Being good at design and being good at running a design firm are two different jobs. This year, the American Society of Landscape Architects built a bridge between them. The first SKILL | ED Firm Leadership Accelerator ran from April through September and closed with an Industry Day in Los Angeles on September 15, held at the office of Studio-MLA just before the ASLA 2026 Conference on Landscape Architecture.
The program, per ASLA, aimed to prepare, empower, and advance the next generation of landscape architecture firm owners and leaders. That framing matters. It treats the move from designer to leader as a skill to be taught, not a rank to be waited for. For a field where many practitioners dream of opening their own studio, that is a quiet shift in how the profession thinks about career growth.
What did the inaugural cohort actually get? According to ASLA, six months of hands-on business training, financial literacy, and mentorship — the subjects design school rarely covers in depth. Readers following this should also see What Mercury Retrograde Actually Looks Like From Space.
Why does a design profession need business training?
Because the hardest problems in early practice are not drawing problems. ASLA's own description of the cohort's challenges reads like a list any new business owner would recognize: finding their positioning, developing clients, making the leap from doer to leader, and deciding how and how fast to grow. Those are questions of strategy, cash flow, and self-definition — not planting palettes or grading plans.
The Accelerator answered them with structure rather than lectures. Between April and September, participants met one-on-one with an industry mentor, worked in small peer study groups, and held office hours with program leader Kacey Clagett, founder of Appleseed Strategies. They also had access to SKILL | ED practice management materials and heard from guest speakers on business management, legal issues for design firms, marketing, and leadership and firm governance, per ASLA.
That mix is the telling part. Legal issues for design firms and firm governance are not topics a single seminar can fix. Building them into a six-month program suggests ASLA sees firm leadership as an ongoing discipline — one that benefits from repetition, mentors, and peers who are facing the same decisions at the same time.
What happened at Industry Day in Los Angeles?
The closing session was built for candor, not ceremony. On September 15, at Studio-MLA's office, each participant brought one or two problems they were actively wrestling with — positioning and business development, running a profitable practice, ownership transition, or work/life balance — and discussed them in small groups led by a guest mentor, according to ASLA.
The conversation was participant-led. Everyone in the room had a chance to listen, reflect, and share from their own lived experience. ASLA describes the session as informal and collegial, with mentors and peers eager for candid feedback and different perspectives.
The mentor list alone says something about the program's intent. Industry Day guest mentors included Mia Lehrer, FASLA, of Studio-MLA; Glen Schmidt, FASLA, of Schmidt Design Group; Valorie Born of VB Strat; Cinda Gilliland of re:public; Megan Horn of Studio-MLA; Jerany Jackson of Jerany Jackson Leadership Consulting; Toshi Karato of Civil Site Group; Hattie Pavlechko-Reiter of LandDesign; and Scott Rice of RHA Community Works, per ASLA. These are people who run firms or advise the people who do. Pairing emerging leaders with established ones puts lived experience directly in the room.
What does the first cohort tell us about where the field is heading?
Three things stand out from the facts ASLA shared. This connects to our earlier piece, What a Birth Chart Actually Maps, In Three Placements.
- Leadership is being treated as teachable. The program's stated goal — preparing the next generation of firm owners and leaders — reframes ownership as a learnable transition rather than a trial by fire.
- Peer community is the product. ASLA calls the connections among the cohort, mentors, and speakers "the true culmination of the Accelerator." The organization acknowledges that being an emerging leader can feel extremely daunting, and positions the network itself as the resource participants carry forward.
- The cohort is not one kind of leader. ASLA describes groups spanning new and growing founders, people navigating ownership transfer at established firms, and those building a new geographic presence or specialized design focus inside a larger organization. Leadership development here is not just about startups.
That last point may be the most practical. A designer stepping into a partner role at an established firm faces different questions than a founder opening a studio. A program that serves both widens who can see themselves leading.
Why does this matter beyond landscape architecture?
Because the pattern is familiar across creative and mission-driven fields. Talented practitioners are trained in the craft and then left to guess at the business. Programs like this one name the gap and fill it with mentors, materials, and peers. The communities that read society stories closely will recognize the shape: access to knowledge and networks is often the difference between an idea and a functioning organization. Coverage of how community news and professional fields handle that gap is part of the same story.
ASLA also framed the outcome in human terms. With this community of peers and supporters, the organization wrote, participants now have an array of resources to draw on as they move forward in their leadership journeys. That is not a promise about any one career. It is an investment in the infrastructure behind the practices that shape parks, campuses, and public space.
What remains unknown is what the participants do next — whether this inaugural cohort becomes a recurring program, and what its graduates build. ASLA has documented the first year. The second act is theirs to run.
