Leadership Development Exclusively for AEC Firms
Industry-tailored peer groups, workshops, and direct advisory support for architects, engineers, contractors, and other AEC professionals becoming better leaders.
Helping busy firms develop the leaders they need.
Helping professionals master the craft of business leadership.
The Terrain
Becoming An Effective Leader Is A Difficult Climb
It's not your imagination — it's a structural problem with professional occupations.
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Colleges and universities fail to prepare professionals for the leadership challenges they'll one day face. Most professional degrees include little, if any, content or courses related to leadership or management.
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Most firms are too busy, stretched too thin, or lack the size and scale to devote the time and resources they would like to leadership development. As a result, internal mentoring programs are often inconsistent and slow to produce results.
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Senior leaders often find it's "lonely at the top," having few good options to accelerate their growth and few peers that understand the challenges of leading an AEC firm.
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And typical options for leadership development are a poor fit for professionals navigating the challenges of leading a construction or design firm — and the teams, divisions, or studios within them.
And The Problem May Be Worse Than Ever
A Shrinking Talent Pool
Competition For Leadership Talent
Senior leaders are retiring at the fastest rate in history, while too few leaders from younger generations are yet ready to step into their shoes. Competing for that scarce talent on the open market is expensive and hard to win. And for aspiring leaders, there are fewer mentors left to learn from.
Fewer Moments For Insight
Growth Has Gotten Harder
Remote and hybrid schedules, the constant bombardment of AI, email, and notifications, and the broader pull of always-on technology continue to erode the intentional, in-person moments where insight, mentorship, and real leadership growth actually happen.
The Summit
Excellence in AEC Leadership
It's the craft of leading highly-skilled professionals to do their best work.
Most leadership programs pride themselves on being "industry agnostic." They'll tell you the right mix of emotional intelligence and soft skills makes anyone an effective leader.
We disagree.
Those skills are necessary — but not sufficient — because AEC leadership isn't a profile or personality. It is the specific craft of leading high-agency individuals through high-complexity situations.
Architects, engineers, construction managers, designers, and other technical experts: their work depends on their own judgment, operating in the uncertain, high-stakes world of design and construction. You can't command people like that into high performance. You can only create the conditions where they can do their best work.
That's a different challenge than almost any other in business — and it's the one YC² is built around.
YC² develops effective AEC leaders:
They provide clarity and order.
Clarity in the face of confusion outside their team, order in the face of potential chaos within their team — enough structure and accountability to keep everyone aligned, without so much that it smothers the judgment of capable people.
They earn the right to lead.
People decide whether to follow a leader on two instincts: do they have my best interests at heart, and can they do anything about it? Warmth and strength. Our leaders learn how to build and display both.
They raise the lid.
A team performs only to the level of leadership above it. We build the four capacities that set that ceiling — communication, empathy, the six kinds of strength, and an executive mindset — on the one foundation that makes the others possible: knowing yourself — and seeing where you need to improve.
They see the business behind the work.
Not just the technical side — the decisions, the people, the systems, and the economics of how a firm actually runs and makes money. Leadership as a strategy in service of the business's goals, not a personality to perform.
And they're willing to pay what it costs.
Real leadership has a price — the hard conversations, the patience, trusting others, the weight of carrying a team. But the cost of bad leadership is higher: wasted talent, good people underdeveloped and looking for better options, a firm that never becomes what it could have been.
The Path Forward
Better Opportunities For Growth
Decades of adult development research point to the same four conditions for genuine growth: a persistent struggle, an awareness of our limits, a domain we care about, and sufficient supports to keep us making progress without being overwhelmed.
YC² exists to increase the support available to AEC leaders.
A Tale of Two Leaders
Leader One
on their own
He's talented. He was promoted because he was excellent at the work. But now he's responsible for people, projects, and margins.
He reads a book here and there. He catches a good podcast on the drive in some days. But most of the learning happens the way it always has — one hard week at a time.
He has well-meaning internal mentors, but they're stretched for time. HR cares about his development, but it's trying to serve a wide range of people and priorities.
When a new leadership challenge emerges, he often works through it alone. There's no time set aside to think, no one further along the path to compare notes with, and no clear language for what "good leadership" even looks like.
A year or two goes by. He's a better leader than he was. But no one knows how much faster he could have grown.
- The firm is the only classroom
- A peer or two if he's lucky
- Mentorship when time allows
- Leadership development by chance
Leader Two
a part of YC²
She has the same job, works for a similar firm, the same hard weeks. But she has more support.
Once a month, she sits down with peers from other AEC firms. She brings her challenges. She hears theirs. She gets the reps of a dozen leadership problems, not just her own.
She gets structured insights and curriculum from an external mentor who has walked the same path.
She works through a 26-chapter guide on high-agency leadership with the author who wrote it.
She makes commitments to the group on how she will improve as a leader each month.
She feels supported, invested in, and less alone in the work of leading.
A year or two later, she's not just better. She's confident, effective, getting results — and she can tell you exactly why.
- The firm is just one classroom
- Eight to ten peers to grow with
- Consistent mentorship
- Leadership development by design
About
Zack Tomlin
Zack Tomlin is the founder and head facilitator of Your Craft Your Climb. A licensed engineer, he knows all too well how the current education and career trajectory of AEC professionals doesn't prepare them for the challenge of leading teams and organizations.
At twenty-seven, Zack founded an engineering firm in the AEC industry and, over the next twelve years, grew it from a company of one into a firm of twenty. Having grown up around construction sites and the trades, he built the firm from the ground up, working hand-in-hand with contractors, architects, and owners on projects across the Southeast. He navigated the organization successfully through an acquisition and spent the following year as office president for the firm that acquired his.
After leaving engineering, Zack became an advisor and consultant to general contractors and A & E firms. During that time, two insights were made clear for him:
- The challenges of the AEC industry are unique and largely unaddressed by the current leadership development industry.
- No system, software, technology, or consultant can deliver a better return on investment than investing in the capacity of a company's leaders — owners and senior executives, but also the junior and emerging leaders they, and so much of the organization, depend on.
That experience led Zack to author Craft: The Expedition of Business — a national award-winning book for small business and entrepreneurship — and to establish Your Craft Your Climb to bring the insights, principles, and processes of his work to professionals aspiring to be better leaders.
Zack, his wife (a licensed architect), and their two daughters live in Raleigh, North Carolina, though he works with clients and facilitates peer groups and immersive workshops across North Carolina and throughout most of the Southeast & Mid-Atlantic.
Environments For Growth
Three Ways To Work Together
Peer Groups
A small cohort of high-potential leaders meeting together on a monthly cadence — combining a curriculum of leadership tools and insights with live problem-solving drawn from group members' current challenges. One in-person half-day each month, with on-demand access to Zack between meetings.
$650 / month
*application, acceptance, and NDA required
Immersive Workshops
Focused sessions that instill the frameworks and principles leaders need. Offered both as open enrollment cohorts drawn from different firms across the AEC industry, and as private workshops held internally for a single firm.
$4,000–$8,000 / day
One-On-One
Direct advisory engagements tailored to a specific leader or organization. Cadence, focus, and depth are shaped around the challenges in front of you — whether that's navigating a transition, working with multiple leaders in a single firm, or working through a problem that doesn't fit a group setting.
Starting at $1,500 / month
If you're a leader serious about getting better at your craft — or improving the skills of the leaders you depend on — the best way to get started is a conversation with Zack.
Click Here To Schedule A TimeNo long-term commitments, no retainers, money-back guarantee.
The firms of our clients will always be the primary place its leaders are formed. YC² does not replace that responsibility entirely. It creates an outside developmental environment — away from the daily pressure of projects, clients, and internal dynamics — where leaders can reflect, learn, be challenged, and return to the firm with better judgment, clearer thinking, and more confidence.
Learn More
Go Deeper
Three ways to explore the ideas and impact behind YC².
Expand the cards below for more.