Ep 244:Do You Actually Want to Own an Interior Design Business?

Designed for the Creative Mind™

Host Michelle Lynn explores the fundamental distinction between being an interior designer and running an interior design business. She disc

Key takeaways

• Business ownership requires permanent engagement in sales, even if it is not the designer's passion.
• Owners must manage financial aspects like margins, markups, and profitability, rather than just focusing on revenue.

Main topics

• Designer vs. Business Owner
• Responsibilities of Ownership

Notable quotes

The design only happens if the sales works.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a guide for designers to make an honest assessme

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Design for the Creative Mind. I'm your host, Michelle Lynn, interior designer, entrepreneur, and someone who's been building businesses in this industry for almost two decades. I run an award-winning interior design firm. I've coached over a thousand designers. I've built and scaled multiple businesses around this industry because I genuinely believe that designers deserve to be paid well and run firms that actually work. And I've done it with a big team, a small team, and everything in between. So I'm not speaking from just a single season of experience. I'm speaking from all of them. This podcast exists because talented designers are leaving money on the table, burning themselves out, and wondering why the business isn't matching the quality of work. So every episode, we get into the real stuff. Pricing, procurement, operations, sales, the mindset it takes to lead a design firm with intention. No fluff, no motivational speeches, just honest conversation from someone who's still in it. So if you're ready to run your design business like a business, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. All right, here we go. Welcome to Design for the Creative Mind. I'm Michelle Lynn, and if you're new here, this is the podcast about the business behind the beautiful, the real, unglamorous, nobody warned you about this side of running an interior design firm. And I've been doing this for close to two decades. I run my own design firm, Enel Interiors Group. We're here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I also run the design bakehouse, which is where I work with designers. On the operational... and business side of what they're building. And I've been coaching designers long enough to know that there are certain conversations that need to be had more directly than they usually are. That's what today's episode is. We're going to talk about something that is, well, it sounds simple, but it's actually pretty loaded. The difference between being an interior designer and being an interior design business owner. And more specifically, the question. of which one you actually want to be. Because they're not the same job. And assuming that they are has cost a lot of talented people a lot of time, money, and peace of mind. I want to start by saying what this episode is not. It is not a motivational talk about going after your dreams. It is not a cautionary tale designed to talk you out of anything. And it's definitely not the kind of episode where I tell you that anybody can do this, just believe in yourself. Because I don't think that's true. And I don't think it's kind to say that. So what I want to do today is to describe the job honestly, both jobs actually, because that's a conversation worth having. What does it actually mean to run your own design business? What does it mean to work inside somebody else's? And how do you make the actual decision? between these two paths instead of drifting towards one by default or by pressure or by what sounds impressive on paper. Speaker 1 (3:03) There's no shame in either direction here. I want to say that clearly. For those of you in the back, before we go any further, there's no shame in going either direction. There's this cultural narrative in our industry, and actually I think it's just in general, it treats business ownership as the obvious next step for anybody with talent and ambition. Speaker 1 (3:29) You know, as I was envisioning this episode, I feel like I can say that I disagree with that framing pretty strongly. Because being good at design does not mean that you are built to run a business. It might mean that, but it might also not. So the question worth asking, and I think that most people aren't asking it enough, is what we're going to talk about today. So when most designers think about going out on their own, the picture in their head is usually something like this. More creative control, better clients, work that actually reflects your aesthetic and your sensibility, and some version of freedom that a salaried position just doesn't offer. You want to choose your projects. You want to set your own hours. You want your name on the work. And you want the income to reflect your actual ability and talent rather than whatever a job description has decided your role is worth. And that picture, girl, it's not wrong. All of those things are 100 % possible. And I'd be lying if I told you otherwise because I've built them and I've watched plenty of designers build them too. But here's what tends to get left out of that picture. The design is fairly, it's a small portion of what you will actually do as a business owner, at least in the early years and gosh, honestly, throughout. The creative work, right? The sourcing, the space planning, the client presentation, the installs, that part exists, but it's inside this container of other work that is not creative at all. And that container takes up a lot more of your time and your energy than most people anticipate when they're standing at the starting line deciding whether to go. So the first year I ran my own firm, I spent a shocking amount of my week on things that had nothing to do with design. Sending proposals, following up on them, chasing invoices, troubleshooting vendor issues, trying to figure out what software I should be using and then figuring out how to use it. Handling a client complaint that had nothing to do with the design and everything to do with the contractor's timeline. Writing my own marketing content badly and inconsistently, if we're honest, okay? Why? Because I didn't have a system and I didn't have a team. I didn't have a software platform that housed all the details for me. So none of that is what I thought the job was going to look like. And the gap between my expectation and the reality, y'all, I think that's where a lot of people get into trouble. So what the job actually is, like, let's lay this out. It's running a design business. It basically means you're now on sales permanently. Whether sales comes naturally to you or makes you want to cancel all of your appointments and hide, you are responsible for finding clients. You are responsible for having consultations, presenting proposals, following up, and closing contracts with enough consistency that you have a functioning business. The design only happens if the sales works. And for most designers, not all, but most, sales is not the thing that drew him into this career. I was talking to one of my coaching clients yesterday, and he said, basically, he doesn't want to do sales. Like, that's his least favorite part. And it's because a lot of times we are associating sales with, you know, the greasy used car salesman. But running a design business means that now you are responsible because It's your business. And I think that a lot of times sales is the part where we hope to hire that away to somebody else someday. And