The Clear on Black Story

June 21, 2015 by Carl Ross and Dolly Ross

Why Design Group Carl Ross is now Clear on Black

It Was Time to Clarify: After 19 years of doing what we do, we felt we needed to step back and take a good, hard look at how it was going. We reached out to clients, past and present, for feedback. We had roundtables with our entire team. We engaged business consultants. We took a dose of our own medicine, the diagnostics we perform for our clients, and took a dispassionate look at what we do best, where we can’t compete well, and how we could improve. It was brutal, lengthy, and finally fun once we got past some of the unknowns. We can honestly say we understand the anxiety and trepidation our clients feel when they embark on big change. The truth is, we had evolved but weren’t recognizing or communicating it. It was time.

We Understand What We Do Best: To us, design is first and foremost problem solving and finding the essential character of a property or project. Our diagnostic process, which has developed and evolved over many years, brings to the surface the essence, the issues, and the opportunities. Like black is the color against which all other colors are measured, we discovered our own black, our own standard of what we do best. It was time for us to focus on this process we had been unconsciously doing, bring it to the forefront, and hold true to it.

We Are Only As Good As Our People: We believe that great design starts with good leadership but needs to filter through each and every designer on our team to be successful for our clients. Leadership, mentorship and apprenticeship are paramount to what we do and give us another reason to love going to work each day. We wanted our name to reflect something beyond ourselves.

We Believe in Radical Transparency: We have proven that we can move more quickly and efficiently when everything is out in the open. We have worked that way with our employees and clients for nearly 20 years and now want to take it even further - by publishing information we think you’d want to know, such as our thoughts on relevant topics and issues, how we work, our fee structure, and philosophy, etc. We figure that the better you know us, our work, our expertise and how we work, the better we all are in determining if we’ll be a fit to work together. Clarity is the way forward.

We Like to Work With Clients That Get Us: By putting a stake in the ground to say exactly who we are, what we do best, and the process we believe is necessary to do it, we believe we save everyone’s valuable time by being better able to identify clients who want to let us bring our unique lens to unlock the hidden potential in their properties.

After all this, it only made sense. We’re Clear on Black.