CGarchitect Industry Survey - Ask Me Anything

[Jeff Mottle]

As I'm sure many of you have seen, I've been posting results of our latest industry survey as Infographics. http://www.cgarchitect.com/features/category/industry-surveys

 

I was having a conversation tonight with a friend who started asking quite a few specific questions about the data on the Vol 5. graph I just posted. Things like:

 

- Where were the locations of those who saw a decline in their businesses

- What sort of services were they offering

- What were their ages

- How old were their companies

- What do they think are new techs that might turn things around

 

So in answering all of those questions it occurred to me I will never be able to create enough infographics to fully answer every single question. So I thought I'd open this thread as an open discussion. An "Ask Me Anything" of sorts.

 

There is TONS of data and the ways I can filter and sort it, is almost endless.

 

So ask me anything you've always wanted to know about the industry (other than how much should I get paid) as you can access our previous salary survey here: http://www.cgarchitect.com/2013/01/20132013-visualization-salary-survey-now-available

 

If I have the data to answer your question, I'll post it here.

 

Jeff

[Andres Saarnak]

Maybe merging vol.5 with vol.2 (or even others) somehow? There are a lot of ways to do this for sure, but I guess this would be interesting to see if or what successful people and companies do differently.

 

Who has seen the revenue growth and best year for a company- are they happier, are they working more, what type of projects do they visualize, is their project planning (time spent on different tasks) different, are those people more positive about animation, vr, ar, realtime and mobile apps?

[Ernest Burden III]

What size studio is most profitable and/or sustainable (so income + longevity) ?

[Jeff Mottle]

Great suggestions. Will work up the best way to show this. Keep them coming

[Scott Schroeder]

It would be interesting to see if the increase in growth comes with increase in budgets/time or is the trend to increase business but decrease time and budgets.

[John Dollus]

In the end, most people just want to find out how they are doing when compared to their peers.

 

At the moment, none of the released data addresses that. What you really need is an interactive page or spreadsheet so people can filter down to their own demographic. That way, the person living in a basement as a dependent using pirated tools can drill down to find out if charging $150 a rendering correlates to a positive outlook and overall satisfaction. Of course, that would require questions about size of organization, location, amount spent on software per year, fee per project, if they live alone, and if they are the primary supporter. A few of those are spread around the infographics but not enough to draw conclusions.

 

Aggregating the data from $2.5 million/year agency/studio model to the $28k/year freelancer and lumping them together with the billion dollar global design firm muddies the waters quite a bit.

 

so, I guess the question would be How many of the survey respondents from the US are currently employed by a corporation whose primary source of revenue is derived from the design and/or construction of commercial buildings, not derived from the production of marketing material (images/animation/interactive) and has a staffing size of between 50-100 employees in the local office?

[Jeff Mottle]

 

At the moment, none of the released data addresses that. What you really need is an interactive page or spreadsheet so people can filter down to their own demographic.

 

That would be nice to do for sure, however the software that allows you to do that is very expensive, and I'd have to charge for access. I paid for a local desktop only version when I did the salary survey and heard no end of bitching about that when I had to charge for it. Thankfully not everyone in this industry is so entitled to think everything should be handed to them on a silver platter, but the fee I'd have to charge to recoup my costs for what you describe would probably cause a pitchfork crew to hunt me down.

 

 

That way, the person living in a basement as a dependent using pirated tools can drill down to find out if charging $150 a rendering correlates to a positive outlook and overall satisfaction. Of course, that would require questions about size of organization, location, amount spent on software per year, fee per project, if they live alone, and if they are the primary supporter. A few of those are spread around the infographics but not enough to draw conclusions.

 

For some things for sure, but I'm also finding in many cases there is a lot of similar responses regardless of the demographic.

 

so, I guess the question would be How many of the survey respondents from the US are currently employed by a corporation whose primary source of revenue is derived from the design and/or construction of commercial buildings, not derived from the production of marketing material (images/animation/interactive) and has a staffing size of between 50-100 employees in the local office?

 

For your very specific segment, there were 12 people who took the survey matching these criteria:

 

- Involved with Arch Viz production or management

- From the US Only

- Works for: Architectural Firm, Interior Design Firm, Engineering Firm, Civil/Landscape/Urban Planning Firm, Real Estate Developer, Building Contractor, Lighting Designer, Retail Designer

- Company size is between 51-100 (I could not filter based on local offices only as I don't have that granular of data)

 

So what do you want to know about them?

[Jeff Mottle]

What size studio is most profitable and/or sustainable (so income + longevity) ?

 

So to answer your question about which company size is most profitable. That would be sole practitioners. Over 50% indicated their net annual profit margin was more than 36%, with 35% indicating their profit margin was more than 55%

 

There is an interesting trend when you look at the data though. You can see when there are likely growing pains in company size and thus a lowering of profit margin. If my hypothesis is correct, I'd say when people hit the 11-20 range, the 51-100 range you see significant changes in company structure and profit margin.

 

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=54008&d=1455308201

[Jeff Mottle]

John, did some digging this afternoon and there might now be some options to make the data public in the way you described. The software I use has changed their licensing model so stay tuned. Will dig into it further after the long weekend.

 

EDIT: OK, calling it a week, but spent about 4 hours today digging into how I might do this and it's all coming back to me now. I spent the better part of a month solid cleaning and doing data reshaping for the salary survey. That was on data that was exponentially easier to analyze. The industry survey would take even longer due to its complexity. Not sure I can justify the time and expense.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Jeff Mottle

[Nic H]

I'm not sure if its covered in your surveys but I wonder where staff / cg technicians come from. self trained? architecture school dropouts? short real world courses? crossing over from vfx/games industries?

 

there is a *huge* worldwide lack of talented staff around at the moment capable of doing commercial grade work and i don't see any steady new source for training these people. the demand for imagery and visual content for property doesn't seem to be waning

[RyderSK]

I was mostly gonna ask John's question, but even like this the data is useful to me. On most level, they give even more positive outlook on the industry than I thought, esp. the last one.

Though I wonder how much of this could have been skewed by lot of strong players who took this survey as suggested :- ).

 

(I have to say I am creeped out by that weird face at right corner, surely there is better graphicon for that)

 

Anyway, thank you a lot for for publishing these.

[krishtawadley]

few points still wanted to know.

 

 

Regards,

Krishta Wadley

[John Dollus]

John, did some digging this afternoon and there might now be some options to make the data public in the way you described. The software I use has changed their licensing model so stay tuned. Will dig into it further after the long weekend.

 

EDIT: OK, calling it a week, but spent about 4 hours today digging into how I might do this and it's all coming back to me now. I spent the better part of a month solid cleaning and doing data reshaping for the salary survey. That was on data that was exponentially easier to analyze. The industry survey would take even longer due to its complexity. Not sure I can justify the time and expense.

 

 

Yeah, I remember when it was paid access and it was totally worth it in my opinion. Thanks for checking into it.

[John Dollus]

So to answer your question about which company size is most profitable. That would be sole practitioners. Over 50% indicated their net annual profit margin was more than 36%, with 35% indicating their profit margin was more than 55%

 

There is an interesting trend when you look at the data though. You can see when there are likely growing pains in company size and thus a lowering of profit margin. If my hypothesis is correct, I'd say when people hit the 11-20 range, the 51-100 range you see significant changes in company structure and profit margin.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]54008[/ATTACH]

 

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=54008&d=1455308201

 

In your survey, did you differentiate between legit sole proprietors and moonlighters? In my experience, people don't openly differentiate so the profit margin data becomes unreliable. Perhaps a question immediately following the size of studio to ask if it was the respondents sole source of active income? It's easy to show a profit when your only expense is time and I have found that a healthy percentage of one-person providers are actually employed by another entity.

[Jeff Mottle]

In your survey, did you differentiate between legit sole proprietors and moonlighters? In my experience, people don't openly differentiate so the profit margin data becomes unreliable. Perhaps a question immediately following the size of studio to ask if it was the respondents sole source of active income? It's easy to show a profit when your only expense is time and I have found that a healthy percentage of one-person providers are actually employed by another entity.

 

There is a question that asks about people's involvement in the industry (Full Time, Part Time, Casual). So I ran the 1 person stats again against only people who are working full time in CG and the numbers surprisingly did not change much.

 

[Justin Hunt]

doesn't surprise me at all, moonlighting is so common across the industry, regardless of whether you work in-house for architects or in a studio. I 'd say the ones not moonlighting are either under a specific contract, already working for themselves or just couldn't be bothered.

 

Some employers hate it, but most accept it as long as there is no conflict of interest or doesn't impact on their full time job.