3 Ways Your Design Process helps your Bottom Line

When you think about ways to be more profitable in your interior design business, what are the first things you consider?

Raising your rates?

Reducing overhead?

Investing in advertising?

Taking bigger projects?

While all of those are reasonable ideas, I invite you to consider for a moment how simply having a polished design process can improve your earnings.

HERE ARE 3 WAYS: 

#1 It Saves You Time - Time = Money. It doesn’t matter if you charge hourly, flat fee, or a hybrid. When you have a clear and organized design process you will save time - that saves you money. This allows you to (a) take on new clients sooner and (b) if you charge a flat fee, you can earn the revenue that is rightfully yours 

To be 100% crystal clear - I’m NOT talking about creating fast, run-of-the-mill designs that you crank out in 2 weeks just to say you’re a fast designer. Design - good design - still takes time. But you can create efficiencies with templates and a clear step-by-step design process that WILL save you time. Ya’ with me?

#2 - It Builds Trust With Your Clients - Building trust is the #1 way to build a word-of-mouth interior design business. One of the best ways to build trust with your clients is to have a simple, clear process you can describe to your clients - then follow it. They knew what to expect and you delivered exactly that. From the time you kick off the project to meet for the presentation, they will have a clear understanding of what to expect and when.  

#3 - It’s Scalable - It may be counterintuitive depending on where you are in business but one of the fastest ways to grow your business is to hire help - whether that’s with an intern, a design assistant, a virtual assistant, etc. When you get help with putting together designs, you can take on new projects sooner and it frees your time up to do things like business development or learning a new skill. 

You may be thinking...Kate - “Why would I want to outsource design...That’s the most fun part!”. 

I 100% agree! 

But do you really need to be schlepping all over town picking up samples? 

Do you really need to be the one organizing photos after a site survey? 

Do you really need to be the one emailing vendors for pricing or samples? 

You are the Creative Director of your business. When you don’t have a solid process that is documented, how are you going to lead a team?  When you have a solid design process, you can clearly delegate the right tasks to the right team member, freeing you up to do your job as Creative Director.