Designing Your Design Business – New Year’s Business Detox

A new year is traditionally a time for making personal changes, often including a detox to make the body feel better and improve energy levels. Others remove clutter from their houses and/or garages as a way to free up space and clear their minds. Then again, though rarely thought of, a business detox presents opportunities for reducing stress, increasing energy levels, and improving overall health.

What do we mean by a “business detox”?

It’s not about “defining your mission”, “articulating your vision”, or even “setting realistic business goals”. While there is nothing wrong with those (and, in fact, they have great value), a business detox is more like a body detox; an effort to cleanse your business by removing impurities and toxins that may reduce profitability, and could be getting in the way of enjoying your work.

Perform a Business Cleanse

These include the things that make running your design business stressful (and less than enjoyable), such as:

• Collections – Outstanding invoices are a real drag. Knowing you’ve completed a project but have yet to be paid is stressful and emotionally exhausting. It’s time to get busy on collections by creating a list of anyone who owes you money, contact them and demand payment, then follow through on any payment schedule you agree to. Diligence is the key to getting paid all you're owed.

• Clean up old debt – Owing money is no more pleasant than being owed so, make a plan and do all you can to pay down your business debt and try to work on a cash basis as much as possible. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the sense of freedom you experience from dumping business debt.

• Flush stale emails – Hate to say it but, that email link to an article you had to read – from five years ago – needs to be deleted. If you haven’t had the time, or the inclination, to take action on emails that are 4-6 months old, you probably never will. So, DELETE. If, on the other hand, you have important communications that need to be saved, schedule some time to set up folders for them, then schedule a time for following up – so you can finally get rid of them! 

• Fire problematic clients – This may include some of those “slow pay” clients you've put on your old debt list. The old adage “The customer is always right” is not (and never has been) true so, when they are more trouble than they're worth, get rid of them. You would do well to remember though, that some clients are profitable despite the problems they cause and, in the long run, may still be worth the hassle. Schedule some time to detox your client list by cherry-picking the ones who spend enough that you want to keep them; then, go ahead and fire the rest.

• Dump non-supportive suppliers – Not all suppliers are created equal, and neither are all sub-contractors. Life is too short, and business too demanding, to have to work with companies and people you dislike and who refuse to support you. Make 2020 the year you finally choose to detoxify your supplier list, and while you're at it, get rid of those subs who think they’re doing you a favor by working with you, too.

One last tip to help you detox your business is – delegate tasks that you should not be doing every day. You can easily outsource things like billing, tracking, and even project management. This will give you the time you need to better serve existing clients, acquire new clients, build relationships with suppliers and sub-contractors, and run your design business the way you imagined when you began.

Looking for more tips on designing your design business, how to perform a business detox, new home design trends, designer marketing tips, and product ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Designing Your Design Business – Designing a Strategic Business Plan

It occurs to us that we may have erred in our first post in this series about designing your design business. In that post, we took for granted that our audience was already familiar with the idea of designing a strategic business plan that would increase their odds of success. Today, we hope to remedy that error.Regardless of niche, building a successful business requires planning, as well as implementation. Strategic business planning focuses on all areas of your business, with goals for both short- and long-term success. Without this type of planning, you will be forced into a seat-of-the-pants approach to running your business, adding stress, sapping energy and focus and, almost guaranteeing your dreams will not be realized.While it’s not our goal to offer a template for creating an actual business plan, something you might submit to your bank to acquire a business loan for example, we would like to share some ideas for strategic business planing. These are the broad strokes we have found invaluable for successful interior design and furnishing businesses, whether online or brick and mortar.Successful business owners focus on the big picture as well as the day-to-day minutia of running their business. They know the details are important, like paying bills and employees and handling paperwork but, they are also conscious of the larger issues; what the competition is doing, latest market trends, how their clients are being satisfied (or not), and more.Thinking about the Big Stuff and the Small Stuff all the time can be taxing yet, that is what a leader must do.

Designing Your Strategic Business Plan

Here are some things that can make this easier for you:

• Goal setting – for the moment and the future. Having a Big Goal for your business is great but you can’t focus on end-of-year stats while ignoring daily, weekly or monthly performance. In other words, if you hope to grow sales by 10% for the year, you will need to focus on increasing sales by a bit less than 1% per month. In other words, setting incremental goals will make achieving your larger goals much more likely.
• Vision and mission – including your dream and purpose. The vision you have for your business can be anything you dream of achieving, while your mission should be about how you plan to get there. It should also be client-focused and benefits-based; that is, how your business goals and philosophy will make a positive impact on the lives of your clients.
• Focus on relationships – with clients, suppliers, contractors, and subs. In both the short- and long-term, your greatest business asset is the relationships you build. Working with contractors and subs whom you know and trust (and who know and trust you), has value that is almost impossible to quantify. The same is true of existing clients, who are far more likely to work with you than a prospect (see this post for more on the value of current clients).
• Be realistic and practical – when setting goals. Goals are used to help a business grow and achieve its objectives. You can use them to promote teamwork and help describe what you want to accomplish. However, setting too many goals for the year (or too big a goal) can lead to problems. Too many goals can diffuse your focus and too big a goal may well be impossible to achieve. If you “keep it real” and use incremental steps to get there, you are far more likely to get where you want to be.
• Stay focused – on your vision, your mission, and your goals. When your business goals are tied to your vision and your mission, along with realistic steps to achieve them, it becomes much easier to stay focused on things that matter and ignore the rest. This reduces stress and helps you maintain the mental and emotional energy you need to run your design business effectively. That’s a big win/win for you as both an interior designer and business owner.

It’s very important to remember that your business plan should be used as you start your business (to obtain funding or direct operations, for example); while your strategic business plan is primarily used for implementing and managing the overall direction of your business.The difference is significant and critical to the long-term success of your design business.Looking for more tips on designing your design business, new home design trends, designer marketing tips, and product ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Focus Your Business Vision

What is your vision for the future of your interior design business?Obviously, one of your goals as an interior designer is to help your clients realize their vision of any space they wish to repurpose, reimagine or create from the ground up. In fact, helping them to do so may be your most important function as their interior designer. As a business owner however, that same talent may be just as important – creating and realizing your own vision of your design business.Creating a vision for your business involves generating a vivid mental image of what you want your business to be at some point in the future, based on your values, goals, and aspirations. Having a strong vision of your hoped-for future will give your business a clear focus, and can stop you heading in the wrong direction.

Begin with a Vision Statement

The Vision Statement for your design business should focus on the potential you see for your future, or what you intend that future to be. While your Vision Statement might contain references to how you plan to turn that future into reality, the “how” you will do so is really part of a “Mission Statement”, while your Vision Statement is more a description of the “what” you hope to do; meaning, what the you intend your design business to become.The clearer you’re able to hold the mental image of the future of your business, the more effective your Vision Statement will be, and the more focused your actions will become. Generalizations and vague goals will not work well for you. Rather, think in terms of definitive statements that reflect your values, which will help you outline a path toward your long-term business goals.

What will success look like?

Here are four steps you can take to articulating a Vision Statement for your design business:

1. A typical Vision Statement will be brief and succinct; saying much in just a few words, so those words must be very carefully chosen.
2. The key to a good business Vision Statement is to think of things in a long-term, broad sense, without sounding generic.
3. If you're too specific, you will limit your vision and it won't be applicable ten years down the road: for example, if your current goal for your business is to move into a larger space, that's a vision for the future but it's not the vision for the future of your entire business. It's too narrow in focus.
4. On the other hand, if you say that you want to achieve success – well, any business in the world could say that. It's too generic. The best statement will be clear about who you are as a company as well as who you wish to become.

Here is an example of a possible Vision Statement:“In five years, I want to bill $10 million annually, with a client base of “A-listers”, and a staff of 5 designers and design assistants, located in a home that we have completely renovated in my favorite styling.”The beauty of this statement is that it is very specific, contains realistic goals, and includes a values-based outlook.We’re all familiar with the type of client who says they know what they want, but simply cannot put their vision into words. Of course, since they have you and your training, experience, and talent to fall back on, that’s not an insurmountable obstacle for them. As a business owner however, you have no one to fall back on – you ARE the “last resort” in this situation – with your image and vision of the future of your design business being your only guide.