You don't want to have any friction there, so you want your
installations to run as smoothly as possible.
So walk the site before install and anticipate any conditions or
problems that might arise and then make sure the client is
aware going into the installation of what they need
to do. I like to tell them often that
they don't need to be on site for installation.
We don't love when they're looking over our shoulder as
everything gets placed because there's a lot of massaging on
site that we have to do. You know, the rug goes down and
then the sofa and then we're like, oh, actually we planned
for the chair to be here, but maybe it looks better on the
other side. So there's all those last minute
details you want to fine tune before the client actually sees
it. You're now listening to Design
Curious, a place where you, Creative One, are here to learn
about what it really is like to be an interior designer.
And I'm your host and mentor, Rebecca Ward.
If you're worried about how to succeed in a creative career, if
you're ready to learn your next steps to become an interior
designer, and if you want the satisfaction of doing something
you love every day, you are in the right place.
Grab a coffee, a notebook, and let's dig into today's episode.
Hello and welcome to episode 179 of Design Curious podcast.
Today on the podcast, we're continuing the 4th installment
in our design skills series. Today we're talking about
practical business and project skills that you might need.
Most designers can develop a design vision, but the execution
is probably where you don't realize you need more skills
than you thought you did when you signed up for the career.
So that's what we're going to get into today.
Don't forget to check out the links in the show notes.
I've got some freebie downloads for you for those starting out
in the career. Some things I wish I had known
before I started, and then also the road map to interior design.
You might want to get those, so go check that out.
OK, now let's get into practical business and project skills that
you might need that you didn't know you needed.
So when you think of skills that you need as an interior
designer, you're not necessarily thinking business skills or you
know, maybe project skills, how to run a project, but business
skills really as an interior designer.
And as we've talked about before, most designers do end up
going into business for themselves, especially
residential designers. That's why we need to talk about
it. So you can be the best designer,
but that doesn't mean you going to have happy clients because
you might not know or you might not be profitable because you
might not know how to run a business.
You might know how to design a project really well, but running
a business is a whole different animal.
So let's talk about the different areas that you want to
focus on to develop your practical business and project
skills to execute the design. So the first place you're going
to focus on is project management.
This is where you will separate the hobbyists from the pros
because if you're a hobbyist, you're not going to really have
any systems for running the project.
And it's really necessary to be a professional designer to have
a system to have steps of each project that can run smoothly
through a workflow that is probably the same every single
project you're going to start in the same place.
I have episodes talking about how I have a seven step process
that I take every project through.
Regardless of the scope of the project, we follow the same 7
steps every time. And so that project management
framework is so valuable and it keeps projects on track and it
helps you to not burn out, spin your wheels, reinvent any
wheels, and really have confidence going into the
project and also helps you understand how many projects you
can take on at a time. If you're a solopreneur, you
might be focusing on one or two projects to start out with, but
over time, when you have a project management system, you
can stagger them and have them at different points of the
process and really have a handle on each part of it.
And so that can help increase your income as well.
So creating project management systems is going to be helpful.
Now there's lots of project management softwares out there
that you can explore to help you run your projects, just to name
a few. There's Programma.
And I like Dubsado for the first part of my onboarding the
client. So it's first steps one and a
little into Step 2, we'll have them in Dubsado.
And it helps me to also track like where my clients are coming
from. So it gives me a lot of data,
but I could continue to use Dubsado, but then I kind of
switch over to more of a manual mode and I use a sauna to help
keep track of all the tasks and the projects steps that we have.
Asana or monday.com is a great tool to use.
So there's a lot of different project management softwares out
there. You can explore and figure out
which one is the right fit for you and the way your brain works
and the needs of your business. So you might have larger needs
if you have lots of projects or smaller needs if you don't have
a lot. Moving on to the next skill that
you need to work on. Is working with contractors and
trades very important? They are a part of your team.
They are an extension of your business really and they are
representing you out in the field.
So you want to build trust based relationships with your
contractors and trades. What I like to do for my clients
is I tell them I kind of do a matchmaking service for them.
I'm not out there necessarily getting three bids because
that's not required in residential design.
You don't have to get 3 bids. What happens if you have a set
of contractors that you love using and then you keep asking
all of them to give a bid because you're needing three
bids and then 2/3 of the time they're not getting that
project? Well, they could spend a lot of
time putting a bid together and then they're not getting their
project. They're going to stop wanting
you to ask them to bid a project because it takes up too much of
their time and then they don't get the project.
So what I like to do is consider the clients need scope,
personality, and then I think about which contractor will be
the best fit for that client. I call that one contractor out.
And if they do like each other, they like the price, Everything
goes forward. We don't have to waste the other
contractors time and it helps to build your relationship with the
tradespeople because they know that when you're calling them to
come out and bid a project, they're most likely going to get
that project. Sometimes it falls through or or
the client might be bringing on their own contractor.
So that's a little bit different.
And if they do have their own contractor, then you want to
probably meet with that person and see and let them know how
you typically work, how you like to work with contractors.
I always communicate with them at the beginning to say that,
you know, we are a team and if there's an issue on site, please
call me first before calling the client.
Most of the time, the client doesn't have the answer and
they'll have to call me anyway. And part of my service, my
luxury service, is to have the client avoid those types of
headaches. And so if a contractor can just
bring those problems directly to me, I can answer them or filter
them and then take it to the client if necessary, if I need,
if I need the client to answer that question.
But most of the time, I'm an advocate for the client and
answering on their behalf for the best of the project needs
and the client's needs. So you want to learn how to
speak their language. So you might want to brush up on
maybe you know some of your construction vocabulary,
understanding floorboards, ceiling joists, things like
that. With that, they might throw
around drywall where if you've never done any remodel before,
you might not know these terms and you don't want to look like
you don't know these terms in front of the client.
And so building your construction vocabulary is very
important if you're going to be doing a lot of remodels.
You just want to make sure that you establish good communication
with your trades from the beginning and that you don't
talk bad about your trades in front of the client either.
It's a two way St. there, right? So you're looking for your A
list, your A-Team to always have your back and do their best work
for you and for the client. So you're working on your
relationships with your contractors and trades and
communicating with them is very important.
OK, Next we're going to work on how to estimate and pricing to
protect your profitability. This is probably one of the
trickiest things for designers. Most of designers I find are
undercharging. Their rates are too low when
they come to me for mentorship. Or the other thing that I find
they're doing is they're not charging for their
consultations. And understand that your
creativity and your ideas are a part of the value that you
bring. So you can't be giving
everything away for free. There's, you know, a few things
you can give away. Like if you're just doing a
discovery call over the phone, you can kind of tell what you
might want to do with this space, but you're not going to
know until you're there. But I wouldn't go on site unless
you're getting paid to go there because it takes time to get in
the car takes gas money to get there.
You're there for an hour or two. That's time that could have been
spent doing something else on another project.
So your time is valuable. Always be charging for your
initial consultations. So that's one way to work on
your pricing if you're not doing that.
And then another way is to understand what your margins
are. So if you're selling furniture,
you have to understand how much profit you're getting when
you're selling. There's episodes I've gone over
about selling wholesale furniture versus retail.
And my recommendations of course always is to sell wholesale
whenever possible. Wholesale, in my opinion, is
anything that you get over a 30% discount.
Otherwise it's in my opinion, retail.
So understanding that you want to have profit margins that
you're shooting for, for each piece of furniture, each item
that you're selling to the client, hopefully it's in the 30
to 40% profit margin range. If you don't know how to get
there, then that's a place that you need to develop your
financial skills to understand how to pull a report and see
what you're charging versus what it cost you and how to calculate
your profit margins. You want to work on developing
realistic budgets for your clients.
One thing that I love having is a good, better, best kind of
case study for how much furniture can cost for space or
it's like economical mid range and high end.
Just because a lot of people have no idea that they're going
to spend 10s of thousands of dollars in just one room on
their furnishings because everything adds up quickly.
People are just in general not great at estimating and they
always underestimate. So you don't want to promise or
suggest to a client that it's going to cost them $20,000 to
remodel their kitchen. If you don't know that's how
much it's going to cost. And most likely it's going to be
$120,000. So if you tell them 20,000 at
the beginning, then they are going to hold on to that number
probably and then you will be in trouble when it comes in so much
higher. So educating yourself on what
typical project costs are. There's publications out there
and websites and places that you can find that.
You can also ask your colleagues and peers in the area what their
last project cost for a kitchen remodel or for furnishing a
living room and just start to generate information that way.
If you don't have a lot of projects to pull off of for your
own documentation, it is also important to document every
decision that's being made. So that's why I like to have
everything in e-mail when possible.
The easiest to go back and verify what you said.
If you said that you thought your design fees were going to
be 20,000 and the client is saying like, oh, you only said
ten, well you can go back to the e-mail and said for your said
20,000. So that's going to be helpful so
that you can protect your pricing and everything like
that. The next area you might want to
work on is construction literacy.
So construction site vocabulary, which is good just for more
architecture and engineering related things.
You need to be able to talk with both architects and engineers
often times throughout your career.
So you need that vocabulary, but you also need to know more of
the interiors, construction literacy, so cabinetry basics,
tile transitions, lighting plans, switching, things like
that. Just be curious about it.
So go to your local lighting showroom and ask an expert on
what you need to know or things like that.
Go to your tile showroom and ask them like if I wanted to install
this mesh into a bathroom floor, what else am I going to need to
know about it? What kind of trim pieces do I
need? So get curious about all these
things. Some of it you're just going to
be learning on the job as you get a job that maybe covers an
area you haven't done before. Maybe you get a job so that
you're installing AI, don't know a wine storage room or something
like that. There's going to be things you
don't know yet, so you're going to have to do a lot of research.
The internet's going to be super helpful here.
And then you're going to bring that to your contractor.
And then I love to have my contractors verify the
information that I'm bringing, like is this design that I've
come up with that I think is doable?
Is it really doable? And so the contractor will know
most of the time they have a lot of experience with that.
And so they can help guide you towards them and then know when
to bring in a specialist. So if you've never done a
lighting plan before, then just go find a local lighting
designer and partner with them on the project and learn from
that experience. And then the more times you do
that, the more confident you'll get with designing lighting for
space. So it's OK to bring in
specialist when you need it. Bring in the cabinetry or
kitchen designer. If you've never designed a
kitchen, you might want to partner with a kitchen designer
who knows all the insurance and outs and special upgrades and
special drawers and things like that that you might need for a
kitchen to function properly. If you've never done that
before, don't guess. Educate yourself or hire a
specialist to help educate you. OK, so another thing you're
going to work on is managing installations and helping them
to go smoothly. So you're going to want to
develop a punch list way before you are on the job site to
install your furniture or anything like that.
What are you going to need to bring that day?
Has the house been cleaned already?
Did the clients existing furniture get moved out?
Who does that? So things that you have to think
about before the delivery company shows up with the
furniture, you might need to ask the contract about your trade
schedules or if you're hiring the trades directly, like maybe
it's a painter or flooring person.
You can you manage their schedule, coordinating
deliveries, making sure that the delivery company knows if a
heavy item needs to go upstairs. They like to know that head time
so they have enough manpower on site to take it.
Sometimes some pieces will take three people to take it up a
stair well. And how do they have to pivot in
the stairs? We all know that Friends episode
where the cell phone was getting stuck in the stairway and they
had to pivot. You don't want to have any
friction there, so you want your installations to run as smoothly
as possible. So walk the site before install
and anticipate any conditions or problems that might arise and
then make sure the client is aware going into the
installation of what they need to do.
So they might need to be aware that they have to get rid of
their furniture. That might not be a service that
you're going to offer to them. So they need to have it donated,
have it picked up, sell it, or whatever they need to do to get
that old furniture out of there. Then they need to know whether
you're hiring cleaners or if they need to hire cleaners to
come in to clean. Nowadays, I usually extend that
to the client and just say we're bringing in cleaners.
Here's their estimate and I'll bill it to you directly, but I'm
communicating that ahead of time.
I like to tell them often that they don't need to be on site
for installation. We don't love when they're
looking over our shoulder as everything gets placed because
there's a lot of massaging on site that we have to do.
You know, the rug goes down and then the sofa and then we're
like, oh, actually we planned for the chair to be here, but
maybe it looks better on the other side.
So there's all those last minute details you want to fine tune
before the client actually sees it.
So we'll communicate like plan to go to coffee while we're
doing the install. So so you're not in the way.
So things like that. So we actually have APDF that we
send to our clients for installation day.
It's like like what to know and what we're expecting of them.
So one of the other last things you want to work on is
leadership through execution. So how are you when a problem
arises on site? Do you stay calm?
Are you good at being decisive or you wishy washy?
Do you lead your team, which could be someone who's working
with you or it could be your trades?
Are you good at leading them through challenges?
So if you're not used to being in a leadership position, and
I've talked before, I think a couple episodes ago about
designers being leaders, if you've never done any leadership
work, then I would suggest you seek out some books, podcasts,
things like that to help with your leadership skills.
It's only going to help your projects run more smoothly.
So that's about 6 of the areas in practical business and
project skills that I'm recommending that you work on.
Of course, there's so much more, but that's all you get in today.
So if you loved that list and maybe it made you think of of
some new things, then maybe you need to get into My Design
Mentor where we can really explore even more all of the
business skills and execution skills that you might need for a
project. They didn't realize when you
signed up for the career. So go ahead to the show notes.
There'll be links for My Design Mentor in there and also some
free downloads. Don't forget on Spotify we have
some. Playlist created for you of our
favorite episodes depending on where you're at in your design
career. So you can find those on
Spotify. So that's it for this week.
Next week we'll have another great episode, an interview, and
then after that, we're going to wrap all of these design skills
up together in a final episode in the series.
So be looking for that and until then, stay creative.
Thanks for listening. If you love this episode, please
leave a rating and a review. This helps me reach other
curious creatives like you. If you have a topic request or
would like to contact me, simply head over to my website,
awardesign.com or e-mail me at podcast@awardesign.com.