Focus on our 50th: Reflections from Don Miskell and Frank Boffa

We spoke with Don Miskell and Frank Boffa about the early days of the business, its growth and evolution, and the shared values that have been the foundation of Boffa Miskell for 50 years.

Q: One of Boffa Miskell’s core company values is passion. People at Boffa Miskell love what they do, and you get a sense that it’s been that way from the start.

DON: When we came into the consultancy world, there were few landscape architects in private practice. We promoted the profession of landscape architecture with missionary zeal. Frank had already started the practice when I joined; the implicit core values including passion, integrity, and creativity were already embedded into the culture.

FRANK: We worked incredibly hard during those very early years. The profession was pretty new when we started, and we all were young. We loved what we did, and we were committed to the culture we had created. I think that was the most important thing.

Q: Integrity — being trusted and accountable — has been important from the beginning, too.

DON: I saw that value of integrity in action on my very first project. I assisted on a landscape assessment for a road in Queenstown. We reached a judgement that the proposed road would significantly compromise the natural values of the iconic landscape on which it was to be located. Understandably our client did not agree with that conclusion; but we didn’t change our professional opinion.

FRANK: The type of work we were aspiring to do – and we started off doing small design jobs – but once we got involved in planning and the sort of things where you have to give opinions, and make judgements, and invariably you’d end up in environment court. So you have to have integrity. You didn’t want to go to court in support of your client’s case if you didn’t really agree with it. So you have to be pretty upfront. When you take on a job that’s going to be controversial or where your judgement may be challenged, you must tell the client where you stand. And if the client doesn’t like what you’re bound to say, then you shake hands and part company. Your reputation could be ruined overnight if you’ve been bought.

Q: The company grew fairly quickly in just a few years.

FRANK: I think in the early 1980s our recruiting was just fantastic. We brought in many people who are still here today, and we opened the Auckland office. When we sorted ourselves out and rebranded the company as Boffa Miskell, we got the bit between our teeth and we really went for it. We just grew the firm, in many ways it was hard to keep up with it. We were doing good work, and we were really into it.

DON: We recruited an amazing group of people who had similar values. The early leadership group was quite broad and had diverse personalities – we really became a group of friends with diverse personalities and interests – all bound by that shared set of core values.

FRANK: In the first 15 years or so, I don’t recall anyone resigning. Of course, as you grow and take on more people, it’s not going to stay that way. It was almost unreal in the beginning – we just kept growing and nobody dropped off.

Q: How did expanding the business and taking on new disciplines affect things?

FRANK: We consciously decided very early on to widen our base. Most of us came from a science or horticulture background, rather than art or architecture. We decided that we didn’t want to become multi-disciplinary in the sense of having engineers or architects or surveyors. We wanted to expand into landscape planning, which embraces ecology and planning. We wanted to integrate those skills with our in-house landscape skills; and we got much better at what we did, as we brought those people on board. It added to our skill set, which helped us grow immensely.

I think that’s a unique feature of the company – we built on that broad landscape foundation. So I think it’s inter-disciplinary, rather than multi-disciplinary.

DON: At one point in the early ‘90s we put together our first formal strategic plan, and asked ourselves: ‘What business are we in?’ We came up with the answer: ‘We are in the business of creating total integrated environmental solutions’ and those involve the integration of design, planning and science.

When we added new disciplines, it helped the business, but it also helped us as individuals. We got to grow as people and expand our knowledge and collaboration skills. I think that’s a characteristic of the company and the people at Boffa Miskell: we like to continually learn and grow and seek out new goals and challenges.

Q: There must have been some tough patches along the way. Did that diversity of disciplines help during those times?

FRANK: There has been a pattern of that; very much. Just the economic swings in the country. The crash in the 1980s was really bad and we went down to a four-day week, reluctantly, but we didn’t want to lay people off. Different types of work got us through the economic swings. There might have been a drop in building work, but there was a lot of planning work going on: resource consents and environmental assessments continued. Over the years we’ve ridden a few storms.

DON: Over time I think we got better at weathering fluctuations and learning the lessons. If you look at the company’s response to COVID, for example. I suspect there were lessons taken from what the Christchurch office went through during the earthquakes. Overnight, we all had to work from home, tune up our business systems and provide support and pastoral care for our teams. It helps having insight from people who’ve been through things; and the sense of camaraderie that’s ingrained in the company is important during difficult times.

Q: You’ve both stepped away from full-time involvement with the company, but what are your thoughts on the future?

FRANK: I was a strong advocate of widening the ownership of the company. I was the first on board, and I was the first off, in terms of that model. It was a way of bringing new blood into the firm and into the leadership, because succession is so important. Many firms have disintegrated or folded or have been taken over because they didn’t have a succession plan – or if they did, they didn’t adhere to it.

DON: The past is the past, and it was exciting for those of us who lived through the early pioneering years; but the future for the company is wide-open. As Boffa Miskell evolves, the company remains bound together by a common purpose and the core values that continue to inform what we do; and I hope it always will.