Do You Need An Interior Design Business Coach?

Mar 7

Q: Does every residential interior designer need a business coach?

A: No. There are lots of interior designers who have the business skills to complement their design & people skills.

For those interior designers who do need to level up their business skills, finding the “right” interior design business coach isn’t an easy task. Not all business coaches are created equal. And like interior designers, not all business coaches have the same style or approach.

We sat down with interior design business coach Marc Müskens to discuss this relationship between interior designers and their business coaches. I hope it helps.

Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer: Do you have an ideal client avatar of:

Who you want to work with, and
Who you think would get the most benefit from you?

Marc Müskens - Institute of Interior Impact: Yes, we do have that. It's actually perfectly in line with my own life.

I know how it is to be in interior design, running a business, running an institute. So, actually having two businesses and having a family and I'm almost 40 and I do have two sons of six and eight. And you have to manage that as well. You have a private life, personal life and a business life. And most of the time we are so passionate about interior design and we forget about the family or all the attention goes to the business or we want to have all the attention to the family and the business is not running.

So in that case we have a lot of systems, tools, structures, blueprints, scripts that are ideally to make your business really efficient so you can save time and you can focus on what you love the most.

So when you have a few years of experience, minimum five. So you have a continuously stream of new clients. You have to have a stream of clients. Otherwise I'm not an attracting clients machine. That's not what I'm doing. Because you need a continuous stream and we can make that really efficient and we can leverage that big time when you have that.

So let's say next week you have a new request and I'm sure we can raise your value, we can raise the profits, you can raise your prices literally by adjusting your story, your value, your vision, your branding, all in that.

So that's ideally so you are around 40, maybe with a family, few years of experience and you want to level up. You need to level up because you want more in life because now you're hitting a kind of ceiling and you think what's next? And maybe you don't want to grow in terms of staff or team members. Maybe you want to add another designer or another staff member or a VA or whatever, that's fine.

But if you want a whole big office building with 60 or 40 people, I don't think you need to go to us. Maybe there are other coaches with big interior design pros.

FYI: You can check out my entire podcast interview with Marc here.