“BIM Was Never Marketing for Us” — A Conversation with GEOMETRY-S Founder Oleh Samchyk

Your site describes GEOMETRY-S as a “BIM company.” What does that actually mean in practice?

It’s not a marketing label. When we started, almost no one around us actually needed BIM — we adopted it for ourselves, to automate our own work and remove the mechanical errors that creep into drawings. A lot of “old-school” clients still don’t realize that in Revit you can set up automatic sheet printing — start it, go home, and everything is ready by morning.

Real clients with genuine BIM requirements only appeared around 2019–2020, and even then there was rarely a competent BIM manager on their side. Usually the most they asked for was LOD 200 at the design stage and LOD 300 afterward, with no parameter specifications at all. We were already living in that workflow long before the market caught up.

So you were building BIM capability before the market demanded it?

Yes. We treated it as an internal engineering investment, not a sales pitch. Automating the routine and standardizing the output meant fewer human errors and faster delivery. By the time clients started asking for coordinated models, we had already spent years inside that process.

You have a reputation for being obsessive about how drawings look. Why does that matter so much?

I’m a perfectionist about documentation. When I see sloppy work — modeling without proper references or dimensions — I take a screenshot for our internal knowledge base so we can learn from it. We’re direct about this in interviews: if it doesn’t matter to you whether your schedules, tags, and callouts are clean and precise, we’re probably not the right team for you.

How do you select engineers for the team?

The first filter is simple — can the person join a meeting on time, with a working camera and mic. We’re not going to wait twenty minutes while someone configures their setup. Then there’s a test task: fill out a brief, build a scheme, or create a family.

What’s surprising is how many candidates don’t complete even half of the written requirements, even though everything is spelled out clearly. For us that’s the best indicator of attention to detail there is — and attention to detail is the whole job.

Do you have your own internal BIM standards?

We do — our own BIM standard, family requirements, and a classifier. We built it pragmatically: we took established frameworks as a starting point and deliberately simplified them, because the heavier structures were more complex than our work actually needed. A standard is only useful if the team follows it every single day, so we optimized ours to be lived in, not filed away.

Who drives the technical side of the company?

Our lead on the technical side is Anya Filipenko. She worked through the depth of it herself, solved the hard parts, and now trains the rest of the team. I worked hands-on in AutoCAD from 2006 to 2014, but by the time we fully moved to Revit I had shifted into management. I still stay close to the quality bar, though — especially on how the documentation is presented.

How do you handle US and international project standards?

We’ve delivered work for clients in Canada, Estonia, and other markets — including a private island project near Vancouver, where we handled the engineering systems. We’re comfortable working to North American and European codes, and on every new market we put real effort into learning the local requirements properly. Standards fluency is part of the engineering work for us, not an afterthought we leave to the client.

You kept the company running through the full-scale war. How did you manage continuity?

The first couple of weeks, honestly, no one quite knew what to do. Then we distributed the team — we physically delivered workstations to people’s homes so they could keep working. Contracts and payments had frozen, and without a financial cushion I’m not sure how we would have made it through.

But the work came back, and we kept delivering. That period taught us how to operate as a genuinely distributed team — which is exactly how we work with remote clients today.

What keeps you going — what’s the principle you come back to?

Believe in what you’re building, and then act on it. Once you’re convinced an idea is right, you stop worrying about what everyone else thinks and you just do the work — properly — and stay true to it. That’s held up for me through every stage of the company.