Michael
DeLacey

In 1990, Michael DeLacey took a job at a small Autodesk retailer in New England. He was not handed a vision statement or a five-year plan. He was handed a product catalog and a phone. Four years later, he and co-founder Robin Adams started Microdesk from scratch - two people, a region, and a bet that the architecture, engineering, and construction world was about to be remade by software.

They were right. But being right early is different from being useful early, and DeLacey spent the next three decades making sure his clients knew the difference. Microdesk did not just resell Autodesk licenses. It built the training infrastructure, the consulting practice, and the implementation playbook that turned Building Information Modeling from conference-room PowerPoint into jobsite reality.

The education-first philosophy was not a brand positioning exercise. It was operational strategy. Microdesk became an authorized Autodesk Solutions Training Center, embedded instructors alongside implementers, and treated knowledge transfer as a deliverable - not an afterthought. Clients left with workflows, not just software subscriptions.

By 2010, the results were measurable: 30 percent annual growth, year after year. Not from a single product or market surge, but from an accumulation of clients who kept coming back because the last engagement had actually worked. Twelve offices. Over 220 employees at its peak as Microdesk. A reputation as the largest professional technical services team in the AECO space.

DeLacey built all of this without venture capital, without a splashy acquisition spree, and without a pivot. The firm grew in the direction it started - deeper into Building Information Modeling, deeper into enterprise asset management, deeper into the operational life of buildings after construction ends. He was thinking about facility management and digital twins when most of his peers were still debating whether 3D models belonged on a construction site.

The Symetri acquisition in March 2022 changed the nameplate but not the mission. Symetri, already the leading Autodesk Platinum Partner in Europe, saw Microdesk as exactly what it was: the gateway to the US market, backed by two decades of trust. DeLacey's quote at the time carried no corporate hedging - "Microdesk is a strong business, and the company is ready to take the next step on the journey to become a global company." Precise, earned, and true.

He stayed. That matters. In AECO acquisitions, the founder frequently exits within eighteen months. DeLacey became US CEO of the combined entity, shepherding the rebranding to Symetri in June 2023 while maintaining continuity for a customer base that had been working with his team for years. The message to clients was explicit: "Since merging with Symetri last year, we have leveraged the wider capabilities of both companies to deliver enhanced solutions and services to our customers."

The acquisitions kept coming under his watch. Team D3 - a world-class Autodesk Platinum Partner for manufacturing - joined the fold in 2023. BIMrx, Microdesk's own product line, was integrated into Symetri's Naviate suite. Then Naviate Zero: a sustainability-focused solution for energy modeling and carbon reduction in building design, launched in early 2024. Each move extends the original thesis. The software matters less than the workflow. The workflow matters less than the people who know how to use it.

DeLacey's read on technology has consistently been more pragmatic than promotional. On cloud computing, he called it "a huge technological trend towards efficiency" in an era when many in construction were still treating the cloud as an IT department concern. On mobile devices in the field, he identified the iPad as a watershed moment for bringing mobility to practitioners who had never worked from a screen before. On BIM for owners - not just for designers and contractors - he was writing about it when the idea was considered niche.

None of these positions were contrarian at the time. They were simply accurate, stated plainly, and acted upon. That particular combination - seeing clearly and following through - is rarer in technology consulting than most practitioners admit.

At Symetri's scale today, with over 500 employees spanning the US and Europe, DeLacey is running an organization substantially larger than anything he built at Microdesk. The operational challenge has shifted from growth to integration: combining European methodologies with US market expectations, weaving together acquired firms with different cultures, and keeping the "teach people to fish" ethos alive in an organization that now operates at enterprise scale.

He has been doing this for over three decades. In a sector that routinely overpromises and underdelivers on technology adoption, DeLacey's career is a study in what sustained execution actually looks like - one workflow, one training engagement, one client at a time.