For most drawing offices, a Revit templates service means weighing up three routes: hiring a freelancer, taking on an employee, or handing the work to us. A freelancer is quick to arrange, but drops away as soon as the assignment grows or their diary fills up. A new employee means recruitment, onboarding and ongoing payroll costs, while demand for template work peaks and then drops off again.
We sit in between. Our team is ready, we deploy what the project needs and scale back as soon as the set is in place.
You pay no ongoing payroll costs and keep the intellectual property of everything we deliver. If someone on our side drops out through illness or holiday, we replace that person and the work carries on. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and Sam, our team leader, directs the technical side. We draft, and we deliberately keep engineering outside our scope, so our team stays fully focused on the drawing set. That is the difference most project leaders are looking for.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
From first conversation to delivery of your Revit templates
The process starts with a conversation. We go through which files are currently in circulation, which projects run on them and where things go wrong. You usually supply an existing set: a project template that has grown out of hand over the years, families from three different sources and views nobody dares touch any more. We look at those documents ourselves first, instead of calling about every unclear point. We then tell you what we see and what we propose. Sometimes a clean-up is enough. If the set is very messy, we prefer to rebuild, because repairing would take longer than starting afresh.
We present that trade-off to you, and you decide. We then deliver in parts. First a set-up, then feedback, then the next step. That way your project leader sees early on where we are heading and can adjust course before most of the work has gone in. We decide the meeting rhythm together: on an urgent project we talk every two days, on a calmer one weekly. Contact runs via email, phone and meetings.
We are happy to visit you or welcome you at our office. On larger projects we work with software you can log into to follow progress. For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email. Every delivery goes through our own review before it leaves the building. A second team member checks the drafter's work, Sam then checks it as team leader, and Barry, our project manager, gives it a final check. Those three layers keep the number of errors to a minimum in practice.
Software, versions and formats around your Revit templates
We work in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, as well as Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. For template work the focus is naturally on Revit, but the connection with the rest of the chain counts just as much. Many drawing offices still have a large stock of DWG material that needs to go into the new template, and that requires agreement on layers, line types and naming. We deliver and process DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP files, and in practice every common CAD format.
We always work with the latest versions of the software, so a file you supply never holds us up. The work is done in our own environment with our own licences, so we do not ask for space in your environment and do not burden your IT administrators. The work is done remotely from our own office, and that works perfectly well in practice because files and feedback travel digitally anyway. More important than the software package is the standard behind it.
We draft to your drawing conventions, and we get those from you: the layer structure, the hatching, the title blocks, the way elevations and sections are named. If there is no documented standard, we derive it from the existing set and explicitly present our assumptions. That keeps the template recognisable for your own drafting team. A template that is technically correct but does not match the drawing office's habits will not actually be used in practice, and that is a loss we want to avoid.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
Scaling up Revit work during a peak
Template work rarely comes on its own. Usually there is a project running at the same time that needs drawings from that very template, and that is exactly when the drawing office is already fully booked. With our large, variable team, we scale up or down for each project. The team is already in place, so we do not need to recruit first; we deploy what the project needs. If it is urgent, we add people straight away and divide the work so that the parts that can run in parallel actually do. You keep a fixed point of contact throughout. Barry picks up the request, after which Sam takes over the technical side and, as team leader, directs the CAD team. He has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer himself.
The core of our team has around twenty-five years of experience combined. If someone drops out through illness or holiday, we replace them and the work carries on without you hearing anything about it. That is exactly the difference from an extra employee of your own, who leaves a gap when they are absent and still gets paid when things are quiet. We only charge pure working hours. If someone steps away for five minutes to get a coffee, we stop the clock. We agree together how we bill: by the hour or per project at a fixed price. We do not do prepaid hour bundles or monthly subscriptions, because that does not suit work that varies from peak to peak.
Getting started with our Revit templates service
As far as we are concerned, we can start once there is enough information. In practice that means the current template or the file that serves as one, a few recent projects in which the template was used, the drawing conventions if they are written down, and an idea of what needs to come out of it. Without that last point we build too much or too little, so that is what we spend most attention on in the first conversation.
We answer a new request within 1 to 2 working days. This is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project, and only once the picture is clear do we start building. A short assignment is fine.
If you like, we start with a small first package, for example a handful of families and a single view, so you can judge our speed and accuracy before handing us the whole template. We think that is a reasonable way to build trust; we also prefer that someone sees the work first. We assign the intellectual property of all our work to you. We have not signed a non-disclosure agreement so far because clients have not asked for one, but we are open to an NDA if it fits your procedure.
You can reach us by phone or via the contact form on this website. This is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project, look at the existing documents and tell you which route we would choose. If you are considering a Revit templates service, a half-hour conversation is usually enough to find out whether the work is a good fit for us.
Frequently asked questions about our Revit templates service
Let us build your Revit templates
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.