Happy Tuesday, interior design business owners and home pros! A while back, a designer came to me with a pretty common industry problem: Her clients were driving her NUTS. 😂 She didn't hate them, exactly. But she was starting to hate the work. Too many after-hours texts. Requests that were well outside what she'd agreed to do. Extra revisions and scope creep. Clients making purchases on their own... then pulling her back in when things got complicated. 😩 And the worst: work she wasn't getting...
about 17 hours ago • 2 min read
Happy Thursday interior designers and small business owners! Do you think quartz is better than marble? A recent contributor to Happy Starts at Home is a DIYer who decided she's firmly Team Quartz after installing marble in her own home and learning firsthand that: Even when you're careful with it, marble etches. 😩 (She did not consider that a 'feature.' 😑) Of course, hiring an interior designer wouldn't necessarily have changed that outcome. Plenty of designers adore marble, understand that...
20 days ago • 3 min read
Happy Thursday, interior designers and small business owners! First, a special welcome to the 16 (!!) new readers who joined us yesterday. 😀 You’ve landed right in the middle of a conversation about figuring out what kind of design business you actually want to run. Read about how my design-only firm reached $425K in revenue without relying on procurement. Catch up here → On Tuesday, I asked y'all whether you would have wanted my design-only, modest-budget, one-room-at-a-time clients, and a...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Happy Tuesday, interior designers and small business owners! Here's a fun fact: A lot of interior designers would not have wanted my clients' projects. The question is... Would you? 👀 Their homes were usually under 3,000 square feet. Budgets ranged from about $60K for a hall bath remodel to $500K for a home addition. They didn’t want to pay us to manage construction. They didn’t want to pay furniture markups. Nearly all of them lived within about nine miles of my Seattle office. I freaking...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Happy Thursday interior designers and small business owners! A quick one today. 🙂 If your About page mostly explains where you came from, what you’ve done, and how you became a designer, it may be leaving some of your best marketing on the table. When I recently helped a student in my Nail Your Niche class rewrite hers, she didn't need to make her story more impressive. She just needed help connecting the dots. Her previous career, childhood home, project experience, and design instincts were...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Happy Tuesday Interior Designers and Ambitious Entrepreneurs! Tell me if you agree: One of the hardest things to do is: 👉 Say 'no' to a potential client. If you're anything like me, just reading that sentence makes your stomach clench. 😬 → The potential client seems lovely. → They have a real project. → They’re ready to pay you. And now you’re supposed to say, “Actually, I’m not sure you should hire me”? 😑 But saying yes to the wrong client—or even the right client under the wrong...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Happy Thursday, Designers & Savvy Service Providers! Let's adapt Tuesday's reveal for your brand! On Tuesday, I shared how Josepha adapted her message for contractors without abandoning the heart of her brand. Her homeowner-facing message is: Find Your Bold. Her contractor-facing message is: Bold decisions. Buildable designs.Design support that keeps remodels moving. Different words. Same business. And that is the point. Your message can change outfits. It just should not change...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Happy Tuesday, Designers & Savvy Service Providers! Let’s talk taglines. A few simple words, meant to capture the heart of your brand. They can take ages to find and refine, and once you finally discover language that explains what makes your business different, it's tempting to treat those words like they've been carved into a stone tablet. This is the tagline. We shall use it forever. Nobody touch anything. But clear messaging does not mean repeating the exact same sentence to every...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Happy Thursday Designers and Creative Entrepreneurs, On Tuesday I gave you a quick test: Copy the titles of your last 10 blog posts into ChatGPT and ask what your business does, who you help, and what problems you solve. Today, I’m showing you what happened when I ran that test on two real interior design blogs. And spoiler: both designers were doing smart things, but in very different ways. One designer’s blog titles made her location and service lane crystal clear. The other designer’s...
2 months ago • 1 min read