Happy Thursday Interior Designers and Driven Entrepreneurs!
Which do you think is worse?
- A client not making a decision.
- Or a client loving everything you show them… and then changing their mind.
I think the second one is waaaayyyyy worse.
It leaves you wondering:
What Happened???
Did I totally misread the room? 😨
Did outside advice creep in after the meeting? 😑
Did they just tell me what they thought I wanted to hear??? 😥
This just happened to one of my readers — we’ll call him “Raphael.” He wrote:
Subject: Killer design meeting… then this happened.
“I just had a five-star design meeting. Clients ate it up, loved what I came up with. We made some edits, and I left genuinely excited to develop the ideas.
Now, a few days later, I get an email asking for a more generic, looks-like-every-other-house design. They backtracked on decisions we made together, and added in things they hadn’t originally asked for – things that will be very hard to deliver given the details of the existing home.
Details aside, this happens too often, and it feels symptomatic of something.”
A great meeting full of “YES’s” 😃 ... followed by that midnight text… “What if we did *this* instead?” 😖
We’ve all been there, and it suuuuucks.
It makes you question your career choices so much that you want to give up and become a barista. (I spent a lot of time on the job search forums after messages like that lol - you’re not alone. 🤣 )
The reality is, there are LOTS of reasons why this could have happened:
- The client was too polite to say anything negative during the meeting.
- Maybe they were too excited to notice what was missing or let their excitement override their real priorities, only to circle back later.
- Or they got outside advice that made them rethink things.
A one-off client problem isn’t something to fix.
But a pattern IS.
The real question to address isn’t why DID it happen, but why does it KEEP happening?
Here are some coaching questions I might ask:
- Did you gather enough information during intake to understand their true priorities?
- Did you help them understand the tradeoffs involved in the choices they were making?
- Did you notice whether their body language said “no” while their mouth said “yes”?
- Did you build enough trust in your expertise before the presentation for them to trust your leadership during it?
- Did you clearly explain revision milestones, expectations, and how feedback would work?
- Did you build enough room into your process for clients to digest, reflect, and respond thoughtfully?
- And did you create policies and processes that support the behavior you want from clients? (Simple policies are surprisingly effective at guiding client behavior.)
Client indecision is rarely just a presentation problem.
Sometimes it started before they ever hired you: weak positioning, unclear expectations, low trust, poor-fit clients.
Sometimes it’s a process issue: unclear revision structure, weak milestone communication, or not enough space for feedback and reflection.
And sometimes it’s a decision-guidance issue: clients overwhelmed by tradeoffs, fear of regret, multiple opinions, and trying to navigate unfamiliar territory.
Different root causes require different fixes.
In my upcoming book, The DECIDE Method, I talk about the five most common reasons clients struggle to make decisions:
- unfamiliar territory
- wanting to get it “right”
- lots of money
- competing priorities
- multiple people
(You can read an excerpt from the book here.)
Honestly? I suspect Raphael’s situation includes all five — compounded by a few missed opportunities to build trust and establish expectations earlier in the process.
Here’s the important part:
Getting good decisions out of clients is a skill.
But that skill goes a LOT further if you establish trust in your expertise and leadership long before the presentation meeting ever happens.
((Which, by the way, is exactly the kind of work we do in Nail Your Niche and Lead to Launch! 😜))
If you’re letting your clients run the show and need to develop your onboarding, expectation-setting, boundaries, and process so you build client trust and confidence, join me for the next Lead to Launch class starting June 8.
If you’re attracting clients who consistently resist your expertise altogether, that’s a positioning problem — check out Nail Your Niche.
And if all that’s working great and you just need those decision-guiding skills, get on the list for the book so you’ll be first to know when it comes out! 🙌
Before I sign off, I want to acknowledge that some clients will still be a struggle no matter how skilled you are. Humans are… complicated.
But if this keeps happening, it’s worth looking at the systems surrounding the decision-making process, not just the decision-moment itself.
💛 Rebecca
Are you a good candidate for the next Lead to Launch cohort starting June 8, just a week and a half from now?
Let’s chat! 👉 Book a placement call. 2 spots remain. Enrollment closes June 1.
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Well, hello there — have we met?
I’m Rebecca West. I help residential interior designers feel seriously confident about their marketing, sales, and client onboarding.
Everything I teach comes from running my firm, Seriously Happy Homes, for 17 years. Between 2007 and 2023, my team and I helped over 2,000 clients transform their small, tired houses into happy homes. 💛 Our work, and my book Happy Starts at Home, was featured on TV’s New Day, in The Wall Street Journal, Live Happy Magazine, Success Magazine, & beyond!
Then, in 2023, I closed my design studio and moved to Paris, and, a couple of years later, to the south of France. ( 🤩 !! )
As a coach, consultant, and gal-who's-been-there, I'm here to help the next generation of creative, hardworking, detail-oriented interior designers get found, get great clients, and get paid like a pro!
Let’s make it happen for you!
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