He probably wasn't. Notice that the communications were always by someone "representing" him, but the most probable isnthat he had an office with a lot of Jr ar

He probably wasn't. Notice that the communications were always by someone "representing" him, but the most probable isnthat he had an office with a lot of Jr architects who would work on those assignments (with some guidelines and templates done by him, or more senior architects). He probably thought he could scale up and get more volume (and steady revenue stream) working on those small/medium projects as the bigger ones are more rare (even for a big architect). This is an error. Consultancy (I work in the industry) are similar in method to the architecture office, as it depends a lot on people and there is not much you can do to scale up without having to scale your workforce. And even worse, small clients (as we see by the librarian in the story) are usually very high maintenance. For that reason consultancies don't like (or simply don't work) with startups, as they will have less revenue but more work per client, so the scale up is tricky.