Interior Design Business Podcasts - Episode 29
Interior Design Business Podcasts Episode 29 - November 28, 2022
If you’re an interior designer who runs (or aspires to run) their own interior design business, you’re going to love today’s interior design business podcasts. So much awesomeness on a Monday morning.
Here are today’s podcasts:
Interior Design Business - Terri Taylor - Moving Upmarket Part 1 - 18 min
Profit Is A Choice - Michele Williams - Tax Deferral and Risk Management for your Company - 47 min
Designed by Wingnut Social - Darla Powell - Mini News: Why You Have to Get On TikTok if You’re an Interior Designer - 13 min
Designed for the Creative Mind - Michelle Lynne - How to Outsource in Your Design Business & Wow Your Clients - 35 min
The Affluent Creative - Melissa Galt - Never Worry About Money Again When You Learn to Fuel the Soul of Your Business - 42 min
Business of Home Podcast - Athena Calderone likes to prove the doubters wrong - 1 hr, 1 min
Design Curious - Rebecca Ward - Considering a Career Change? How to Transition to an Interior Design Career With Martha Lowry - 22 min
Interior Design Business - Moving Upmarket Part 1 - 18 min
How do you move your interior design business upmarket?
In this episode, host Terri Taylor is sharing everything she knows about moving upmarket and what it takes to shift your mindset as you become a high-end designer.
As interior designers, we usually start our businesses by hustling. We take every single job that falls at our feet. That hustle is an effective way to start a business, but it’s not an effective way to move upmarket. If you keep taking every job that comes your way and working longer and harder hours, you’re not going to have the time and energy to focus on up-leveling your business.
If you feel like you have to keep working more and more in order to succeed, Terri is here to tell you that that’s not true. Let’s unpack it in this episode and find out how to take your business upmarket.
You can check out this podcast episode here:
Profit Is A Choice - Tax Deferral and Risk Management for your Company with Ed Bryan - 47 min
Today’ episode is a wee bit technical. In fact, the topic was totally foreign even to host Michele Williams. The 831(b) plan is a tax deferral and risk management opportunity for American interior designers. Not a sexy topic, but if you operate an interior design firm in the USA, it’s a topic that shouldn’t be overlooked.
For this episode, Michele brought in Ed Bryan of SRA 831(b) Admin to break it down for us.
Topics Mentioned:
Insurance
Tax deferral
Risk management
Plan
Key Thoughts:
It's like traditional insurance. But what you're doing is building up this money, we always say with the 831B plans, they're not worth anything when we set them up. There are no funds, and there are no assets in there initially, but after two, three, four, or five years, these things have the potential to be worth millions of dollars. Ed Bryan (15:42)
I think that would be important to know how you are taxed in order to determine how much you're trying to put into an 831B plan, whether you're really trying to use it for long-term savings in some ways, or if you're really using it to mitigate risk. Michele (27:22)
We've seen a significant upswing in the last three to five years in business owners looking for real cybersecurity insurance that covers things like phishing, social engineering, and those types of things. And we're seeing a lot of pressure there, because unfortunately, people that are attacking, especially those, those hackers and cybersecurity criminals, they know that small to midsize business doesn't necessarily have the awareness in the cybersecurity that a fortune 500 company does. Ed Bryan (31:55)
Even in my coaching and consulting practice I work with my clients, I'm talking to their accountants with them, I'm talking to their bookkeepers, their financial analysts like we're working together, because everybody has a piece of the puzzle. Michele (35:47)
You can check out this podcast episode here:
Designed by Wingnut Social - Mini News: Why You Have to Get On TikTok if You’re an Interior Designer - 13 min
Are you an interior designer about to make a TikTok account and you're looking for tips? OR are you an interior designer who thinks TikTok is just a silly app for kids?
Either way, host Darla Powell & Wingnut’s SEO Manager Gavin Doran are here to share some tips on joining TikTok as an interior designer and the benefits of catering to a younger audience. Help is on the way!!!
Highlights
TikTok just replaced Netflix as the most popular app - not just for kids, but for people under 35. This can be pretty surprising as I’m sure many of us view TikTok as something for kids, or that it’s not a professional space. However, the data shows that this is quickly changing. When you’re thinking about where you want to invest your time and limited amount of resources, you aren’t typically prioritizing younger audiences. However, Gen Z is poised to become one of the wealthiest generations of all time - the average age of people with a $25M net worth is age 45 and above. As an interior designer, if you’re looking to target even the $5-10M range, oddly enough, it could be within the 20-35 year old bracket. These younger generations are developing a higher level of wealth but are a relatively untapped market for interior designers.
What kind of content should interior designers make on TikTok? Firstly, if you have products you can sell, you can now sell them within the TikTok app and reach more people faster. As social media apps roll out new features, they typically reward early users by pushing your content out more, since it’s ultimately in their best financial interest to showcase new features. But what should the videos even be about? You don’t have to go on TikTok and do silly dances. Shift your perspective and consider this…TikTok can take the weight of professionalism off your shoulders and allow you to be a bit more lighthearted and showcase your personality. Try looking at TikTok as something more “freeing” rather than silly. If you have a staff or team working on projects with you, you can also have them create videos to demonstrate a day-in-the-life at your business. You can also show your design work through TikTok. You can use trending audio and sounds to create a fun video clip, like room transformations, which do really well on TikTok. Take a before and after video, with a little bit of your work in between, add some audio, and post away!
Have you been really resistant to join TikTok? If you’re an interior designer listening to this right now, you’re going to realize TikTok isn’t just for kids - whether you realize that now and can take advantage of that, or you realize it once someone else has done it. It’s important to get on TikTok as soon as you can because you will see an advantage. TikTok is working to gain more users of older generations as well, so if you fall into that category, you may find your content getting pushed harder in the algorithm. It is financially beneficial for TikTok to push that content to help reach older demographics.
You can check out this podcast episode here:
Designed for the Creative Mind - How to Outsource in Your Design Business & Wow Your Clients with Theresa Gresham - 35 min
In today’s episode, host Michelle Lynne interviews Theresa Gresham, a rendering artist and CAD drafter with formal interior design training and the owner of Theresa G Design. She provides show-stopping virtual design services for busy interior designers. Theresa has found that working with a virtual design assistant can increase profitability, add value to your design process, and relieve stress.
In this episode, Theresa and Michelle chat about the process of outsourcing 3D renderings and CAD drawings, how she collaborates with other interior designers, and tips when working with a virtual design assistant for the first time.
You can check out this podcast episode here:
The Affluent Creative - Never Worry About Money Again When You Learn to Fuel the Soul of Your Business - 42 min
Think about your current client load and project pipeline. Are you satisfied and fulfilled by every decision that you’ve lined up at this moment? Or are you, like many creatives, worried about how you are going to manage all of the tasks and requests that you’ve agreed to while also jumping through hoops for a client’s every whim to get them on board with your vision?
Many of the designers that host Melissa Galt works with have found themselves in the latter camp at some point in their creative endeavors. And you may feel this way too.
As creatives, we often get ourselves involved in projects or agreements that do not necessarily align with our standard of business because we are solely chasing monetary profits or word-of-mouth advertisement, or because we just can’t say, “No.”
However, when you focus exclusively on your bank account, you starve the soul of your business. You actually wind up earning far less and becoming less satisfied and successful. So, this means that you will have to learn the power of saying “No” sometimes! You do not have to say “Yes” to every business proposition or client request if it does not align with the vision you have for your business. Being selective is key. But, getting there is the hard part!
In today’s episode, Melissa walks us through her best practices for legitimizing our business prospects through the power of selective discernment. In other words, she will key you into all the things you need to learn to say “No” to so that you can start saying “Yes” to higher satisfaction, a greater work-life balance, and more reliable and profitable project pipelines.
Highlights
The nine business basics that you need to have a legitimate and professional business
The most important things that you need to learn say “no” to for a successful business
How to use discernment to your advantage when navigating business decisions
You can check out this podcast episode here:
Business of Home Podcast - Athena Calderone likes to prove the doubters wrong - 1 hr, 1 min
In 2011, Athena Calderone was a young mother in Brooklyn, looking to turn her considerable creative energy into a career. She started a blog, Eyeswoon, which has grown into a powerful platform for her various endeavors, including cooking, styling, and design. A decade in and fresh off a major collection for Crate and Barrel, Calderone is poised to kick off a new phase of growth: she’s in the midst of launching an e-commerce business and working on a residential development project—not to mention a few design jobs, partnerships with the likes of Tiffany and American Express, and attending to her nearly 1 million Instagram followers.
In this episode, Calderone shares with host Dennis Scully why she loves to prove the doubters wrong, how embracing the chaos of creativity is healthy, and why doing more than one thing is both a blessing and a curse.
You can check out this podcast episode here:
Design Curious - Considering a Career Change? How to Transition to an Interior Design Career With Martha Lowry - 22 min
How do interior designers create beautiful and functional rooms? This week's guest, Martha Lowry, approaches interior design using mathematics! For some people like Martha, the design and math parts of her brain are intertwined.
But despite successful careers in mathematics, computing, cooking, and teaching, why did Martha transition into interior design? Why could not she get past the desire to go into interior design? What made her stay in interior design, doing it for 29 years now?
If you are considering a change of career to interior design, this episode is a must-listen. What do you need to know before you make the switch? Would it be worth your time and money? All these and more in today's episode.
What you’re going to learn…
Learn about the challenges you'll face as an interior designer
Know the four questions you should ask yourself before you leap into interior design
Discover who else should be a part of your team other than tradespeople
Highlights
4:02 – Martha’s untraditional path to Interior Design and the many shifts she took to get there
6:59 – How the design business and mathematical side of her brain are intertwined
8:24 – What made her decide to start her own interior design business
9:37 – How design impacts her clients’ lives and the passion that drives her while working with her clients
10:49 – The most challenging part of her career now
12:11 – Pre-pandemic challenges she faced regularly
13:07 – The challenge with HGTV content
13:58 – Her plans for the Design of The Times
14:41 – How to start looking at your interior design business as a sellable business
16:05 – What you will feel during your transition from your career into interior design, and the four questions you should ask yourself before you leap into interior design
What is an interior design job like?
What does a career in interior design entail?
What are the skills required to work as an interior designer?
Are you willing to take on the hours and stress of designing a home?
17:29 – Client success story: How she created a safe space for one of her clients with mobility issues
18:15 – Her advice for those starting out or maybe going through what she went through transitioning into interior design
Do your research
Make sure you know what the job entails
Work on your communication skills because it’s key
Put together a good team of not only tradespeople but also get
A lawyer for legal advice
An accountant for financial advice
A business coach for business advice
You can check out this podcast episode here:
