Starting Your Career as an Interior Designer: The Business of Interior Design

It's Been a Long, Long Time

Friday will be my 61^st birthday.  There was a time in my life when I thought that would be a very long time to live.  Now, of course, 60 is the new 45, or something like that.  I’ve always said birthdays are so much better than the alternative.  So, I’m not sad or depressed about the chance to celebrate another birthday.  I just wish things were better with business and the state of the economy.  We still don’t have a lot to celebrate here in California and certainly not in my neck of the woods.  We are still waiting for the space to open up for the new retail collaboration we’re working on and not a whole lot else is going on.  Robert and I actually worked last week at Pebble Beach during the AT&T Pro-Am gold tournament.  It was great fun and we met all sorts of people from all parts of America.  They were spending money but not what they were spending just two years ago at the same event.  Three years into the recession and the glimmers of light are few and far between.  I know there are designers out there who are hanging on nicely and some who are even doing more business than ever before.  It all depends on where you are.  Will congress ever get off its duff and pass some sort of health care reform?  Will they ever return to governing rather than bickering?  Who knows?  Everything just seems to take so long now.  Once upon a time business hummed along and jobs and work were flowing along.  Now, the banks won’t lend money and complain they aren’t profitable enough.  Hello!!  If you lend money you’ll make it back with interest.  No, they just sit on huge piles of reserves they say are mandated by the government.  I wonder.  Even if you can get a loan the paperwork can take months on end and you’re never assured of the outcome.  Tedious is the only word I can come up with to define how it all works right now.  Americans, it is said, have a very short memory.  For millions of us this recession will be in our collective consciousness for decades to come.  I know I’ll remember it.  Yes, for a long, long time.   

How Do You Do It?

What, exactly, do you do in your business that you believe is unique?  Is there a specific procedure or application you know no one else does in their business?  Are you willing to share?  Have you ever considered teaching at a local college, university, community college or adult education setting?  If the answers are yes, you should consider contacting an institution of higher learning in your area and ask if there is something you might contribute to their efforts.  I have certainly found teaching and mentoring is the most rewarding aspect of my career.  I know, I’m meant to say it’s all about the clients.  I do enjoy working with clients and actually creating room settings and installations but there is so much more to our careers than interior design.  The next thing you’re going to say is you simply don’t have enough time.  Where would you be in your career if every other designer in the world had taken the same position?  Teaching, mentoring, writing and reaching out to young designers simply must become part of your job description.  There is no need for you to spend sixteen hours a week teaching and the like, but finding a way to return what you have received over the years should be important to you.  I may sound preachy now but schools all around the country are cutting back in every area and interior design is seeing cut backs as well.  Who will teach as design departments become smaller and smaller with, in many instances, only one person to teach the whole syllabus?  In fact, I was just informed by Monterey Peninsula College that my services would no longer be needed teaching Business Practices for the Interior Designer after this semester.  I am so disappointed.  The duty will fall to the department head that has never run a business and will audit my course this year to see how it’s done.  Not the best of situations.  Even the department head sees how it will affect the course.  Students will no longer benefit from a teacher who can also be a mentor.  My experience, as far as the Deans of the College are concerned, is of little value.  This after teaching for nine years.  It is so often true that many professional teachers undervalue real life experience in favor of academic experience.  I look around me at Monterey Peninsula College at the way professors dress and the way they teach and I wonder how anyone learns anything at all about the real world.  I will still offer to mentor anyone at the college and the department head knows Robert and I both will help her in any way we can.  I have watched, over the years, how the interior design budget continues to be cut in favor of the hospitality department.  Do you think it has to do with the fact that more men than women go into hospitality.  The needs of women, in my opinion, are continuing to be ignored by the academic hierarchy in favor of the needs of men.  The women in my classes are quiet often recently divorced and in search of a quality career.  Aren’t their needs as important as the needs of young men in another profession, some of whom are not married?  What about equal access.  OK, time for me to get down off my high horse.  In whatever way you can please consider teaching or mentoring those young men and women who want to enter the profession of interior design and are looking for the best possible way to learn our business.  Giving back just a little will bring untold rewards.  I promise.

One Fine Day

There are glimmers everywhere I look of change coming our way.  It isn’t quite like the snowstorm the Northeast recently experienced but it is a positive change in the way many people perceive what is happening and has been happening to this country since early 2007.  Yes, I said since early 2007; that’s almost three years.  Oh, yeah, many people felt a change happening but couldn’t put their finger on what, exactly, was happening.  Me among them.  I just knew there seemed to be a chill in the way my clients were working and it took me months before I realized we hadn’t had a phone call from someone new and looking for work to be done.  Even our own Federal government refused to acknowledge there was a slowdown going on.   

So, like so many of you out there I really didn’t face the awful truth until well into 2008.  Even worse, I made minor adjustments but certainly didn’t put the brakes on until late 2008.  Ah, the wisdom of hindsight.  Still, there is no question things are looking up.  Unemployment dropped in January by .3%.  You may not think that matters but it does.  It is helpful for the way people feel about the situation at the moment and certainly is helpful for those .3% who became employed.  It is also an indicator of what is coming.  There will be new jobs and a stronger and more stable economy.  I know it won’t happen overnight, nothing ever does, really.  We may feel as if the slowdown happened fast but it didn’t.  It took almost eighteen months before most people realized what was going on.  The positive changes have actually been going on for about ten months, now.  Yes, ten months. 

What are you doing to get ready for the upswing in business we are all sure to experience over the next couple of years?  Now might be the time to update some office procedures or look at new accounting software.  If you still have some time on your hands get into one of your programs, say QuickBooks Pro, and learn how it really operates and what feature you may not have used in the past to its best advantage.  Whether it’s time keeping, invoice follow-up or check writing there must be something with which you could become more familiar.  It’s possible you might want to work on a new advertising or direct mail campaign for the summer or autumn.  Now is the time to plan out what, exactly, is needed to make a campaign like that succeed and be profitable. 

As I said, things will one day turn around and you better be ready.  There are actually some designers and firms who claim they still haven’t felt the slowdown as much as others.  I admire their tenacity in tough times and their ability to maintain a busy and lucrative clientele.  We might all take a look at what they did before and during the downturn and try to benefit from their experience.

I've had so much good response to my knowledge genie, INTERIOR DESIGN MENTOR. I've even been invited to mentor for one firm in person. It's such great fun and very rewarding.

I’ll Never Find Another You

A partnership in your business can be one of the most important aspects of how you succeed in the world of modern interior design.  But, like many marriages, a partnership can be a challenge many of us might want to reconsider.  Whether or not you decide to create a partnership and how you go about finding just the right partner is both a delicate and challenging question.  A partner can bring money, talent, management skills or additional clients.  All of these things are important for your business and should be considered when selecting a partner.  This is also the type of choice you don’t want to make over a “speed dating” type of evening with a few drinks.  You must first decide what it is you’re looking for in a partner and who you know who might fit in with your plans.  You will want to meet a number of times for each of you to present ideas and thoughts about why the partnership will work and how it will be structured.  There are as many ways to structure a partnership as there are days in the year.  One of the easiest ways to start is with a standard contract either found on the internet or through your attorney.  Then, as the conversations progress, each party will add or delete items in the contract that are beneficial or unattractive to each.  And, partnerships can be more than two people.  You may have even decided to make each member of your firm a partner.  Again, it’s up to you.  Whatever you decide make sure you create an exit strategy that doesn’t require the sale of the business to remove a partner or allow him or her to leave. 

Leaving, of course, can be one of the hardest parts of partnerships.  What do you do when the partner who has been bringing in the most business decides to leave?  Either to create his or her own business or simply to retire from the business.  What happens when the partner most adept at contract negotiations departs for greener pastures?  Or your budget and accounting whiz partner takes a powder?  Don’t think in terms of replacement only.  Each of these situations requires you assess the changed needs of the partnership and what might now be best for your business.  You may find you aren’t looking for the same type of partner who just left.  Your needs and the needs of the business will have changed somewhat over the years and now might be the best time to evaluate each partner in the firm and whether or not they have lived up to expectations.  Indeed, a review like that should probably happen every year or two at the most.  It’s so easy to let things go along without a review every once and a while.  Beware, however, letting your business slip into complacency.  To remain competitive you need to remain vigilant.  With that vigilance comes the added burden of timely evaluations of the current situation.  So, you might not find exactly the same type of partner that is leaving or has left your firm, you might just find the newest and best partner for this particular cycle of your business.