Are these the exact things your design business is missing?

In today's episode of Designing Success, I’m adding new additions to our resource library within The Framework. Perfect timing, as enrollment is open until May 31st! Join now to access these exclusive tools and elevate your business over the next 12 months. DM "Framework" to @oleander_and_finch to get started. Listening to this after the doors have close? Don’t worry, you will be able to join one of the three courses from July 1st 2024.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you can expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success. On today's episode of Designing Success, I am going to introduce a few new players in the resource library for my online group course, The Framework. And the reason I want to do that is two part. The first is that it's currently open for students to join me for the next 12 months, which doesn't happen all the time. You have until the 31st of May to get involved and you can get supported weekly. You can get to be part of the community and you get access to the Original framework library before it gets split into three courses, which I have spoken about in a previous episode. But the second reason that I wanted to share it with you is maybe a group membership isn't right for you, but you don't have this kind of documentation in your business right now, and you might think to create it. So yes, it's going to take a lot of time. You can have it done for you by being part of the course, but there's nothing stopping you from actually creating these documents. And so they are documents that have supported an elevation in my business. They make what I delivered to my clients really streamlined. And I'm very proud of these documents. And I think they are something that you should all have in your businesses or have. In your back pocket to use as you create other things in your business. So let me get into some of the new players in the resource library coming up first, because it has long been something requested is the interior design task estimated time guide. Now, why do you need an estimated time guide? Basically, because before you've had lots of clients, you're not entirely sure. How long a particular task is going to take you. So you can estimate it's about this, I think. And then you get into it and you're like, Oh gosh, that actually took 14 hours. And I allowed for nine and all these little bleeds in scope you just didn't know. Now. It was difficult to make this document because how long is a piece of string? I don't know your experience levels. I don't know how fast you are. And everyone has a different nuanced approach to design. In saying that, I mean I'm actually much slower at the technical drawing side or the sketch up stuff than a mood board, for example, because those are the things that I do on a really regular basis. And I don't do a lot of spatial planning that often. So when I do, I can do it. It just I feel like a snail. I obviously have value packaging, so it doesn't really matter. It's not like I charge people for my slo mo rates. But then somebody else might be like, Oh, why have you estimated that it will take you around seven hours to do that? I could do that in an hour and a half. So everyone is going to be a little bit different. And the other thing is obviously the client brief, like what is the size of the house? How many rooms am I doing? So most people will shy away from creating a document like this, but I like to risk it for the biscuit and be a little bit crazy. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. And lots of students that are inside of the framework just want a baseline. They just want a bit of an idea. Okay. Medium sized house. How much do you actually think it would take you to do everything so that I can scope it out from initial client consultation to selections of the FF& E. How long does that generally take? Of course, how many pieces are in it? It's all variable, but it is really nice to have something that says this is the expectation for around about what it will take you when you have less than 12 months experience in the industry. And this is the expectation of how many hours this particular task should take you when you have three years or more in the industry. And this has been peer reviewed by everyone inside of the framework in terms of does this hit right? Are your numbers much different when we time track? What are your thoughts? So we've worked on it collectively and it's a really great asset and a valuable thing to have in your business. If you don't have one right now, I would suggest as you begin time tracking and as you begin getting busier and busier with client work that you're really keeping an eye on what are your standard task estimated times because it helps you to project proposal fees and scope of works really quickly when you know actually this is about where I hit in terms of how slow or fast something takes or how many hours are involved in that particular task. The next one is a trade pricing client guide. What's that you say? This is a PDF that is client facing and presents your model of trade pricing. It's an explanation of your trade pricing model. So for example, if you are passing on all of the discount and in doing so have higher base rates. It's a document that explains what is the benefit of trade pricing? How are they going to go about it? How do they order? What are some of your trade brand partners and what is your particular model? So you'd be like, This is the benefit to you of trade pricing. This is what I offer, et cetera, et cetera. It's all written up. It looks beautiful. If I do say so myself, you drop your favorite suppliers into the brand partners page, you read over it, tweak anything that you think could have your own personality, and you just drop some pictures of your own work and you're good to go. You save it as a PDF and you can attach that when you Sending out invoices, post the discovery call to explain to people what is a massive benefit of working with the designer. And that was one model obviously of trade pricing that I'm pulling out or highlighting there, but you could also explain how you split your trade pricing and they don't pay. They always pay less than recommended retail pricing. And this is how you make money to facilitate the coordination of logistics and ordering and responsibility side. And this is how they get a benefit as well. In paying less than retail, and the third version of this template is around trade pricing and presenting it to your client when the way that you do it is that you absorb all of the margin as revenue and you just allow them designer access. I have no opinions of which is the best. I know you're supposed to. I know what I do in my own business and I teach all three models in the framework. It is up to you to design your own success. It is up to you to run your own business, but I will challenge you if you choose the trade pricing model where you pass it all onto your clients to make sure that we have properly calculated your pricing. Which is a beautiful segue to the pricing calculator, isn't it? There is an entire section inside the resource library that has a way to calculate your pricing. You plug in your numbers, you reverse engineer that, you work out exactly what that looks like as a kickoff point. I also have a 12 page industry pricing guide. There are personal and peer reviews in the group chats of every proposal that you need us to look over. There's a complete competitor price matrix, which is just a lot of research that the group have collectively done around what everybody's charging, what they're charging. It's a great little place to see what is the medium and mean of the industry at the moment. And where might you like to come in if you're setting your pricing or if you've had your pricing set for ages and you start working through the framework, we're always going to review it. It is an absolutely great resource. Always evolving number as it should be. Your experience is changing. Your demand is changing. Your offers are changing. If you invest into the framework, for example, and you're spending 199 a month, you're working in a supported way, you're constantly being challenged to Grow from a business sense, but you're also accessing a whole suite of documentation that's changed. So your offering is changing. You can charge more for a beautiful streamlined process, a business that delivers a client experience that is incredible, then you probably could when you first started, you're just a bit scrappy and you're working it all out. So pricing wise, we never say, yep. You've done you're locked in. That's it. You want to review that all the time in lots of different business planning days in our quarterly reviews, always keeping an eye on the pricing, but it is so lovely to have a number that's based on actual insights, not guesswork. Next up is our workflow map. Now this isn't technically a new area of the framework, but it has had a pretty big overhaul in terms of it needed reviewing. It had been a while and I have tweaked some of my process as well. So just going in and making sure that it's really transparent that you have access to what I'm doing and can model your processes. On that. Should you want to, this is not a design specific. It doesn't matter what service you decide to offer full service, a design, one off consults, there's a map that you can step through. That's a step by step process to follow. to create client obsessed workflows every time. So knowing exactly what touch points you are going to have with the client at every step. And what I mean by that is, what happens at initial contact? What happens in the building relationship period? What happens around formal communication and what gets sent? So it's all stepped out. It's quite helpful, I think, if you are somebody who just feels a bit lost or, you There feels like there are too many, not opportunities, but there's just too many differing ways that you can do it that you just get a bit paralyzed and feel like, I just don't know which is the right way for my service offering. Like you could go crazy in terms of over delivering and over stepping out this business. Process when it's an e design and they didn't even ask for that. Or the reason they want to work with you virtually is to be quick and dirty and get it done. And so all these stepped out questionnaires and things can feel really heavy. So I am big on helping you refine that so that you are getting your client from where they are to where they finish up after the transformation in the least amount of steps possible. So it's easy for them. They rave about it, but it's nice and clear and works for you as well. So the workflow map is a really good one in terms of processes and systems to get you going. Get sorted into your notion so that you can print it out, keep it in your office. It helps you level up your discovery calls too, because you can see the flow. And so you're quite confident when you're like, no problems. I'll send you the invoice email along with the contract and service agreement. And from there, once it's paid, you'll receive the welcome pack. You could follow the process. Okay, now we get to one of my faves, the email library. So there is a full suite of emails already in there. Everything from breaking up with a client your discovery call is booked, your invoice has been paid. Thank you for that. Your welcome pack is attached, your scope of work document, like all of those the body of, Email is all written out, but recently the email provider that I use allows template links and what template links basically mean is I have over 800 emails that I have sent out to my audience and my clients and I have all of mine Structured in automated workflows in the backend of my email provider, but I am able to share them as a link to browser in the template, which meant I was able to bulk out that email suite a little bit more to be able to just check it all out, take the text that you want, take the images, take the whole template. If you use the same email provider, it's really allowed. if not, six emails that are email step by step of your workflow, but actually additional things like a nurture sequence or a welcome email that's not about the welcome packet. Just welcome to the world of Oleander and Finch, for example. So that's been really great. I'm getting really good feedback. I've had a lot of messages that are I'm loving myself sick with these pretty emails. And I think there's something really special about feeling proud about the documentation that you provide. I get incredible feedback from clients saying it was so much fun. I just pressed the button and up came the whole scope of work. And it looks so professional. Every single time I send out these documents, in the reply, if they go ahead or they don't go ahead as my client, there's always. It's always a sentence in there that says that email was really beautiful or it looked really fun or, Oh wow, I'm so excited by what just arrived in my inbox, which is incredibly important to me. Everything I teach in the framework and everything I do is customer obsessed. Okay. The last thing I wanted to call out that's inside of the framework is at the beginning of this year, I did a full day seminar for the framework is it is a seven lesson to. executive planning or business management planning. So not everybody comes from a corporate background. I have been in, I cannot tell you how many two day, four day, seven day management conferences and business training and quarterly planning and yearly planning and all that sort of stuff. And it is full on, but it also allowed me a Real insight into what happens in those boardrooms with senior leadership. And that way I was able to design inside of notion, something for the framework is that helps them set their goals, map out their sales, map out their yearly strategy, and look at what we're actually going to feature when there's all these great little calendars and things, and it just really clearly says how we have that mindset shift, how we approach our business as CEOs and how we. Do that. So if you can put aside some time, whether that's quarterly, biannually, or even once a year to do a full. Day of planning, but then every six months, at least you'll want to set aside four or five hours and just take a look at what's coming up for you. How can you be more strategic in when you launch certain things in and around focuses on certain offers, when you do certain content pushes as in, in your content calendar. It can seem really overwhelming and be full of ah, Big buzzwords, a strategy and all of that sort of stuff. But actually the way that I have set it out, you don't have to have a lot of business experience to go in and say, okay, cool, here's the calendar, the yearly calendar, what's happening in each month and how can I leverage that from a content perspective? And I have written out the facility or shared the facilitator notes for the full seminar that I ran. And that way you can read those and follow along and think, okay, yeah. That makes sense. Here I go. And you can always just ask questions in our private chat group. So the full day business seminar is a massive value add. It's valued at 15. 99. So it is almost half the cost of the course because it is really that involved. And I like to get the girls once they get up and running and they get more towards the scale side of that business to think about even just working on one of the seven major lessons inside of the seminar. Per week and just chipping away at it if need be anyway, things that we can go through definitely when you are on the other side, but I thought it was worth mentioning that sits inside of the resource library. It is not a major focus. You're not supposed to be constantly like, have you looked in the business seminar? Have you looked at a full day of planning? But if you need to, and Newsflash, you do need to do some planning for your business that is always there to support you in a way that's really structured and it steps you through so that you don't feel overwhelmed or lost. I'm just going to recap some of the areas that exist within the resource library and inside of each of these is Everything that you need related to that topic So we have the branding studio is probably after the startup sessions We go into the branding studio and that's where we go to look at colors fonts logos Just best practice all around branding. We have the document lab. The document lab is it's a website that's almost exactly as it sounds, full of editable documents, things that already exist that can help you deliver what you promise to deliver to your clients. There's the process hub and the process hub is where we look at the workflow, we look at what are the ways that we go from the very first step. Touchpoint. We do customer journey. We do ideal client staff. The process hub is somewhere I like to hang out, but maybe I'm just a process nerd. And then we have the marketing Bible. I think that speaks for itself. That's where you're going to head to the second that you want to be doing. Editing your pricing and services guide, or which would also appear inside of your document lab. Some of the things are placed in two places just because some person, one person's mind might look for it in the marketing Bible and another might go to the document lab. So I've made sure that we place it wherever you might decide to look for it. We have the email library or the template library of emails. There's a huge section called experts, eBooks, and education. And that's where we have over 140 hours of masterclasses from all the people that we've spoken to in the past. So things like PR, finance, legals, just anything you might be interested in. SEO, all of these experts have come in and given us their amazing. Private tips in the backend behind inside of the framework. So that's all stored. You can go back and watch all of those. And then I have a property staging and styling headquarters coming soon. This is a game changer. This has. Everything that you could possibly need to keep the industry standard protected. Because what happens when people enter the property styling world is they often heavily under quote to get on the real estate agents good side, or to win the work, but then the agents are pushing other high end property stylists to lower their costs. And it just has a real ripple effect throughout the industry. That's not supported by the framework and Oleander and Finch. So I'm in there showing you lots of different things. There's templates and spreadsheets. For example, if you bought an armchair, it tells you over the life of the armchair, how many styling jobs you need to get in order to break even for the cost of it, it helps you plan for warehousing pieces. It is just. Just everything that you need to start and maintain a property styling and staging business. It is epic. There are really great masterclasses and interviews and tutorials behind the scenes from well known Melbourne property stylists and staging professionals. Amazing. I'm really excited. It's not launched yet though, but it is coming and it will be included for those of you who are joining this month and getting the original resource library, because I will make sure to add the styling headquarters into the OG resource library. But that's it. I've hit 20 minutes of chatting about this amazing course that I'm so proud of. I could talk about this for days, but really I don't want to be talking about what's in the framework. I want to be talking to you in the framework. And the reason is the best part of it is the community. It's the chat, it's the support, it's the one on ones, it's the. Jokes and the gifts and the laughs and the bits that people don't see that really makes me so proud and happy to be able to facilitate a place where I see interior design experts come together and feel like they have that connection and they are not sitting in a lonely sterile office talking to a houseplant. You have until the 31st of May. I hope to see you in my DMs. Hit me up anytime with any questions at oleander underscore and underscore Finch. And until then, keep your eyes on socials. You'll be able to see a bit of behind the scenes of our epic in person event over at the M& Co showroom on the weekend. And if you have tickets already to the Style Sourcebook and Interior Design Institute webinar, I will be a guest panelist on that on Thursday. There, you can still register. It's 29 US dollars to join and you will get the replay. There is so many people registered already. I'm really excited to share some insights around what that journey has been like for me in the last six years. I will chat to you on Thursday. I am chatting to the lovely Callie of Balm Interiors, located in Texas. And she has some really unique perspectives and ways of looking at pricing. And she has some offers in her office suite that I've never ever seen before. So stick around for that. Join me then. That's it from me. Bye for now. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success. Today's podcast partner was Purefloor. Purefloor is a 100 percent natural plant based formula cleaning product. It uses multi enzymes that continue to work up to 72 hours after you clean, it's a soap and chlorine free stain remover and odor remover. I can absolutely attest to this because my father in law rang me in a blind panic last week after he'd spilt hot, dirty, chocolate, milk, all through his beautiful rug. I whipped over there with my Purefloor, we treated the rug and I can tell you there are no milk smells and no remaining stains. So thank you Purefloor for sponsoring Designing Success.