closeness and commitment to our clients.
The distinction between “advisable” and “decisive” carries weight. It positions the principal’s presence as a signal to the client rather than as the mechanism that wins the work. If that reading is right, the value lies in what the presence communicates, which raises a practical matter: which opportunities warrant the signal, and how does the practice decide? A signal used on every pursuit risks losing its meaning, while one used too rarely may be read as indifference. The criteria for choosing are not described, and they are probably worth making explicit.
The structure around the principal is equally candid.
We have a Business Development department, but it is not entirely independent, precisely because the managing partner sometimes gets involved and helps develop new business.
This is presented as a fact, not as a problem. A structure in which the principal still contributes to new business can preserve relationships that a purely delegated model might lose. It can also blur accountability for results. The evidence does not favour either reading, and the outcome likely depends on how roles are defined in daily operation rather than on the structure on paper.
The most distinctive element concerns where opportunities originate.
We see Business Development as a responsibility shared across the whole practice, even though its direction is set by a dedicated department. Many commissions and opportunities come through colleagues whose role does not formally include business development but who, through their day-to-day contacts, hear about opportunities we could pursue.
This widens the surface through which a firm listens to the market. Every architect, technician and project lead becomes a potential source, which in a growing practice is a significant multiplication of contact points. Business development, described this way, is less a department than a network, with the department providing direction and the practice providing reach.
The model carries a dependency, though. Information heard in everyday contacts has value only if it reaches people who can act on it. How those leads are captured, qualified and credited is not described, and it is the point on which this model would stand or fall. Shared responsibility can mean that everyone contributes, or that no one is accountable. Which of the two applies depends on mechanisms rather than intent, and practice growth tends to test them, because what works through informal contact in a small team must be organized as headcount rises.
This leaves the underlying distinction open: is business development one team’s job, or an organizational culture that operates regardless of structure? The position expressed here implies both, with direction centralized and activity distributed. Hybrids of this kind are common in principle and harder to run in practice, since they require the department to coordinate people it does not manage and the wider team to treat a secondary task as a real contribution.
What The Firm May Want to Test
Practice growth rarely arrives as a single decision. It accumulates through projects accepted and declined, through the clients who start calling and those who stop, and through responsibilities that migrate from one person to a team. The value of this perspective lies in describing those shifts from inside a practice that has lived them, and in doing so as trade-offs rather than as improvements.
It is also a single perspective: one practice, one typology, one market. The figures of 25 homes and 40 to 50 technical staff are testimony from a specific context, not rules to be applied elsewhere. The more transferable element is the set of questions the testimony raises:
- The floor. Where is your practice’s minimum viable project, who set it, and was it set deliberately or inherited from the way the practice grew?
- The comparison set. Who now defines your peer group, you or your clients, and does your positioning reflect it or still describe the practice you were?
- The principal’s presence. When the principal attends, what does the client conclude, and does the practice measure whether it changes the outcome?
- The shared model. If business development belongs to everyone, what is the mechanism by which an opportunity heard by an architect reaches the pipeline and is followed up?
Read together, these positions suggest that practice growth is as much a series of trade-offs as an expansion. Each gain described, whether access to national developers, a more structured function or a broader base of informal sources, is paired with something that moves out of reach or becomes harder to see. None of this argues for or against growth. It argues for naming what changes while it is changing, because the alternative is to discover it afterwards.
One question remains for the reader. If your practice doubled in size, which of the things that built its reputation would still be possible, and which would quietly have become someone else’s work?