A sneaky Q&A

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Transcript

Speaker 3: 0:12

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.

Speaker 4: 0:37

By the time you're listening to this podcast episode, I will have just finished appearing as a panelist with Interior Design Institute and Style Sourcebook in a paid webinar for students looking at that career progression from a design student to running a studio or running your own design business. And what's out there for you and what should you consider? And when they sent me my questions, it's obviously, the, panel itself is made up of a bunch of different perspectives and a bunch of different women in the interior design industry. And so I brain dumped all of my answers out. And then when I'd finished, I was like, look, I'm not going to get to speak to each of these questions. I am not going to be bringing all of this content to that little webinar, because that would be just the me show for an hour. But after brain dumping it, I was like, you know what, this might be a helpful thing to share on my podcast because it will help you get to know a little bit more about what makes me, what makes me tick and what I'm all about. Here we go. I'm going to share some of the answers to the following questions. I'm not going to bore you with the lead in questions I'm just going to share some of the things that came up for me. So when I was studying, I used to use stylesourcebook daily. massive confession. I was making multiple mood boards a day. I didn't have clients. I used it to hone all of my skills and to practice and create the dream work and the looks I wished people would pay me to create. So honestly, some of those some of those early mood boards are so cringy. Do not scroll to the bottom of my Instagram because I've never cleaned them out. And I, Oh my god yeah, I never want to see them again, but they're there and I'm not sorry about them. They helped me so much. They helped me get really quick and familiar using the platform and the software. They helped me engage my own design eye and step out of that sort of everyone doing the same kind of mood board and get a style that went on to be quite recognizable. I think I know people would say to me, Oh, I knew that was an Oleander and Finch design. And I really love that. And eventually it also helped me to attract clients in both Australia and the USA, which are my two largest markets, who wanted me to make mood boards. In that style for them as well at home. Weirdly, I didn't start out wanting to be an e designer. I actually thought I would do floor plan reviews, new home selections, and FF and E's mostly. But it became pretty apparent to me pretty early that's actually not my favorite part of what I do and I was super keen to kick that off. The service list straight away. I find FF& E is really stressful and a lot of decorators will say this and a lot of people who do like e design and other things that it's for me, I overthink the selections. I'm all, how do I say this? I don't want to sound. boastful, but like I always lock it in and get it right first choice when it comes to the cohesion across the tiles and the paint and the blah, blah, blah. But I second guess it so much. Like I will go and look at 650 other alternative tiles and return to the first one I chose as the final decision. But I've wasted so much time. I'm stressed. I'm overthinking it. I do not enjoy the process of FFNE for me personally, because even though I get to the end result, I'm very nervous about it. When I create an e design, when I'm selecting and procuring furniture, I am always right. I am right to the point of doubling down, digging in my heels. And I will have clients go, I don't really like that couch. And I'd be like, yes, but this is the couch. This is the sofa that needs to happen in that room. And they'll be like, Oh, Yeah, you can have a look, but I'm telling you, this is the answer. Whereas if it was FF& E, I'd be like, Okay, let's see another 600 tiles, I'll meet you at the tile shop. I feel like my confidence maybe isn't there. And as you can hear from that bossiness just before, I do feel very confident in the furniture and decor selections that I make. So pretty early on, I Ditched the idea of doing what I thought I was going to do. And I just thought I was going to go and work for metric on help people do new build selections and get into property styling when my kids were in primary school. That's so naive to me now when I think back, but that's what, that's exactly what was happening for me. I just fell in love with the creation part of the design process. And so I built my business around that. I was like, what can I do every single day that lights me up that I will absolutely love? And I kid you not, I have loved every single day of the six years in my business. Sometimes it's rough. Sometimes it's rough as hell. I won't lie, but the actual creating and the things that I'm putting out into the world and that I give to my clients, I couldn't be more proud of. And I couldn't love doing more. The way that I use the style source book software has changed over the years. I used to be on it multiple times, as I said, a day making and creating. And now I don't get to go in there every day. I use it consistently as a designer for concept development, for final iterations and edits, for my deliverables for showcasing my skills still. I believe it is such a strong thing, especially if you don't have a portfolio. You can make something that you want to put out into the world without having to make someone buy all the things. It's incredible for building your portfolio. One of the ways that I think, believe it or not, I use it the most for is just for fun. I love what I do. I love creating possibility in the interior world when business gets really stressful as it does, or, it's not going my way. I always go back to my why I always go back to the source and I sit and create something on style source book. That's not because I'm being paid. It recenters me. It focuses me. It reminds me why I do what I do. Yeah. Yeah, so it's just something that I also like to do for the pleasure of it. I was asked what my day to day looks like and what are some recent projects that I've been working on. And I mentioned I'd recently been working on a whole home refresh for some clients who had invested heavily in landscaping and they had a really interesting architectural build as well that was all about aging in place, which I won't bore you with, but it was an incredible home, incredible garden, and then they realized the interiors just didn't reflect what was happening outside. I was focused on working with them to keep and reupholster a large amount of what they had. And then I redid the whole guest room with some beautiful Globe West pieces. Mood boarding let me show them all the fabric colors and how the chosen pieces would work before we got client approval and moved on to procurement. It also helped me come up with multiple concepts that ended up on the scrap heap floor. There were color palettes that the client just, Couldn't get on board with. So it really does help when you're trying to visually nail a common ground between you and your clients. Anyway, that's a recent job that I was working on, but in terms of my day to day, currently my day to day calendar, and we've talked before about time blocking and stuff, it's split into three core focuses, design client work. So mood boarding, sourcing, selections, preparing deliverables, having inquiry calls, finalizing schedules, et cetera. And I thought it was really important to call out here. For me, running my own interior design business is really important. If I'm going to be teaching people, I see far too many people in the coaching space or course creator space who gave up their design business. And therefore everything they teach is related back to what was happening in the industry and what was happening for them, what they've come across and what, how they dealt with things. back when they operated their business. So it is a strategy for me to keep my business operating. It's not just because I could never give it up. And I love it so much. It is also because while I continue to run it and teach people inside of the framework, I have my finger on the pulse. I know what the issues are. I understand what COSYLIVS means to interior design deposits. If I gave up my business, And I was teaching people in the framework and I was going off the last, time before the framework, I would be like, I'm sold out 12 weeks in advance. I'm charging premium rates. No one ever says no to me. It's all about availability. And I'm not saying that to gloat or boast or be, I don't even know what the word is. I feel icky saying it, but that's how my business was when I stopped to write the framework. So I would be constantly guiding people through. That version of me and that version of my business, I see it time and time again. I see big names in the industry talking about, Oh, you don't do this. And you always present it this way, or this is how we do trade supplier. You pass on the discounts. You don't do the, but those are things that worked in businesses that were run five or 10 years ago. And when you're still running a business, you understand pivots that have had to happen at this point. So it's a long game and it swings around about some business and it was crazy Packed out and sold out and COVID clients were not a problem between the years of 2020 to 2022. We're knocking them away with sticks. I'm not joking about that. I feel like that's how it felt for me anyway. And then from 2022 to 2024, things have shifted. So me still running my own interior design business allows me to See the difference between when something's an excuse, when something is said that is not true, and when something is actually the landscape of the market at the moment. And yeah, times are hard. Yep. Alignment calls are down. Yep. Yeses and deposits are down. Here's how we go about getting them anyway. So I really do really strongly feel it's important for me to keep my business continually running in conjunction with everything that I do in the support space for designers. It doesn't make things easy for me, though, because I've had to reduce down to pretty much one client at any given time, so I've always got something that I'm working on with a particular client by application. But there's still so much client work, obviously, so when it comes to my day to day, a huge portion of it is actually looking around and sourcing and making sure that I'm meeting the client brief myself. The second part of that, I would say, is the course upkeep for the framework and the course. Supporting emerging designers, supporting scaling designers, supporting people who need private coaching. I have four full time, one on one, VoxMe, Walkie Talkie Me, anytime Monday to Friday, nine to five, private coaching clients. That's it. The moment, not at any given time. At the moment, there's four, there's never more than four. That's as much as I can physically take on for obvious reasons. But I'm also, mentoring the frame workers, talking in Slack, checking their service guides when they've created them, checking over their scope of work and giving feedback. I'm in that app 24 hours a day, supporting them. And I'm in there teaching them the business of design, creating new templates to share. recording little Canva tutorials uploading bonus content. It's all about keeping the lessons up to date, filming the content, cleaning out Notion, making sure everything, all the links work, all of that boring stuff. And marketing that course is a huge job in itself. It's making sure that the marketing isn't too cheesy, that I'm not every day showing up going, buy the course, it's time to buy the course. But I am actually giving a lot of value so that by the time I say, Hey, that what is really valuable, the other side of the pay wall, come on over and let's work together. So marketing for the framework and everything that comes, along with supporting and running and building that course. And the last massive chunk for me, if I'm honest, it has to be the podcast. The podcast takes up a lot of time because I self edit it. I, manage the guests. I booked them in, I send them their links. I prepare for the interviews. I thoroughly research them, their businesses. I try to articulate the kinds of questions I think my audience will have for that particular person and what can they best learn. I spend a lot of time preparing, thinking about that, editing it, marketing it, putting all the assets into Canva, making sure there's just so much. I don't. I don't want to list it all out for you. It's not Oh, poor me. It's something I choose to do for the love of it. And it is a marketing channel, like beyond everything else, make no mistake. I am doing this so that you can get through that no and trust barrier and get to know me a lot better than you can in an Instagram post or a Pinterest tile. And I talked about the three core focuses on my day to day. So design clients, students, and the podcast. But then obviously there are all the other admin things like marketing, finances, blah, blah, blah. We know that, but I do want to put a special shout out to running a household with three young boys. The boys are absolutely my focus. They're just not in my four days a week. When I was asked about the day to day, I took that to be what is my working day as an interior designer.

Speaker 5: 13:41

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Speaker 4: 14:12

what is your greatest advice for a student looking to have their own interior design business once they graduate? Because I think this one could be helpful for some of you who listen, who are interior designers looking to run your own business. So I'm not going to go through all six of the things that I put down, but I will highlight a few. Know that you are your own biggest blocker when it comes to overthinking, getting in your own head and getting in your own way, and I mean that with all the love in the world, but that imposter syndrome and that little voice, you are in control of how much you listen to that you are in control around mindset and how much you let the things that you're overthinking to a place of paralysis. rule what you actually do. What is that saying? They always say there's someone with half as much as your qualifications, but twice as much of the like Riz, if you will, to come out there and boast about it and talk about how amazing they are and they're like, skyrocketing really quickly through getting clients, getting all the things that you wished you had, while you're over there still going, I'm not really an expert, so I'm confused about whether I can write a caption that talks about my favorite white paint when who am I to say that? And then you just write nothing. And that's so common. I'm not throwing shade at you. That is a common thing. But just know that you are your own biggest blocker. That's on you. Okay. The second thing I mentioned was to try to always look at everything through the filter of, and this is like a three pronged filter that I use in my business. All people who are successful in business are quick decision makers because they know they can change their mind and they know they can fix a mistake and they know that they can always evolve that decision. If I lock it in, cool, we're going to change the framework. It's now three courses. If that was a royally shit thing to do. I can just turn around and say, Oh, my bad. And do a whole podcast episode about why it was terrible and what you can learn from it and smush it all back into the same resource library and go, okay. the framework version 1. 0. We're going back. This is the original signature course. I can put a marketing spin on that. I can go back. And that's why businesses who don't overthink things and just make a decision and move to the next will always go further and faster. I have never worked for any CEO who's let me research, overthink, question it, interview my neighbors, take a whole bunch. No, they'll just say, yep. How much money do you need to get it off the ground? What do we need to do? What do we need to do to make that happen? And if it's easy enough, if you make it easy for me to say yes, I'll give you all the money that you need. So the three pronged lenses that I use inside of my business are from the perspective of me, the CEO, is this a good idea? Why is it a good idea? What is it going to benefit? Why have I made the decision? La. All those like questions. Play devil's advocate with myself. What could go wrong? What does it matter? What's the outcome if I do A or B or all that sort of stuff? The second lens I use is always, I do not do anything in my business where I haven't put myself in the position or perspective of my ideal client. Is this a good decision for the client? Does it benefit the client? Will it continue to deliver an exceptional experience for that client? Will I be proud of this decision? And if it passes through that lens, great. There's only one more test to go. And I like to think of, if if you're familiar with the never ending story and, walking through those golden statues and their eyes are like lasers, it's it's the very last step before you're on the other side. And that is the lens of objectivity. I put my hat on as though I am a strategist or a business coach and objective party. I'm not the client. I'm not the business owner. I know nothing about this business or this client. And I look at the idea and I go, is this a good business decision? How do you make it happen? What needs to happen? All those like questions around. Okay. But Why would you do it that way? If this is a way as well, I almost pretend that it is an anonymous idea, an email sent to me. And what would I say to them as a business coach, if somebody came to me with this idea in their business? So the objectivity part is really important. And then if I get three green lights or three ticks, I'm really confident that yep, this is the way to do things. It's just a little tip. I think that we don't really start to employ into the backend and the decision making stuff until sort of the second, third year. And really, I think you should learn it from the start so that even something like naming your business, you can put through those filters and go, okay, Works for me as the CEO. Clients love it. They can Google it. They can spell it. They can say it. It works for the client. And then what would my coach or strategist say? Have you checked for if the domain's available? All that kind of stuff. So it can work even in some of the most basic tasks that we need to do. The last one I'm going to, so there were some others, but the last one I'm going to chat to you about specifically is not looking around too much at what other designers are offering and doing, unless you want to be other designers and you want to run their version of business. Try not to do this. Now, we all follow each other so that we can support each other. And I get that, but you can mute accounts if they make you feel crap. If you're on Instagram right now and someone else that you studied with is like constantly coming up with ideas and doing things that you wish you had, what are you? are jealous of or what, for whatever reason, just get rid of them or hide them, block them, restrict them, whatever you need to do. Even if you tell yourself it's just for six months, your content will thank you. You will start creating way more stuff that you And we need to stop being influenced by the wrong people. So what I mean by that is stop looking around and benchmarking your business on other designers who are at the same level as you. Because you're copying the wrong person. They don't know what they're doing either. So if you see them come out with an error message, E design or virtual design package from 2. 97. And so you go in and say, okay I'll do mine at 1. 85 because she's really good. No, you're both undervaluing yourself and you both got it wrong. And your pricing is need serious assessment. And you both need to come and talk to me about having a one on one session. So we can coach you into the pricing structure that you need to have. But I hope you get what I mean. We're all looking around all the time and that's just going to distraction is the number one killer of progress. Something that I have said in quite a few different speaking engagements that I've had is, talking about keeping your blinkers on, don't look sideways. But I just want to quickly also mention, and I've said it lots of times, but your friends and family might support you, but they are not going to pay you. They are not going to hire So they are not relevant to your business account. They can affect the algorithm by over supporting you. And so the algorithm keeps sending you out to people just like Artie Janice, but she's not your ideal client or which is more often the case, they under support you. They see everything you do in turn making you feel really uncomfortable. You're like, I don't want to get on and talk in my stories about this is a way to work with me. Cause you're like, I look like a dick. And then everybody at the family honestly, I go to my husband's father's 70th and, aunties and uncles are talking to me about how they saw me on face or they saw me on Instagram or Facebook crying. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm dead. And this is a prime example about why, if you just unfriend them, they don't need to see that. None of them are hiring me for interior design consultations. None of them are going to open an interior design, Business and therefore need to join the framework. I am not for them. They can follow me on my private pages so they can see the kids and they can interact with me there. They don't need to be here. And when you keep them there, you are aware of in the beginning, especially obviously, now I just show up, do whatever I need to say it all, cry, scream, do all the things that I need to do or I want to do to engage with my audience. But in the beginning, I would not do face to camera stuff because the kinder moms might have seen me or people that I've, that I know have followed me or people that have followed me in the industry, but they were like pity following me back that have 150, 000 followers. I thought that they were closely watching my stories, which is like so naive and silly when I look back on it, like that it would just never have popped up in their algorithm, but I couldn't get on my stories and talk about what I was doing growing my business and getting my first look offers off the ground because I thought that those people would see me. And now I get to interview those people on this podcast and I giggle and I think, Oh my God, you are the person that I was like, terrified would see. See me plotting along, trying to get it right in the early days. And so another reminder, we are all just humans, but I hope you picked out something helpful from that. This is just a little one that when I was writing them, I was like, Oh, this advice is quite general in terms of things that you might find some actionable or practical tips for you that you hadn't thought of, or that you've been thinking about for a while. If I can help you in any other way, please come and see me over on Instagram at oleander underscore and underscore Finch. And a reminder, if you haven't clicked the plus. button to follow this podcast. Could you please do that? I have a big goal this year. I would like to see 40 percent of the people that listen to this podcast, and I know how many that is follow so that they're actually engaged enough that they want to hear the podcast episodes drop into their library each week. I would love you for it. Thanks for clicking the plus or sharing it with a friend. Chat to you next week.

Speaker: 23:50

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 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.

Speaker 2: 24:44

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.