Hallie Crouch
39, Partner, Director of Strategy
Bialosky
Cleveland
The first woman, the first millennial and the first non -traditional practitioner to be owned by the design firm of Cleveland, Bialosky, Crouch united during the great recession when many companies made layoffs.
After graduating with a master’s degree in architecture from Kent State University, the search for work directed Crouch to expand his vision of what his career would be. He took a different path from the architecture that finally led him to find his true call as a strategist and a marketer.
Crouch’s first job was for a boutique interior design store in Washington DC, a job that helped him grow up in business skills and confidence. She says the owner hired her and then had to leave for a while. “You imagine,” he says. “It’s a first 20 -year job and they give me the keys to a business and the owner says” you can get on the phone. ”
During his time at the store, Crouch treated national arts accounts and artists, conducted the store, conducted interior consultations, represented the business on television and managing goods and delivery. “It was such a wonderful experience because I discovered that I loved … being in the first business lines,” he says.
Returning to Cleveland where he grew up, Crouch did an architecture job with Bialosky, but he struggled until the practice offered a different path. “It was a turn of being the most low -performance employee to understand what I was concerned about and what the firm, which was the commercial strategy, was in the first lines and gaining work.”
For the past ten years, Crouch has focused on business development and marketing strategy. It became a couple in 2024.
A challenge for her company and for her has been competing to work with older companies. “As a strategist we have talked internally about what this means,” he says.
Bialosky promotes his strengths of the market, which includes public libraries. “We love being a leader in public libraries, both new construction and reform,” he says. “Libraries everywhere seek to invest” in community -centered spaces.
Bialosky also does a lot of higher education and mixed use developments. “At least in the Midwest, we see these traditional places and developers of shopping centers that are raised as redevelopment,” he says.
One of his roles is to train team members on how to win work on customer presentations. Crouch helps his team to “think about what makes us different,” he says. “What are customer pain points and just throw this thread and get our team to show the human side in the interviews.”
Crouch also organized a withdrawal of out -of -place women and a non -binary withdrawal for the firm that was a reflective balance of research, data sharing and vision. A men’s retirement was also held. Actable suggestions and honest comments were transmitted to higher leadership. The remarkable results included an improved paternity leave policy, broader salary reviews, demystification of the way the projects are maintained and pursued and maintained by the councils firm to promote transparency.
Crouch often presents to design schools and architectural lectures on equity and alternative races, and is a former executive and secretary of the Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He is currently a member of the National Strategic Council of the AIA.
It is also part of the large -hearted flower flower board, a non -profit that recycles flowers that are used after non -selling flowers and flowers to create new bouquets for patients, veterans, elderly and lonely people, in 2023, serving 129 care facilities and achieving more than 12,000 personal distributions in hand pipes to raise the spirits.
