Letter From The President — December 2021
It’s hard to believe it has been five years since I became the president of OCBA. I’m lucky to have acquired a healthy and profitable firm, but even with that, it has been a steep learning curve to go from being a landscape architect that writes proposals, manages camp master planning projects, and is part of a management team to sole owner and decision-maker for all aspects of the business.
One of the biggest challenges of these first five years has been to identify our reason for being. Back when I started at OCBA in 1993 there were six experienced project managers with revolving support staff to design, create drafts, and manage project budgets. Today we are a much smaller firm with just three project managers and one support staff person. However, we are still often competing with larger firms for the same kind of aspirational projects we were doing 20 years ago. Therefore, my job is to convey to potential clients that we can do the work as well as or better than our competitors despite our smaller size.
So, that helped us identify our reason for being— to provide better service and design solutions than any other landscape architecture firm so we can win and successfully-complete aspirational projects. However, I believe that has always been OCBA’s reason for being, so maybe I should say we rediscovered it…
About a year into my ownership of OCBA the time seemed right to invest in developing a marketing strategy that would help us define what we do best and why our clients should work with us. It seems like an easy question to answer but opened up a lot of discussion about where the firm had been, was at present, and wanted to go in the future.
After the entire OCBA staff worked with our marketing strategist for a year we surmised that the three areas in which we already have the greatest strengths, most consistently apply to our projects, and provide the most benefit are:
Climate Resiliency/Biodiversity
Green Infrastructure
Placemaking
Therefore, OCBA strives to be a thought-provoking leader in these three areas. Our goal on every project is to use a diverse, deep-rooted native plant palette that supports pollinators and sequesters carbon; manage rainwater by restoring or mimicking natural systems so that flooding is reduced; and work with the community to create beautiful spaces that are equitable, diverse and vibrant. We believe that this multi-pronged focus provides the most benefit to our clients, their communities, and the earth.
Through defining our reason for being and determining what we offer that makes us the best choice for our clients we have revealed the three pillars of OCBA that will guide our next 50 years and help us create positive environmental change on every project.
— Sandy Bliesener, President of OCBA
