Interior Design for Disaster Clients

Are you a couples’ therapist, counselor, or coach? No, you’re an interior designer who is just trying to help them create a beautiful, livable space. If you’ve worked with many couples, you know that a consultation with the pair of them often feels like a therapy session, with you being the psychologist. Here’s a little help when you have to perform interior design for disaster clients, as we call them.

When Wants Exceed Budget

“We want the best, but our budget is low.”

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Champagne taste on a beer budget.” While there is nothing wrong with wanting the best, two of the most common issues with couples is that they often have a different understanding of what the best is, as well as how much they can afford to spend.

The Solution:

Playing the referee in such a situation can be tough so, the first thing to do is guide them gently toward a list of priorities they can agree on. Next, stick to those priorities as tenaciously as possible, in your interest as well as theirs. Then, set aside a part of the budget for some extra expenses. If you do get trapped into a fight when your clients argue over whether they should go for a more expensive version of the couch or not, don’t forget to remind them about their initial priorities and, remember your set-aside in the budget which you can offer to use to cover this upgrade.

A wise piece of advice here is not to take anybody’s side, but help your customers find the balance with a minimum of your time taken.

Accommodating Conflicting Tastes

“I want the same style everywhere.”

Men and women often have different aesthetic tastes. Women lean more toward decorative solutions, while men tend to be more minimalist. When these style visons clash in the same home, the designer’s life becomes difficult, at best.

The Solution:

This type of couple not only makes your job harder, but it also creates tension between your clients, which can lead to more conflict and increased determination to “have it their way.” If you come up with the controversial requirements, try taking the least controversial parts of both of them and organizing them into an accommodating design.

If you can’t find a compromise solution, try to give each member a certain area of control: let one define the color scheme and the other go for furniture selection. You can even go so far as to award each of them a section of the house; a “his space” and “her space.” Remember, talking about their aims and priorities in design will always help to guide you – and them.

Limiting Change Requests

“We’ve decided to go a different direction.”

It’s often difficult for a homeowner to visualize the changes they ask you to make for them. Seeing the reality can lead to them changing their minds. Plus, if they have differences, and those differences are discussed outside your presence, you’re going to get plenty of change requests.

The Solution:

Again, setting priorities before you begin work will help you here. Also, before you start the project, agree on the number of amendment sessions to be included within the scope of your changes (this is a good practice for any client). This agreement will at least protect you financially. Another good practice is to discuss reasons for any change requests that are introduced.

Explain to your clients that this way it will be easier for any participant of the process to share the same vision. By reminding them of the thought process upon which the previous solution was accepted, you will be able to protect those parts of the design that you find most important, as well as to call upon logic instead of emotion.

Clients Who Don’t Communicate

“He (or she) wouldn’t understand so don’t tell him (or her) we talked about this, OK?”

One of the more dangerous (to you) places to be caught is between clients who don’t communicate with each other. If one of them is not ready for an open discussion of the choices being made, they will try to approach you separately as a way to “get their way.” The interior designer who accepts this role does so at their peril.

The Solution:

The best thing you can do here is to make the specs and goals of the project as transparent as possible. Using professional design software to track changes and progress helps you easily collect product information from any webpage into professional specification list with simple clicks.

Working with couples can be challenging in the extreme, requiring you to employ your skills as a communicator and amateur therapist. If you set priorities for them at the beginning, stay on top of every aspect of the project, and keep the lines of communication open, you are far more likely to smooth the path and meet the challenges of interior design for disaster clients.

Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

When to Ignore Feedback

We all have egos. We all enjoy praise and resist, even resent disapproval. None of us are perfect and, when you deal with clients in a creative field like interior design, criticism will be an unavoidable part of your life. After all, we’re not dealing with a black and white world of simple metrics and schedules; but a space where personal tastes, style, and aesthetics predominate.Such a world is rife with feedback, both positive and negative. Understanding the nature and value of each, to you and your clients, will go a long way toward helping you provide better services to your clients, while not feeling abused by their criticism.Sticks and StonesFirst, an ego bruise has never killed anyone. Mistakes happen and, if you make one, the best thing you can do is take responsibility for it, learn from it, and move on. Unwarranted criticism is similar – consider the source and, if you do not respect the person’s opinion, it has no value. Again, move on.When criticism may be warranted but is vague or off-point, it’s easy to get frustrated. Often when hearing something like that, you’ll know intuitively that the critique is valid, but you also realize you don’t have enough information to correct it.When this happens, it’s up to you to get what you need so, ask follow-up questions to get to the root of the problem. The person offering the criticism will appreciate that you're trying to understand their needs more fully and, ultimately, you will benefit from a better understanding of where you may have fallen short or underdelivered.Ignore Dubious Sources of CriticismWhen you take professional feedback personally, you do yourself a disservice. You also negate the input of the person offering advice – advice that may be helpful.Of course, the source of the feedback matters. Past clients, professional associates, even friends and family may have valid judgments to offer that will help you in your professional life. Take what they have to say to heart and make the changes needed to improve your service, relationships, and your business.For your peace of mind, you must learn to ignore negative criticism that is unwarranted, or that comes from a source with the goal of causing you pain. Yes, there are people out there who only want to belittle others but, again, if you do not respect their opinion, you should be able to ignore them with ease.One more thought: Do not accept praise from such a source either. Believe me, if their negative critique of you has no value, neither does their positive opinion. Eventually, they will show their true colors again and, if you believe they may have changed, they will only hurt you when they revert to their negativity.Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

How to Sell More High-End Upholstered Furniture

While upholstered furniture sales will likely generate the biggest tickets and highest revenues for your interior design business, they may not come easily. Simply presenting your offerings as “The Best” will often create a question in your client’s mind – “The best, as compared to what?” Do you have an answer for this?

Home fashion has become a rapidly shifting target, with statements ranging from traditional to transitional to contemporary. This takes place not just from client to client and from home to home, but even from room to room within the same home! Staying current with these shifting home fashion trends is a challenge that all of us must face. With the right approach, these shifting design trends can be dealt with effectively.

Descriptive Language is the Key to Luxury Furniture Sales

Capturing the imagination of your clients – and reinforcing their choices and tastes – is the key to growing your luxury furniture sales. Using descriptive language to distinguish your offerings will go a long way toward helping your clients realize that you have their best interests at heart:

1. “Subtle, labor intensive decorative details include hand-sewn welting, double top-stitched seams, and pleating.”
2. “Our bespoke furniture includes 8-way hand-tied and handset coil springs, as well as sustainable materials and components.”
3. “Tailored from traditional materials to create a sumptuous yet modern (or contemporary) mood that speaks volumes.”

While it goes without saying that you can rarely make an overt appeal, it is also often necessary, and effective, to subtly appeal to your client’s ego; their sense of self-importance and discernment. This can often be done by engaging them in conversations that include more sensuous language, such as stylish presentations, opulence, custom tailoring, sumptuousness, gratification, curvaceous upholstery, lavish covers, artisanship, craftsmanship, bench-built, and hand-crafted.

Understanding your client’s needs, and speaking to those needs in terms that elicit an emotional response, will allow you to close more high-end upholstered furniture sales – and satisfy your client completely and repeatedly.

Know Your Value and Charge Accordingly

The question of what to charge is often difficult for emerging entrepreneurs and independent contractors. Oddly, it can be just as difficult to know your value even if you have an established design business. You see, as an independent business person, it’s very easy to lead a somewhat insulated life, with little interaction among other designers. This can lead to confusion about your value and can make you wonder what clients might be willing to pay for your design services.

When we wonder about the value and price of the services we offer, we will all do well to remember this little nugget of wisdom, often attributed to Warren Buffett:

“Price is what you pay… Value is what you receive!”

First, let’s define our terms, shall we?

• Price – The amount of money needed to purchase something.
• Value – The amount of money that is a fair equivalent in exchange for goods or services.

So, stated as simply as possible, it’s the difference between what you charge and the worth of what you deliver that determines the value of anything you sell, whether goods or services.

How Valuable Are Your Design Services?

Here’s an example of the mindset that will help you discover just how valuable your services are: There was once a young man who taught piano lessons. He was just 20 years old, but he charged as much as a 40-year-old piano teacher. When asked why he explained, “I don’t charge for teaching piano, I charge for the 15 years it took me to learn how”.

This was a young man who understood the value of what he had to offer – the value to his clients, not to anyone else – for their opinion did not matter.

Now, as you try to set a value for the services you offer, there are some very basic things you need to consider. These are commonly referred to a covering “your nut,” and are the basic expenses you’ll incur as you move forward in business.

• What have you invested in becoming an interior designer – the time, the effort, the dedication, and paying for your training; both in the past and any ongoing training you need?
• What kinds of business expenses do you have to cover – from office to insurance and equipment to support personnel?
• What kinds of personal expenses do you have to cover – from mortgage to utilities and groceries to family support?

Once you’ve covered the basics, it’s time to build in some profit. For help with this, it would be wise to consult with someone who will be honest with you and help you understand the true value you provide to your clients. This can be a friend, an “ideal client”, a fellow designer, or one of the resources with whom you work. Just keep in mind, it’s always helpful to have that outside view when brainstorming what you’d like to charge for your services.

Doing this should be a priority for you. Not only will it put your mind at ease, but it will also greatly help change your sense of self and help you to know the value of your design services.

The Financial Side of Your Design Business - Part 2

Now that you’ve managed to put your personal money demons to rest, it’s time to work on the beliefs that are limiting the financial side of your design business success. What does this mean? It means successful entrepreneurs do not allow fear to hold them back simply because it means stepping out of their comfort zone.

Or because they fear success. For some, having grown up in an environment that implanted and reinforced the belief that they had little value, they continue to believe that they do not DESERVE to be successful. That is just another limiting belief that was implanted by others – and – you need to drop that right now! You do deserve success, and you're about to learn how you can earn it!

We’ll take it as a given that you don’t do what you do just for the money. (No one in the interior design business is quite THAT delusional!) But, just because your goal is to help others live and work in beautiful spaces doesn’t mean that you are not entitled to be successful.

Does any of the following sound like you?

• You hate telling potential clients what your rates are.
• You avoid having an honest conversation with someone about money.
• You keep LOWERING your rates, thinking that will bring you more clients.

How’s all that working for you? Still struggling to pay the mortgage, despite working 60 hours a week? Still wishing you could afford to take a vacation occasionally? Still struggling to understand why what you do is WORTH more than you're asking for?

4 Steps to Financial Health

Here is a strategic approach to helping you overcome your money fears and help you get paid what you're worth; using a very simple 4-part exercise that could transform your income potential, and set you on the path to FINALLY creating the wealth you’ve always dreamed of.

1. Courage – First, let’s address courage by having you complete this sentence, “I have the courage to _____.” It might be the courage to raise your rates as one example.
2. Boundaries – Second, address boundaries by completing this sentence, “The boundary I will put into place is _____.” Using the example from courage, that you will raise your rates, then the boundary you will put into place might be something like, “The boundary I will put into place is to tell all potential new clients my new rates.”
3. Action – Next, we want to move you into action, so the next is your activity. Complete this next sentence “The action I will take is _____ by _____ (date).” Our example here could be, “The action I will take is to put my new rates on my website by next Thursday.”
4. Gift – Finally, complete the sentence “The gift in this is _____.” And, using our example, this might be, “The gift in this is by feeling empowered,” or, “I make a difference in the lives of others who need me,” or… well, something positive, as you can see.

There is real power in this last step, which is to look at the gift you give yourself by taking these empowering steps toward financial freedom. This simple exercise can help you claim your money power, which, particularly for entrepreneurs, is the first step in creating wealth!

Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

The Financial Side of Your Design Business - Part 1

As much as you may hate it, caring for the financial side of your design business is critical to your short- and long-term success; both professional and personal. No matter how much you may WISH you could focus exclusively on working with clients, cash flow projections, budgets, and the development your business model will determine whether you make it, or fold. Without these things, you will NOT have the freedom you dream of! But there's more:

• What is your relationship to money?
• How does that hold you back?
• How do you earn more without compromising your values and principles?
• How can you earn more – and still have a life?
• Imagine healing old bad habits and old beliefs; imagine working less and earning more; both of which will lead to the success of you’ve been dreaming of.

In short, you can either learn it or outsource it but, figuring out your finances is integral to the success of your business. Once you Accept this as a fact of your business life, much of the stress and anxiety you're feeling about money and your financial future will disappear. Then, you can either take some classes or hire someone to help you set up a strategy that gives you control of your finances and ensures your long-term freedom.

Your relationship to money

What would be possible for you if you could let go of old money paradigms that have been holding you back? Those old paradigms are just limiting beliefs about money that you’ve developed and held from your past, often since childhood. But today is a new day, and it is possible to create the wealth you’ve always dreamed of.

Being an entrepreneur, you tend to run solo, relying on your energy and intuition to get everything done. However, your thoughts and feelings about money and wealth may be limiting your ability to care for the financial needs of your business. Overcoming this requires a new belief system that enables you to step into your personal integrity surrounding your business, your relationship to money, and your desire to help others.

Being in integrity means being on a track of taking consistent action, based on your values and the goals you’ve set for yourself and your business. Here are three empowering steps to move you out of old actions or habits that have held you back, so you can more easily start transforming your design business.

• The first step to your personal integrity is to write down two negative core feelings you have around money. Don’t say you don’t have any! That’s just taking you out because this isn’t a fun exercise and is uncomfortable.

Examples might be guilt, shame, fear – or the lack of any shame, guilt or fear of money. If you grew up in a household with little money to spare, and we’re repeatedly told “We can’t afford it,” it’s relatively easy to understand how you may be placing too much value on money, and acquiring it at the expense of other, more important, values.

On the other hand, if money was not an issue in your early life, you may be inclined to devalue the effort and energy required to acquire and build wealth. Either way, to at least some extent, your relationship to money was implanted by the beliefs and feelings that others have held about money and wealth in the past. As an entrepreneur, it’s time to overcome those limiting beliefs and create a new paradigm around money and your relationship to it.

• The next step is to write down at least two actions you take that re-creates these feelings in you. These feelings might be triggered by something other than money, but it leads to HOW you feel about it.

One example might be that you spend money even when you feel you don’t have it to spend. You know; you go shopping and find the perfect pair of shoes. You don’t need them, and you certainly can’t afford them. But, you imagine it will make you feel better if you get them. So, you go ahead and buy them, then when you get home you feel guilty, so you hide them. Your partner won’t notice, and he manages the money, so you're home free, right? Except for that ongoing guilt thing, yeah, you're just fine!

• The third step is to come up with at least two PRACTICAL and SPECIFIC actions you’ll take to break these old feelings surrounding money. For example, those feelings of secrecy or guilt when you bought those shoes.

A few of the actions you can implement might be telling someone you trust, or a few people, what is going on, rather than hiding it. Another might be to track your daily spending habits. That really can help you feel in control, rather than afraid all the time. Finally, you can develop a budget – and commit to living and spending within it. You’ll be surprised at the sense of freedom you can experience when you take actions like these to alter your relationship to money.

Of course, once you’ve done this preliminary work, you must ACT to protect the financial side of your design business. But, if you do, you could very well break some old, negative, disempowering habits that have kept you from your new possibility paradigm.

Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

3 Marketing Ideas for Interior Designers

It’s human nature to want to spend your time doing what you're best at doing and, for an interior designer, that is all about reimaging spaces for your clients and implementing the changes they ask for. But, if your business is not large enough to enable you to hire a marketing team, and your goal is to grow your design business, you would do well to check out these three marketing ideas for interior designers.

So, if marketing your business is not at the top of your list of fun things to do, think of it this way: your first job as an interior designer is to market your business, and then to prove what a fabulous interior designer you are.

After all, if you don’t do the former, you’ll never have the clients you need to prove the latter.

The First 3 Marketing Steps You Must Take

1. Who are you? Creating an identity within your niche will be critical to your success. Where can you establish yourself as an expert? Where do your interests and talents naturally lead you? How can you use that knowledge to create your identity – and brand? The best way to define yourself to others is first to do it for yourself, then present that image and identity in your marketing.
2. Have real conversations with real people. Pick up the phone or get on Skype and have a chat with people who would be your dream clients. If you don't have any, look for people who may be interested in working with you and talk to them for 30 minutes. Then you want to listen carefully, take notes and figure out what is the emotional reason they hired you. Write down their words (like they feel overwhelmed, depressed, hopeless when it comes to pulling a room together) and use them in your marketing.
3. Create more than one Opt-in Freebie. Building your list is an important step for the long-term growth of your design business. To do this, you need to keep in mind that different people will have different needs. A single opt-in freebie will rarely address more than one need – and shouldn’t. Instead, create several freebies that address a variety of issues and – always provide solutions.

By defining yourself and your ideal client, then creating content that will help them overcome their pain points, you can quickly become a master at marketing your interior design business.

Looking for interior design trends and tips? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Yes, Business Networking is Still a Thing!

As an interior designer, business networking is critical to your long-term success. You will need to develop a circle of dependable contractors and referrals; people who can help you complete your client’s design projects on time and on budget. You’ll also need to work with a variety of suppliers: from draperies to carpeting; from plumbing fixtures to flooring; from lighting to wall coverings; and from furniture to accessories.

And yet, even with all of these people in your list of business contacts, you may be missing a vital resource to help you grow your design business: local realtors.

Design Trends for New Home Buyers

Why should you work with realtors? The best real estate agents work intimately with their clients, sometimes over decades-long periods, and will often have a better idea than builders about what buyers are looking for in a new home. Building relationships and networking with the realtors in your market can easily become mutually beneficial, with each of your providing leads and sharing information on market trends.

With this in mind, we share this information from an article from the folks at BuilderOnline.com, listing the design trends that are currently most in demand among home buyers, according to the realtors they surveyed:

• Open layouts
• Modern design
• Neutral color schemes
• Multigenerational floor plans
• First-floor master suites
• No dining rooms
• White kitchens
• Extra-large garages
• Big closets
• Barn-style sliding doors
• No vinyl floors
• Oversized master bathrooms
• Finished basements with 9-foot-high ceilings

Of course, questions remain: Are these home design trends realistic for a particular client? Are they as trendy in your market? DO home buyers seek these things for their own comfort or to boost eventual re-sale value? And many more.

Expanding your Business Network Expands your Resources

These questions are impossible to answer in a blog post designed for a national audience. However, if you’ve put in some time on business networking, developing a list of sources for goods and services – AND information, you’ll be able to keep your finger on the pulse of your marketplace, and will have the answers to all those questions.

Looking for interior design trends and tips? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Select and Use Color for Both Effect and Enjoyment

When you begin to analyze a client’s space, one of the first things that will often come to mind is color. Why was the existing color chosen, and what does it say about your client?

While a color change may be the simplest, most expedient step to take for reimagining a space, the fear of using color can stop some people in their tracks. They will worry about which color to choose; whether it should be light/dark/warm/cool; where to use it; how to use it; how it will look and feel; whether they’ll get tired of it; how it blends with other colors; where to start and stop; and on and on.

Of course, color is one of the areas where a professional designer can step in and help. The reason is twofold: First, a professional has been trained in color and how to use it. Second, a professional can serve as an objective eye in the project, asking and answering questions from an unbiased perspective.

Calming client fears of color

Based on the “psychology of colors,” there are several ways to approach color in decorating that will help to calm these fears:

• If your client would like a particular room to feel larger, light, and airy, you should select lighter colors, since light colors recede and give the feeling of expanding space.
• If your client would like a particular room to feel warm and cozy, less large, you should select deeper shades of color. For the warm feel, you will gravitate toward the warm tones of reds and yellows.
• If your client would like a particular room to feel relaxing, blues and neutral tones will be the direction you should suggest to them.
• If your client would like a special room to offer stimulation and contrast, you should propose a black-and-white combo: deeper shades of one color mixed with neutrals or lighter tints of the same color for a monochromatic effect.

It may be helpful to lead your client on a shopping expedition to your favorite paint store or the paint section of a home improvement store. Beyond the normal have tear sheets or brochures of current color trends and combinations, they usually have photos of those colors in room settings to help you visualize. All of this will assist in narrowing down your client’s color preferences.

Ask your clients to be open to colors that they may not have considered previously. Explain that there are over 16 million colors available to choose from and that they would do well not to limit themselves just because they have never used a particular color before.

Remember, what people are really afraid of is taking a risk or making a blunder; that fear can be so real to them that, sometimes, they never make a decision at all.

Looking for interior design tips? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Pantone Releases Hot Colors for Spring 2017

Pantone, the self-proclaimed authority on Fashion Color, have released their Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 Color Reports. Based on what was showcased at the latest New York Fashion Week in September, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute Leatrice Eiseman said, "One of the things that we saw this year, was a renewed sense of imagination in which color was appearing in context that was different than the traditional.”

Spring 2017 Pantone Color Report

From colors that are bright and vivid to those that convey a sense of earthiness, the top 10 colors for spring 2017 are reminiscent of the hues that surround us in nature.

According to Architectural Digest, the seasonal Pantone Color Report is seen as a glimpse into upcoming styles for the year.

Surprisingly earthy and warm for the spring season, the list ranges from veggie-inspired Kale to Greenery; warm, muted hues Hazelnut and Pale Dogwood; soft blues Island Paradise and Niagara; and the more poppy Pink Yarrow, Flame, Lapis Blue, and Primrose Yellow.

Yet, when compared to their fall list, one can see how these colors evolved for 2017.

Fall 2016 Pantone Color Report

Of course, nothing exists in a vacuum, which makes it important to examine how this list of colors was developed for spring 2017.

Along with anchoring earth tones, exuberant pops of vibrant colors also appear throughout the collections. Transcending gender, these unexpectedly vivacious colors in our Fall 2016 palette act as playful but structured departures from your more typical fall shades.

While the top 10 for Fall 2016 were heavy on the blues as well as reddish-brown shades, there were six colors that are brand-new to the Pantone universe of colors. When this palette of colors is considered relative to the list for next spring, it’s fairly easy to see how many of the top 10 colors evolved.

The similarities between the spring and fall reports don't end there. There are a lot of nature references, like in seasons past; this time around, the earthy vibes come courtesy of vibrant earth tones like Dusty Cedar and Lush Meadow.

As they do every year and season, the Pantone Color Institute surveys the designers at New York Fashion Week about their color choices, then develops the bi-annual color report for those of us in the fashion and home design industries to employ as a tool for the work we do.

Looking for interior design tips? Get in touch with TD Fall today.