How to Improve the Business-Side of Your Interior Design Business

Oct 30

Residential interior designers are among the most creative of creative business owners. Transforming a house into a home that combines beauty, function and meaning is not a task for the unimaginative.

Unfortunately…a LOT of interior designers fail at their business. They fail not because of a lack of skill as a designer, but because they struggle with the business side of their interior design business. That’s why we invited / begged Gail Doby to share some advice on how we can improve the business side of our interior design business.

For those that don’t know, Gail Doby is one of the most skilled and well-known interior design business coaches in the world. With 20+ years’ experience running her own design firm (plus degrees in Finance, Banking and Interior Design), Gail knows what she’s talking about.

In our Q&A interview, we dove deep into interior design business processes, how design schools fail interior designers, and how we can implement effective systems & processes into our interior design business. Gail shared a ton of actionable info.

Enjoy :)

There is a ton of research showing that if you simultaneous read & listen to the same content, your retention increases significantly. So…if you really want to learn from Gail Doby, you can read this transcript while listening to our Zoom call.

Enjoy everybody…
TRANSCRIPT

Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
Okay, Gail. As we both know, interior designers are a highly creative group of entrepreneurs. And while I'm not saying that there aren't lots of other types of entrepreneurs that are creative people, the designers I've talked to almost across the board, especially if they have only been in business for five years or less, they are definitely skew creative and are much weaker on the business side.
So when I've discussed implementing processes to them, I've always received a lot of pushback, and they say, Well, I don't want to lose the creativity of my business by coming up with a whole set of systems and rules and everybody has to do anything. My designs will suffer.
Is this accurate? Because I tell them, no.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
Oh, gosh, no. I love that. And I think that's a myth and a mis-perception a lot of designers have. So think about this. If you are really good at what you do and you have foundational skills, does it hurt you to have foundational skills that will allow you to build on that and be more creative?

And I think the answer most designers would have is that foundational skills are necessary.
Systems and processes are just like that. And when you have systems and processes in your business,
it means that you can scale your business with the same brand message and the same brand delivery of services and also excellent quality of design work.
In fact, you can be more creative because you're not spending your time reteaching people over and over and over how to do things.
You can actually bring people on in your company and in your business to help you do things in the way you like to have them done.
So you can actually create more consistency and reduce the amount of work that you have to spend coaching people and training people and repeating the same things over and over.
So the rule is, if you have to repeat something more than once or do it more than once, then you need a process, a system, a checklist, or something like that so other people can do it in your way.
So to me, this is really the ultimate in letting go and having the opportunity to be ultimately creative.
And so for designers, if you want to do more creative, then that's what you do.
That's how you scale your business, and that's how you're able to be more creative and continue to attract more and more better clients, because you're doing better work, and so is your team.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer: The designers, also, that I've spoken to about this, when the ones I've been able to kind of convince that maybe processes are good for their business, they'll come back to me with.
And once they've started implementing them or working with someone who's helping them implement them, they say, Why didn't we learn this in school?
Because design school, you start with the person's innate creativity and interest in doing interior design.
And then they teach the heck out of them on design principles and technology and all of that kind of stuff, which is totally necessary, but the business side is so woefully lacking, which I guess is great for you, because then you come along and you're able to help them level up their business.
I'm curious, do you consider your coaching business to be almost maybe a finishing school or a postgraduate degree?
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
It is. And I would tell you that honestly, when I got in design school, I had one business course, and the teacher had been doing design for 20 years.
She turned to me in the middle of the class. She knew I was a practicing designer already, and her comment to me was, I don't really understand sales tax.
Can you help me with this part?
So I ended up answering the questions for the people in the class instead of the teacher who had been in it 20 years.
And I was just dumbfounded.
And I was asked later to come and speak at the school and be a teacher, but they paid $15 an hour.
And I said, Well, I don't think I can do that. I'm so sorry, but not going to happen.
So what I realized was, you're right, it's woefully lacking in the schools.
And part of the reason and it's not the fault of the schools, they only have so many hours in their curriculum.
And the point is to teach you the design skills so that you can do your actual work.
But the reality is, 90% of the work of an interior designer is the business. And so if you don't have a business background and you don't have a business degree, then you better go find someone that can train you on how to run a business.
And so what I took was my 20 plus years of business experience and my finance degree and many years of other experience in sales and marketing and working for a Fortune 500 to develop a curriculum that teaches people exactly what they need to know when they need to know it.
Because each level of designer is at a different place and they need to know different things to scale their business.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
Building on that point of each different level of designer, I would assume most designers, when they leave school, they're not thinking about starting their own business right away.
Some are if they have a passion or if they have a background in business.
So they can already kind of marry those two skills. But most people go to work for another designer, whether it's residential or commercial.
And then they learn some of that, the business side. And that goes beyond the actual systems, processes and the day to day, but also the interpersonal working with other employees, do you find that those people who've worked with other companies and have learned from them, that's a net positive.
They come into it when they meet you already knowing more about business or they've learned things that are wrong.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
It's both.
We see things. And of course, I have opinions on how I think it works to run a business.
And I'm coming from a very business oriented background, and I happened to get a design degree later, so I added it on the top of it.
And to me, you have to know how to run the business first.
And what I did not get in design school, nor did I get in my internship, was any education on how to run a business.
In fact, I was teaching the person with whom I was doing an internship how to run his business better.
And so I realized that in my particular case, that I had a natural instinct about it.
But I also just knew from watching what he was doing that some of the things he was doing weren't working.
For example, doing a 10% markup on things wouldn't pay the bills.
And of course, I was having heart failure. And I said, Look, I'm going to give you some advice, and this is from me being a finance person.
You need to raise your rates, and you need to raise your markups because you're not making enough money.
And it was a real shock to his system to have his person who's an intern teaching him that.
So what I realized was, that's why I ended up in this business, because I realized that what I learned the hard way by running my own business is what the designers need to know.
And it's a shortcut, because I know what not to do, and the fastest way to get to the best possible results, to get more money working, less, better team, the whole works.
And I would rather give people that shortcut in the packages that we have and the training we have so that they don't have to learn it the hard way like I did.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
A lot of the designers that I've spoken with about processes, their resistance, it's funny because I'll say to them, you already have processes, and not just in your business, but in your real life.
Like this morning, my daughter, who's eight years old, she's now being responsible for getting herself ready to go to school in the morning.
And we've told her, if you're late, you're late, and you're going to have to be the one to go to the principal's office and deal with that.
So now she's built her own little process this week on how to get ready for school, and she's got a little list, and she follows it. Boom, boom, boom. And then she's on time. And it's been great.
And I've said the same thing to designers. I said, you already have a process. It may not be written down, it may not be codified in a standard operating procedure manual or in Asana or something like that.
But you do have processes, and the trick then, and this is where I find it's difficult, is pulling that out of their head or having them pull that out of their head and put it down on paper or on the computer or however they're going to do it, or on a piece of software.
Is that something that you run into? Or when the people come to you….okay, so that is something you run into.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
Oh gosh, yes. And I'm going to share how I think this would be useful to most of the people here.
But if you're going to teach somebody else anyway and you're going to verbalize it to them and maybe show them what you're doing, just turn on a zoom and record.
And then you've got the opportunity for the person that is listening to take that.
You can actually use something like Otter AI and it will transcribe.
And then take that and have your employee turn that into a process that's simple. If you do that, it takes no time to do it. You're going to teach someone how to do it anyway. So you might as well record the screen, record your words, have somebody take that, transcribe it, and develop it into a one page summary that would take an hour for that person to do it.
And then you can review it and you can review whether that worked or not and what tweaks you need to make, because often what happens is the person hears it differently than the way you said it.
So you have to go back and repeat it and make sure that that person understands what you said and have them feed it back.
And then you can say, oh, that wasn't quite what I meant. Let's correct that.
So that's how you can get a very quick process put together.
Very simple.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
Yeah. And it doesn't need to be big, fancy Asana or any of that kind of stuff, right?
Like, you can literally start out with a one page document.
And would you recommend also that look at a single process, not think of it as this giant project where every single part of your business needs to be done in the next three months.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
Do one a week.
That's the easiest thing for you to do is spend an hour or two a week and just train somebody on something and record it and then have them finish it up. If you do that, within a year, you'll have everything documented, probably even less than that.
But that is the simplest process.
And in fact, in our program, what we do is we make a list of here are the processes that you need to document for your business and we can't give it to you because each person has a different way of doing things and it would not make any sense at all for us to put together.
Here's your perfect template, because it won't be perfect for them.
Everyone that we work with is creative and they'll do it in their own way.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
So not even like a very bare bones like, say we took client onboarding.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
We do have some, we try to do the major ones, but we don't do all the nitpicky ones because everyone has a different method for taking in money and processing checks and doing all the things that happen behind the scenes.
So we do help with a couple of the key processes that people need to have.
So we try to provide a lot of checklists and a lot of things that they can use overall.
And again, we do the things we know for sure.
We can give them a good baseline from which they can work, but they need to always customize everything to their own methods.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
Which makes sense to me because it's a living document. The process, right.
Where your process is today is definitely not going to be the place where it is five years from now.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
No, because your business changes and you're going to have different people doing different elements of the business and therefore they are going to bring their own twist to it.
And in some cases, it'll be ten times better than the way you are doing it.
And that's what I found. I have an operations manager who is so good at processes that I shouldn't ever touch them because she's so good at it that I would let her do it.
So I know where I'm really exceptional and where I'm not.
And that's not one of my core areas of expertise, but I have people on the team and it is for that.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
Right. Would you say if someone was going to try to DIY their own processes, where they should start?
What would be like the top three?
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
I would start with client experience.
That's always the first thing, right? Yeah, you need to have that.
And then you also need to have a process for sales, and that would probably be the second one.
And probably the third one is your hiring process because you need to hire to grow your business.
So those three would be my top three.
Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer:
And probably, if the whole Pareto Principle 80/20 rule holds true, those probably take care of the bulk of your problems in a day.
Exactly. Yeah. Okay.
If you were going to recommend a piece of software or technology other than, like we talked about the recording it on a zoom call, which is a great idea, that I hadn't thought of any kind of technology that you think would be useful or literally just create a standard operating procedure Binder.
Gail Doby - Pearl Collective:
Well, it depends on where you are in your business. If you are in the under 500,000, you're probably going to do a binder and checklist.
If you're in the 500,000 to say a million and a half in revenue, you're probably starting to put it into some sort of a digital format.
And for sure over a million and a half you're going to have everything digitally, so pick what software works for you.
Some people like ClickUp, some people like Asana. Those are great tools to use. Some people like Monday.
I'm sure there are lots of other softwares out there, but talk to your friends in the business.
And in our Mastermind Group, we had questions like that today, and they were asking questions of each other in our boardroom group, well, what are you using for this?
And they were literally asking what software everyone was using.
So that was the conversation.
So to me, that's one of the reasons you want to be in a Mastermind Group, too, is that the way you do things may be different than the way I do things, and the choices I would make on software may be different than yours.
So you have to do a little investigation and figure out what works for you and talk to your friends who can give you some background and feedback on what has worked for them.

If you want to learn more from Gail Doby, you can click on the Gail Doby link below for more free stuff, check out her blog, listen to her podcast or sign up for her coaching program.