Solberg and Lowe had a similar feel-good experience when they visited Minneapolis for a day in the summer of 1995. Solberg had been very specific about what he hoped to find. "I wanted to see live, vibrant contributors on the ownership side," he says. "I didn't want a bunch of dead initials on the door." The men liked what they saw. "Doug and I walked in and said, 'This is where we'd want to be," says Solberg.
Although the fit felt good in the office, all involved wanted to make sure that the management teams got along outside the office as well, before shaking hands on the deal. To cut costs and to become better acquainted, they stayed in one another's homes when business took them to each other's cities. "Whether we were going to dinners together or spending weekends together," Solberg says, "we wanted to have time where we turned off the pagers and the phones and talked about what we like to do outside of work."
As the pre-merger equivalent of a first date, the two companies joined forces on a couple of hotel projects in Mississippi in the fall of 1995. Cuningham was particularly eager to give his staffers the opportunity to do their own cultural due diligence. "How much can you show them with slides?" he asks. "OK, Solberg + Lowe has a cool office. But they could have been really groovy-looking people, and I could hate every one of them. You can communicate all you want; it's working together that gets people to enjoy and respect one another."
The first date was a success. "Problems and differences came up," Solberg says, "but they had the willingness to have a dialogue. If we said, 'That isn't the way we do it,' they said, 'Tell us why you do it your way.' How we do what we do isn't really doctrine, and they seemed receptive to other ways of getting it done." Cuningham had a similar response. "We were learning how to work together and finding that it worked."
That was just the beginning. Everyone agrees that the holiday party in January 1996, although costly, was the best move the two companies made to get buy-in from their staffs. The Cuningham Group flew 38 people -- the entire staff of Solberg + Lowe, plus spouses, children, and significant others -- to Minneapolis. "That probably saved us five or six months in long-distance-bonding time," says Cuningham. "It was very expensive but well worth it. People still talk about it."
As well they might. In a friendly salute to their rugged Minneapolis colleagues, the Solberg + Lowe staffers wore lumberjack shirts and, as a token of their own sun-drenched lifestyle, presented the Minneapolis office with a classic surfboard, a Jacobs "longboard," upon which all the Angelenos and Phoenicians had signed their names. The Minneapolis crew greeted their western guests -- who would be staying in their homes -- with an odd assortment of scarves, hats, and gloves from the Salvation Army. "I still have my dashing Austrian hat with the feather," says Solberg.
To continue the getting-to-know-you process, the six partners of the soon-to-be-conjoined firms got together for a management retreat in Keystone, Colo., during the spring of 1996. They spent part of the time golfing and hiking, and part of the time holed up for a three-day session with a management consultant, personality profiles, and a bunch of flip charts and markers, planning out the strategic future of their incipient corporate entity.
Nothing, they realized, could take the place of daily face-to-face contact, so having at least one partner in each office would be crucial. The final arrangement had John Cuningham, John Hamilton, and Tom Hoskens remaining in Minneapolis, John Quiter joining Doug Lowe in Los Angeles, and Rick Solberg ending up in Phoenix.
Today board meetings rotate among the three locations, and design staff members travel among the offices on a project-by-project basis. Every July, to celebrate the anniversary of the 1996 merger, each office holds a party on the same day, called "Interdependence Day." On the first Interdependence Day, in 1996, the entire company gathered in Minneapolis, and the home team presented a genuine Old Town brand canoe to its western colleagues.
Even happy unions have their tribulations. Think of The Brady Bunch. Father with three boys marries mother with three girls. Six kids, one bathroom -- you do the math. So it is with culture melding. "You can't just lump them together and treat them all the same," says Cuningham. "Each office had a strong regional identity." Solberg agrees and sees the upside. "We don't want to create homogenized architecture," he says. "The challenge is nurturing the creative spark without putting a corral around it. If you want to be on the cutting edge in design, you can't do it by committee."
The merger agreement specified that the new entity would use the name the Cuningham Group, which Solberg admits took some adjustment on his part. "That was part of the strategy for us to come together," he says. "Sure, I regret the fact that my legacy has been removed from the overall banner, but we all thought keeping our name would be contradictory to the process of becoming one group."
"We couldn't reach anyone on a Friday afternoon," says John Cuningham. "We weren't sure how that was going to work out."
As the summer of 1996 passed, Cuningham, Solberg, and their newly amalgamated staff started to notice how the two companies, which had seemed so similar, began to show fundamental differences. Some were only on the surface, like the dress code. "We're all pretty much a knit-shirt crowd, and up there in Minneapolis you have some pretty tightly knotted ties," says Solberg. That sartorial stance on the part of the Minnesotans was due more to personal choice than to a dress code, so there wasn't much there to work through. More critical, the Los Angeles and Phoenix offices were used to fitting all their hours into a four-and-a-half-day workweek, taking off on Friday afternoons. "We couldn't reach anyone in those offices on a Friday afternoon," says Cuningham. "We weren't quite sure how that was going to work for us. At first we wondered if they were just lazier than we were. But we just had to adjust."
