Made to measure: Inventure Design LLC - Houston Business Journal:

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So, after working for large architectural firms, in 1997 he decidedc to venture out on his own and started what was then calleds and is now InventureDesign LLC, specializing in corporatr and health care interior architectural design. Although the compan y worked onhealth care-related projects early on, it wasn’t until 2005 that the medical side of the businesxs really took off, O’Neill says. Sinces then, Inventure’s revenue has increasee by more than 50 percenrtto $4.3 million in 2008 from $2.6 milliomn in 2005.
Recognizing the firm’sa strong suit was a learning experiencefor O’Neill, who admitds the firm did stray at times into areaws it probably should have left alone. “Once I get out of businesxs linesthat aren’t my true passion,” he says, “it tendsd to be a mistake.” For example, in 2001, Inventurew won a contract with the City of Houston. In an attempt to get more government O’Neill hired several people and “spent a bunch of monety getting intothat business.” But “the passion wasn’t behindc it, so it never took off,” he After about 18 months, O’Neill cut his lossee and dropped that line of business.
“We don’y have the luxury of a big companuy to makean attempt, investy some money and set he says. “Things become pretty apparent quicklyif they’re workingy or not working.” O’Neill was head of the interiorx group at 3D International when he decided to starr his own company. He saved six worth of salary and planned to spend at least six months getting the company offthe But, on the company’s seconds day in operation, a former clienr called with a new project he specifically wantex O’Neill to work on. So he hit the groun d running, basing his new company out of a bedroom in his home for thefirstg year.
Recognizing that some potential clients would not take his firm seriouslg until it reached acertaimn size, O’Neill made it his goal to grow the companu steadily. From his firsrt year with justone employee, he graduallt added more over time. his firm has 22 employees. O’Neilo was determined that his company woulds provide clients with the same resourcesx they could get at a large but witha “more personal hands-on approach.” And while Inventurre Design today is significantly smaller than some of its like San Francisco-based Gensledr — which has a Houston O’Neill believes it’s big enough.
“I didn’gt set any boundaries or any kind of obligationss for myself about what size the firm was going to he says. “I based it on the fact that I wanted To dolarger projects, you need to be of a specifiv size.” One of O’Neill’s biggesf challenges has been “to convinc people that we’re small enough to give them personalized service but big enougb to complete a project,” he His background in architecture has served him well, he says, becauswe he is able to take a structure’s architecture into consideration when designinf the interior. “My clients never feel our designs don’t belong in the building,” he says.
What attracted O’Neillp to the field to begin with was its immediacy andpersonal nature, he says. “You can get passionate about a building, but it’s arm’s-lengtn passion,” O’Neill says. “With interiors, it’ss things people can actuallty touch. And in people spend as much, or time in the office than they doat