Cathie Anderson: Roseville architects land big China contracts

The phone call from China came out of the blue in 2009, just after Williams + Paddon Architects + Planners won a prestigious Gold Nugget award for the design of a clubhouse on California's Central Coast.

Terry Green, a principal with the Roseville firm, fielded the call from a consultant whose clients were interested in using a Western architect for similar work.

"I spent a year-plus sending brochures and proposals, and then we arranged a business trip where we went out there to China and we went all over the country ... and we landed two really good clients," Green said.

In two years, those "really good clients" names are confidential agreed to work that makes up almost 40 percent of Williams + Paddon's billings. Increasingly, small architectural firms from Heller Manus Architects in San Francisco to Goettsch Partners in Chicago are booming with demand from China where they find clients who are adventurous with design and have money to spend.

"Budget's not an issue," said Green, a Sacramento native who attended Mira Loma High School. "They want the right design for the right project."

Williams + Paddon had been cultivating deals in South America and the Caribbean before the call from China, but funding for those projects is pending. In the meantime, the firm has begun work on everything from teahouses to golf clubhouses to a 100,000-square-foot exhibition hall in China.

Foreign business interests also came calling on Jim Schraith, but this query arrived via a form at his small startup's website, http://www.boardevals.com.

Dozens of corporations and nonprofit organizations use the online questionnaires at BoardEvals.com to assess the performance of their boards of directors, exposure to risk and more. On average, clients pay annual fees of $6,000 to $8,000.

"Our largest customers are literally multibillion-dollar organizations," said Schraith, a director for BloodSource and Folsom's SynapSense, among others. "Our smallest customer is a three-person board of a private company."

Schraith expects to add 400 director accounts this year to a base of 600. Directors log in from any computer to rate the board, company management and processes. It cuts down on paperwork or oral interviews and, because it's anonymous, often leads to franker assessments.

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Cathie Anderson: Roseville architects land big China contracts