EP #20 | Making Space for the Things that Matter

Welcome to the Designers Oasis podcast. I'm your host, Kate Bendewald, interior designer, mama, and CEO of a thriving interior design business, built on authentic word-of-mouth referrals. It wasn't that long ago that I stepped away from my corporate architecture job to build my own dream, one that would allow me more time with the people that I love, the ability to serve my clients at the highest level and to make a great living. It wasn't always easy, and I've made my share of mistakes along the way. Fast forward to today, and I've learned a thing or two. This podcast is for you - the inspired, creative, ambitious, and let's admit it,  occasionally overwhelmed interior designer who shares this dream of transforming lives by transforming homes. Join me and my guests each week as we walk through practical ways to build an interior design business you love, and help you transform your client's lives. You can do this. 

Well, welcome back, my friend, I am so glad to be hanging out with you again today. Today we are talking about making space for the things that matter. So at the time of this recording, we are getting ready to gear down for the holidays. Now I take my holiday time very seriously. Like many of you, this is a chance to connect with family to slow down to reflect on your year, maybe even doing a little planning for next year. But generally just to recover from the year prior. Personally, I can see myself being one of those crazy old ladies that asks for a shed to store all of her holiday decor, I really go out whether it's from the core to the traditions like seeing the Nutcracker every year making hot chocolate bar, doing puzzles, games, movies, oh my gosh, so many movie, Christmas carols driving to see the Christmas lights, hosting and attending cocktails parties. It's really a magical time. And I want my kids to have these memories and experiences. It was a big part of my childhood. And that's one of these things that are important for me. 

But what we're talking about here today can also apply if you have seasons where you simply want to slow down or take some extended time off. Perhaps it's a two week holiday vacation or slowing down over the summer, which is especially for important for those of you with school aged kids. I'm a big gardener. So when spring rolls around, I love to take some Friday's off so I can really just bliss out by myself in the garden with no kids to take care of I love my kids. But sometimes I just like to put in my headphones and listen to a podcast and garden. So whatever it is, these are the things that matter to you. Leisure matters. Family Time matters time with friends matter. Travel matters. What are the things that matter to you? Is it gardening, traveling entertaining? Is it focusing on your faith? Is it music and going to concerts or festivals? Is it yoga, whatever it is that matters to you. Think about taking a week to go to high point or maybe you're preparing to take maternity leave, but you need some extended time off. You can shut down, you can turn away and rejuvenate right? Okay? It's important and you need to make space for it. 

The problem is, if we aren't intentional about our time, and protecting those things that matter. It's too easy to look up and be like oh my god, I haven't had a proper vacation in three years. And I'm raising my hand over here because that was me. I would our time in Texas. I don't even I don't even know what happened. I just don't even know what happened. But we didn't go on a proper holiday for three years and you know, you don't want to look back at your life and feel like you missed opportunities to get the most out of it. What is any of this for if we don't have time to appreciate the fruits of our labor. So, I'm sure if you're listening to this today, you're a lot like me, you love working, you love your career, you love helping people. But in order to maintain your enthusiasm and joy for what it is that you do, it's important that you make space and time to look away for a bit. And that has to come with intention. So today, we're going to talk about how you can do this with intention to week vacations don't happen by accident, sabbaticals don't happen by accident. You have to plan for them. And I'm not going to get books specific. But one book that I read years ago that has been really impactful for me is the book clockwork design your business to run itself by Mike McCalla wits. And I don't follow his book to a tee the way that I run their business. But so much of that the advice in that book has helped me to figure out how I can sort of remove myself from the necessity of having to do everything on my own. So we're just we're gonna get into some of that right now.

So the first thing starts with communicating with clients, there's a couple of ways that you can do this. Your clients need to have expectations about what to expect working with you. And I would start with your welcome guide, your welcome guide should have your company holidays, listed inside of it plus any other dates, you know, you'll be out for a period of time. If you plan to go to high point every year in the spring or the fall or both. Put that in your welcome guide. They need to know from the very beginning of working with you that this is going to be a time that you'll be unavailable period. And what are your other regularly scheduled holidays, you're thinking about the end of the year, Thanksgiving, all of the end of your holidays, Labor Day, Memorial Day, your birthday, if it's you know, if it's in there, put it in your if it's if it's on your calendar, put it in your welcome guide. And that doesn't mean that if it's not in your welcome guide that you can't take that time off, I'm not suggesting that. But those are those would be kind of the baseline minimum standard every year, this is happening sort of holidays. Okay. Next, when it comes to communicating with clients, you need to have a point of contact on your team. If you're a solopreneur, you know this is going to look a little bit different. But if you have a team or team member, that will be maintaining the business while you're away. Your client needs to know this person, it's important not to introduce them a week before you plan to be out. Even if it is somebody that's familiar with your clients project. clients need to know that they're being left in good hands with someone competent and familiar with the project somebody that they can trust. Another way that you can communicate this is in your signature line. If you have upcoming travel where you know, you'll be out for an extended period of time, put it in your signature line about a month out. 

Now, of course you want to communicate by email first to your clients, I think a month's notice the the length of time that you're going to be out is going to kind of dictate how far in advance, you need to share this information with your client. If it's a significant amount of time, say for maternity leave, of course, this needs to be communicated much earlier. If it's you know, three to five days, then a couple of weeks out is good enough. If you're just taking the day off, you don't necessarily need to communicate that with your client. But if it's a significant period of time, make sure you communicate this with them. Whether by phone or email or in person first, and then go ahead and put that in your signature line once all your clients have been told just as a little bit of a reminder so it doesn't sneak up on them.

Okay, so those are just some simple ways that you can communicate with your with your clients, I'm sure there's more, I want to get into just a couple of these like quarterly annual monthly kind of things that you can do to look after your schedule to look after making space for these things that matter. And the big one, the big daddy of them all is something that you're gonna want to do annually. And then again, checking in on quarterly, which is a calendar review. And what I recommend that you do is, if you are in a partnership, if you're in a relationship with somebody else, I think it's important that you sit down together and ask each other. When do we want to take some time off together? Maybe this is dictated by things like your kids school schedule, maybe not. But I recommend that you decide together, when those times are and how long that looks like and decide together and commit to it so that you can ensure that as you start to build out your client calendar that you can get your clients to, you can either get your clients to a good milestone or know that you have a team available to support the business in your absence. 

So my business personally has ebbed and flowed over the years from being a group of five to a group of one, two, sometimes two or three, you know, we've moved a bit and things have just shifted for me a number of times, so I've kind of experienced it at different levels. But I know that when I've been running a really lean team, maybe it's just me and one or two others. If I know that we're going to be away for the holidays, maybe the whole team is going to take three weeks off for the holidays, we want to make sure that we can get our clients to a really good milestone. So those milestones might be you know, hey, we're going to get client a to, we're going to get them up to a site survey and our deep dive interview. And then we're going to regroup in the in the new year, or we're going to get them to the design presentation. And then they're going to be able to sit on that. And then again, we'll pick up in January with procurement and ordering and all of that good stuff. Or perhaps it's that you get everything ordered before the holidays. 

And that way you can you know, move into the holidays, knowing that stuff's going to be arriving. And you can just kind of pick up where you left off in the new year. And chances are you might have clients that are at various stages like this. But if you know in advance, months down the line, when you're going to be out for two weeks here a week there, whatever the case may be, that you can plan your projects accordingly. And make sure that you're always getting your clients to a nice stopping point or milestone, before that time. It'll just make your life so much easier. So that's, that's really the big one. And I think doing that a good sit down with your partner annually is a good idea. But knowing that you can't always predict everything all the time. So sitting down and looking at it quarterly again, just to make sure you've got your dates Correct. I know for us, we don't really know our next our kids school calendar year for the next year, until you know spring of of the chair. So that's something where once we get that information, we have to go back and see if what we what we guessed was right. 

So that quarterly annual calendar review is huge. And I always suggest doing it with your partner if you've got somebody in your life that you make decisions like that with. After that it really comes down to just being efficient with your time and looking ahead. So a couple of things that you can do, on a monthly basis. Have a day of finance. So instead of managing all your financial tasks throughout the week, I suggest setting aside one day a month, either first Monday or final Friday are kind of some good times to consider where you plan to take care of those things. Don't get me wrong, there's always going to be something here there that can't wait till the end of the month. Obviously, do that once a week when you're doing your sort of admin stuff. But to the extent that you can group all your big financial stuff, whether it's billing clients, whether it's paying bills all's I know for us, we get bills almost, or invoices almost daily from our receiving company. And if I paid those as they roll the end, I, that's literally all I would do. So I've I've communicated to the, to our receiver, look, I'm keeping track of these, and I'll make sure to get you paid up once a month. And so we've got that agreement in place. Again, monthly looking ahead at the calendar ahead, and, you know, checking, is there, do I have some time off built in here just to either, you know, not be doing client work, but maybe working on your business? And then also, what is your leisure time? Do you have that built in and are you prepared in advance to take to take that time off, and some things that you can do on a daily or weekly basis. 

Again, this just comes down with being efficient. And the first thing is having a weekly startup routine, and a shutdown routine, a weekly startup routine, for me, helps me ensure when I look at the week ahead, ensure that if I'm trying to take Friday off, because I want to go to the museum or go to a park with my kids, or whatever the case may be that I'm getting all that other stuff done on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And if that means working a little bit late one day so that I can do those things, I'm certainly going to try to try my best to get that done. So the weekly sort of routine for me, could look different for you. But it involves a couple of things. 

Number one is looking at my calendar, confirming Who am I meeting with? Is it a meeting that I need to keep? Is it a meeting that I need to move or cancel? Is it Is there anything that I need to do to prepare for that meeting? What are those things so looking at the calendar is number one, number two is going through email, but not necessarily responding to email just yet. I find it much easier to go through my email, make a big brain dump of what is it that needs action, and categories that buy, you know, client work here, so on and so forth. Because that's going to help with batching your day to day tasks. So that task batching is the thing I'm gonna talk about next, but I wanted to talk about the startup routine first. So if if you aren't, if you sit down and you just start hammering off emails, sometimes an email, it can take 30 seconds to respond to find go ahead and do that. But if an email requires some work to be done on it, it's best to just flag it mark it unread, however you want to manage your inbox is up to you. But making a note and then when you sit down and you're working on client a or you're working on all your financial stuff, or you're working on all of your website stuff, or whatever the case may be, that you're not sitting there trying to work while you're going through emails, but you're coming back to them.

 So that weekly startup routine looks like looking through my email, jotting down everything that I need to do related to it. And then coming back to those emails when it's time to do those things. And then the other thing that I do while I'm doing this type of routine is I'm going through and I'm thinking about what needs to be done for all of my clients for the week, and then I start blocking off time for the week. So this looks like okay, client a needs about two hours of work, I'm gonna put it in here, a client B needs a couple of hours, I'm gonna put it in here, I need to follow up with the graphic designer on XY or Z and I need to spend about an hour on that. So then I start blocking off time for my week on what I'm going to do those things. And this prevents you from bouncing around from doing you know, having your brain in the creative world and then moving over to like the administrative staff, and giving your chant your brain a chance to get into some flow, right. I don't know any of you out there that might do yoga. But for me, when I get on the mat and do yoga that that first down dog is always just a little crunchy. It's like well, you know, like, I'm starting to feel my age. But by the end of it, and I get into that flow, it just feels so much more natural and so much more relaxing. And so your brain works the same way when you get into the flow of working on the financial stuff or working on mapping out your calendar or mapping out a new project or working on concept designs for a client if you can, task batch, which is a tricky word for my mouse to say, batch those tasks together, then it allows your brain to kind of get into that flow. And ultimately what that's going to do is that's going to give you more efficiency. help you get through things faster. You can communicate with your clients more efficiently more effectively. And so that ultimately, it's gonna leave you more time, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, putting in time in your calendar for those things that you want to do, if you've got a yoga class you want to get to, if it's not on your calendar, guess what, you're not gonna go and I'm talking to myself here. It's really important that you put into your calendar, the things that you want to do that light you up. So we talked about the, the annual things, right, those those big chunks of time off, but what about the little things? What if, what if you want to go to that? I joined The Rose Society here last year, and their meetings are like 11am, in the middle of the week, because I am by a few decades, definitely the youngest person there. So most of them people there don't have, you know, they're retirees, but I love it, they're my friends, I like to go. But if it's on my calendar, I don't I don't get to go. And of course, I don't make everyone but it's important that you put in on a daily weekly basis, put into your calendar, the things that lights you up, and work around it. And then you know, some other things like having a day where you insist on no meetings with clients. Okay, meetings, my friend said one time, the best meeting is canceled meeting and I just laughed so hard. I don't necessarily suggest you cancel your meetings. But giving yourself some space to sit down and get focused and get into the zone. only happens if you protect your time. So this may look different for you. My example is on Mondays, absolutely no meetings, there are very few times I will make an exception for that. So that could be one, maybe you have, you know, one day a week where that's the only day you go out and do site visits or go run errands, run to the Design Center or get out and about because you're running all your errands on the same day. Those kinds of things are really important to streamlining your week so that you're not just bouncing around from this to that to the other. Okay. 

The last thing are automations, right. So to the extent that you can automate your business, it's going to be a tremendous time saver, that ultimately it's these these little things that add up to a lot of time savings. These are things like having reminder emails set up to clients so that you're not having to, you know, email them the day before. So don't forget our meetings tomorrow at 10am, we'll see you there. Those things can all be automated for you. So that's it. Those are those are some of the weekly, the daily and weekly things that you can do that I know might seem small, they might seem insignificant, but you add them up. And over time, when you do all these things together, they can free up so much more time for you. So that you can put those fun things in your calendar, like going to the gym, going to yoga class, taking the day off to be with your kids going to a museum, whatever it is. that lights you up. 

So I hope you enjoyed today's episode, I hope that you are inspired to find some ways to really take ownership of your calendar. Really take up space with your clients when it comes to protecting that space. Knowing that they're going to get a better you a better designer. When you are feeling whole. You're feeling inspired. You're feeling invigorated, you're feeling joyful. You're you're excited to do the work. And you can only do that if you make space for the things in life that light you up. All right, same time, same place next week. Friends, I will see you here. Until then have a great rest of your week. Thank you so much for letting me spend part of this day with you. If you're loving this podcast, please share it with a friend who you think might also love it. Or perhaps you can take just 30 seconds to open your podcast app and leave us a five star rating. And if you have just an extra minute, go ahead and leave a review. This helps me so much and it helps other designers like you to find the podcast. It also adds fuel to my motivation to keep making great episodes just for you. However you choose to help. Please know I appreciate you so very much. Thank you, my friend. Have a wonderful rest of your day and I'll see you next time