Partners
For builders, realtors, developers and consultants
When your client asks the design question
You're mid-project and they ask what it should look like, or whether you can help them choose. Here's what happens when you say the name of a studio.
Referring someone is not a favour you're doing us. It's your name on the recommendation, and if it goes badly you're the one taking that phone call. We've built how we work with partners around that, because it's the part most studios never say out loud.
Metric Design has worked in Saskatoon since 2011, on whole-home renovations, custom builds, acreage and farm homes, and commercial fit-outs from clinics and offices to retail and hospitality. We work alongside builders and contractors regularly, and we're comfortable being brought in at any point, including partway through when something has changed.
What we protect on your project
Not what we create. What we protect, because that's the part that affects you.
- Your schedule
- Selections and design decisions locked before the trades need them, not while they're standing in the room waiting.
- Your sequence
- No layout changes after the pour. If something has to move, it moves at the drawing stage or it doesn't move.
- Your number
- We don't talk a client into a scope that breaks the budget you quoted them. If they want more, that's a conversation with you in it.
- Your standing
- You get the credit for the introduction, and you're named in the project write-up when the work is published.
- Your peace of mind
- You hear back. Twice.
How a referral actually works
- Give them our number, or send us their name and we'll make the first call ourselves. Whichever is less work for you.
- We talk to them for fifteen minutes at no cost, and if what they need is outside what we do, we say so early and point them somewhere useful rather than stringing it out.
- We email you when they book. Two lines, so you know the introduction landed.
- We email you again when the project starts, with what we're doing and roughly when. So you're never the last to know about a project you started.
That fourth step is the one partners tell us is missing everywhere else. You refer someone, you hear nothing, and you quietly stop referring. We'd rather write two emails than lose the relationship to silence.
Where we fit, depending on who you are
Builders and contractors
You want decisions made early and held. We work to your schedule, we put selections in writing, and we'd rather be told we're wrong at the drawing stage than be right after framing.
Realtors
Styling and staging is usually the easiest place to start together, because it's fast, it's visible, and it either sells the house or it doesn't. Low risk for you, and a straightforward first project for us.
Property managers and developers
Lease-up time and turnover quality. We work on tenant improvements and fit-outs, and we understand that an empty suite is the problem, not the finishes.
Practice and equipment consultants
Dental, medical, veterinary. You're usually in the room before anyone else is, advising someone opening their own practice for the first time. We'd like to be the studio you name.
Two programmes, and one of them is unusual
The partner programme. For builders, contractors, architects, realtors, developers and consultants who send us work. Trade terms, direct access to the studio, and the feedback loop above as standard. The terms are a conversation rather than a published rate card, because they depend on how we work together.
The designer and graduate programme. For design graduates and emerging designers starting out in Saskatchewan: trade access to our vendors, and mentorship from a studio that has been doing this a long time. Nobody in this market runs one, and we think that's a gap worth closing rather than a moat worth keeping.
If you're a designer just starting your own practice and that sounds useful, say so when you get in touch. It's a real programme, not a courtesy.
