What Can a GOOD Interior Design Business Coach ACTUALLY Do For Me?

Mar 11

For many of my interior designer friends, a decade of running their business, making mistakes, fixing those mistakes, making “next level” mistakes, and fixing those mistakes was their path to learning how to run a really good residential interior design business - trial & error.

For other people, spending a decade learning how to run a good interior design business is 100% crazy-pants. For those people, hiring someone to teach them how to run a good interior design biz makes way more sense.

Because, knowledge doesn’t come cheap. You either pay with money or you pay with time…unless your business fails before you learn the necessary skills to keep it afloat.

When it comes to learning necessary business skills, I am a big fan of spending money to shorten my time being ignorant. If that makes sense to you, check out this discussion I had with interior design business coach Marc Müskens about what a good interior design business coach can actually do for us?

Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer: When I have spoken with designers and brought up the idea of coaching to them, I keep getting back their concerns. What will a coach actually do for me?

I've been running my business for five years. I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, but I'm really good at it.

What pitfalls, what things that I'm doing wrong? Can a good interior design coach help me with?

Marc Müskens - Institute of Interior Impact: Well, a lot of times we hear I'm too busy. That's excuse number one. I'm too busy. Well, I come back to you when I have the time. And I was like, you're too busy. But too busy means maybe you can work more efficient, maybe you can get more out of existing clients. Maybe you need to change something in your business.

Because the next question is, are you happy with that or are you overworked? Are you underpaid? So that could be the case.

Another one is, I need more clients. And they tell me, first I need to do something with my new website. And they will invest thousands of dollars to a new website. Three k, whatever. They hire a marketing company to see how they can attract clients. But then I ask them, well, that's wonderful if you know what to tell them, your brand story, what it is that you promise to deliver as an interior designer, you knew how you are unique or special in some way, or what you are beyond interior design level.

That's what we love to talk about, the beyond part. That's the real deal.

Don't start with social media because a marketing company will just try to switch the right buttons on the Internet and trying to get clients. But when the client contacts you, you have no story to tell them. You don't know how to act on that, how to assess them, how to socialize with them, how to share your knowledge with them. Then you're going in the wrong direction. It's literally burning money.

So you have to start on the other side and have a close look to who you are as an interior designer, what it is, what you want to achieve. And that's a kind of zooming out on the person, on you as an interior designer. And then you can dive as deep inside as you want to go because there's a gift first you need to zoom out. So what they can get in terms of time, saving money, saving just average efforts, you can leverage what you're doing. That's what they can normally get to the code.

But besides that, we talk about fulfillment, happiness, meaning all the things that are hard to match. The other ones are, you can count the hours, I will say to you, you can count the money, your return on investment. But for the rest, it's a kind of emotional feeling thing that you can get more rest, more calmness.

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