Designing Success

10 better ways to showcase your skills than a ‘portfolio’

June 11, 2024 rhiannon lee
10 better ways to showcase your skills than a ‘portfolio’
Designing Success
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Designing Success
10 better ways to showcase your skills than a ‘portfolio’
Jun 11, 2024
rhiannon lee

Why Your Portfolio Belongs in the Bin and Ten Alternative Ways to Actually Attract Clients.

Welcome to the 80th episode of *Designing Success*! Today, we're shaking things up with a controversial take: Why your portfolio is overrated and what to focus on instead. Discover ten powerful ways to attract clients without relying on a traditional portfolio.

- Portfolios are often unnecessary and not client-focused.
- Alternative strategies to attract clients more effectively:
  1. Showcase case studies.
  2. Leverage social media.
  3. Create valuable content.
  4. Network strategically.
  5. Offer free workshops/webinars.
  6. Optimise your website.
  7. Collaborate with complementary businesses.
  8. Focus on local SEO.
  9. Develop a strong brand identity.
  10. Follow up with past clients.

Tune in to learn why ditching the portfolio could be your best business move yet!

The presenting partner for this episode is Pureflor - Use code 'Design' for a sneaky discount  For a better environment | Pureflor

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.

Grab more insights and updates:

Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oleander_and_finch
Like Oleander & Finch on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/oleanderandfinch

For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/

Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success
(waitlist now open) https://oleanderandfinch.com/first-year-framework/

Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.

Thank you for yo...

Show Notes Transcript

Why Your Portfolio Belongs in the Bin and Ten Alternative Ways to Actually Attract Clients.

Welcome to the 80th episode of *Designing Success*! Today, we're shaking things up with a controversial take: Why your portfolio is overrated and what to focus on instead. Discover ten powerful ways to attract clients without relying on a traditional portfolio.

- Portfolios are often unnecessary and not client-focused.
- Alternative strategies to attract clients more effectively:
  1. Showcase case studies.
  2. Leverage social media.
  3. Create valuable content.
  4. Network strategically.
  5. Offer free workshops/webinars.
  6. Optimise your website.
  7. Collaborate with complementary businesses.
  8. Focus on local SEO.
  9. Develop a strong brand identity.
  10. Follow up with past clients.

Tune in to learn why ditching the portfolio could be your best business move yet!

The presenting partner for this episode is Pureflor - Use code 'Design' for a sneaky discount  For a better environment | Pureflor

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.

Grab more insights and updates:

Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oleander_and_finch
Like Oleander & Finch on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/oleanderandfinch

For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/

Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success
(waitlist now open) https://oleanderandfinch.com/first-year-framework/

Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.

Thank you for yo...

Speaker 4:

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 2:

Welcome to the 80th episode of Designing Success. I cannot believe that, but to celebrate, I have gone back to a topic that I did for the very first episode called No Portfolio, No Problem. And today I want to chat about portfolios because they are so important. The single handedly most overrated things that I find I am often up against when speaking to emerging designers or newer designers that are like, my portfolio is not up to scratch. What about my portfolio? Even the word just makes me go, Oh, really? When was the last time you asked a service provider to see their portfolio? Nobody has ever asked me to see my portfolio or occasionally on a discovery call, someone will say, is there some examples of your work I can see? And that's great. I can obviously take them directly to style source book to see over 800 mood boards of mine on my designer profile. Or sometimes they want a specific look an example of that, I was approached once by somebody who wanted a new build service from me, but they had really bright, bold, brave color choices, and they weren't seeing that in my mood board, so rightfully they said, look, How do you work with color? Can we see some examples? And I was able to send them some mood boards and some completed work that I'd done with people who had, a lot of patent clashing and a lot of bright colors, which reassured them that I was capable of doing that anyway, back to the portfolio, when I say, when was the last time you asked, it's more to highlight the idea that people just aren't asking you to see that. And it's unlikely that what's inside of your portfolio right now relates to the bespoke needs of the next project inquiry. Another thing that many people feedback that they feel they're lacking is the before and afters, but a portfolio doesn't have to be before and afters. It could be a spec project or, which is to show what your deliverables look like and make a full report. Fake set of deliverables for a fake client and a dream job and display those as a portfolio. You don't have to have been paid for the work and nobody asks to see the receipts. And a portfolio can be really simple. I just don't think it needs to be as large as many people assume it does. I don't know if it's that word that you feel like you should have a big leather bound folio of jobs, but it really doesn't have to be a big deal. It can simply be one single display of end to end documentation or a client brief, how you met the brief, how you overcome things and what you delivered as the end result. I feel like saying things like portfolios need to get in the bin does stir the pot a little bit, especially if you're quite new and you're like hang on, I don't have anything else. And I just want to be clear here when I say get in the bin or it's just not that needed. It's more where I see people using all of that. The lack of finished finalized work before and afters and a large number of examples of these in a quote unquote portfolio, they let that hold them back. So that becomes the excuse and the catalyst as to why they're not getting clients. And I really don't believe that's a thing because I think that clients. Just my experience with all of the designers I work with and with my own experience is that I've just never been asked for it. And I asked a room full of girls last week in a networking thing, like hands up, how many people have had to provide their portfolio upon request and zero hands went up. So I know from speaking with so many different people in the industry who do. types of interior design and offer different services. Absolutely none of no one has ever lost work because someone went, Oh, look, your portfolio wasn't really up to scratch or it wasn't what I expected to see. It's just not a thing. But I'm not just here to dump all over your portfolio and your ideas about portfolio. And that's it. I thought today instead of. Back to episode one, you can listen to no portfolio, no problem, which talks about a bunch of different ways that you could showcase your work like spec projects or those sorts of things. And today I'm going to talk about where you could put your energy instead of perfecting a portfolio that might actually attract clients. Instead of perfecting a portfolio of hypothetical work, I would love to see you work on clear branding and messaging. We know that brand is identity, personal branding is important, but having that professional, consistent, clear communication, what you do, who you serve, those sorts of things are really important. And of course, we focus a lot at the beginning on getting a logo and a website and starting an Instagram profile, but even your email signature, if you create a master list, I have this in my startup framework, the master list of all the templates you're going to need. So Canva real covers for Instagram, everything from that all the way to Pinterest board covers. Static posts, carousels, just getting a unified look across all platforms makes you feel so in control and professional. And it's a much better feeling and a much better way of showcasing what you do and how you do it to your clients than a portfolio, which to be frank, they can see that is just schoolwork from space. The second thing I think it'd be really good to spend some time on instead is getting out and getting to know people who are genuinely likely to become potential clients. So meeting them, asking them questions, trying to understand their needs, DMing them. It's not a sales pitch, I'm not here to sell you anything, I'd just love to know, do you have a perception that stops you from wanting to work with an interior designer? Do you want to work with an interior designer, but you're not sure how much they cost? Finding out this information is critical for you targeting your content and making sure that you're speaking directly to your dream client that you'd love to work with. If you can create content that speaks directly to their soul and lights up get a whole bunch, you'll get lots of engagement for a start. You'll be building a real community and you will get clients who book you. I have been private coaching with a couple of girls recently, and one of them is relatively new and she is getting discovery calls every day. Each week. And we've done a lot of these things I'm going to go through today together over the last six months. But I can tell that, she is really clear on who she wants to work with. And she has done all of the work in the background to get that suite of marketing master copies saved and her documents ready and everything's like polished and professional. And it also comes across in, when I see her do. Instagram stories or anything like that. I can tell that she feels secure in what she delivers to the client. So therefore she comes across a lot more confidently than maybe she's even feeling because she's no, I can do this, right? All I have to do is the design based on your brief. Everything else is under control and that control breeds confidence. So I think it would be great if you are active. It's a great way to get your brand and messaging going, making a personal connection and having lots of conversations with those potential clients. It can help you build that like and trust and actually know what it is that they want from you and that you want to be creating so that you can build your community. The next one's helpful. It's not groundbreaking. Client testimonials, real feedback from clients is invaluable. It makes you feel good. It makes people feel like, Oh, she's a real person who gets real jobs. So I could consider working with her. It's good to build up a bunch of these. And even if you've had no clients, just ask your tutor. Maybe if you go to design school to comment on your style or. Maybe give you a little bit of feedback of what it is they think that you do well in the design realm and use a snippet of that as a Testimonial with a quote tile you can share it on your Instagram could go in your stories even Or you could exchange a mini consultation with a friend in exchange for a Google review just to get those reviews up and running You can ask anyone to give you a Google review They don't have to be a former paid client of yours in an interior design space As long as they are not saying paid you to do this full home renovation, and we were thrilled with it when you did nothing, it was just your cousin, Sally. Like that's disingenuous, obviously, but you could ask your cousin Sally to give a review about how trustworthy you are and how you have a really great eye for detail and how your style advice means a lot to her. And she's gotten a lot of help over the years in pulling things together in her own home, for example. Don't forget these days, testimonials don't have to be fully polished and put in Canva people can be distrusting of that anyway and think that you just made it up. A quick screenshot of an actual Google review or an actual email or an actual DM, it probably holds a lot more value. validity or it seems more authentic because they can see that an external person has written it to you. So you even don't have to spend a lot of time on these. You just have to ask for them. And that is the thing that's missing from a lot of people in the early days, before we've had clients is to go out and actually say, I'm looking to build Collect a few testimonials. Would you be willing to say one or two things about me as an interior designer? Case studies are another one that I think it's nice to have. And they're almost like a portfolio without being the word portfolio. And there's a few different ways I think you can use them really well. One is to showcase projects that you've You've gathered a brief you've had to consider a certain thing and then how you've delivered that thing and overcome any problems along the way. You could take people on a bit of a journey in your stories so I find that can really help. Like it helps engagement people will email you and go oh I can see why you had to choose. I remember one of the biggest, most engaging stories that I ever had in my first year was when I worked with a client who refused to give up the La Z Boy recliner. They were okay with buying a new one, but it had to be leather and it had to be there, right? And we all know that's not the easiest brief. We want to keep the recliner. It was a torn black leather. And so I went to my audience and I was like, wish me luck. This is brief. I wasn't worried about it. I know it sounds like I probably was hanging it on the clients. I really wasn't. I was like, I love a challenge. I understand what, why they want to keep it. I'm all about, do we recover it? What should we do? And in the end we found. Found a beautiful ivory soft leather recliner, which, and I explained how just lightening the fabric choice and making sure that it wasn't like a heavy grounding piece of furniture really changed the room. And we got a coaster, a beautiful, Wool weave coastal rug and some really simple Japandi style artworks. Anyway, we made it work and the engagement was really high because people were coming on the story with me and I didn't have a lot of paid clients at the time and I have always found that was really effective. Just highlighting challenges, asking for assistance, has anyone seen a recliner ever that is beautiful that I could use in this design or anything like that another thing that you can do is highlight, for example, maybe you've got a mood board that you've done and you could share that and you could say, we're having real storage issues in this small sized property. I have been tasked with hiding all of the kids in stuff, can you spot where it goes and then tap to the next story and the lid comes off the coffee table and the built ins like are all open with baskets in there. And the sofa lifts up with storage solutions, something like that. And you actually could do a little arrow and show Lego goes in here, this goes in here and then tap back to the clean design again. And be like, have we nailed it? Does it feel like an Adult appropriate space that all the kids storage is taken care of stuff like that. I think people really enjoy that because it is educational and inspirational and relatable because if you have children, you also need a storage solution. So thinking outside of the box, how do we actually highlight the challenges? Ask for help. You're not supposed to know everything. And I think that can be one of our biggest downfalls with the control side of being a designer is we don't want to ask our audience because they're like, Oh, shouldn't we know everything if they're going to hire us? But actually they really want to answer questions. That's what engagement is on social media. You might not have to ask them for the answer. What should I choose this one or that one? Cause we're not designing by Committee, but you can say these two both solve this problem of storage, but I'm undecided on the final finish. Should we recover it with custom upholstery? Should we do this? And really teaching them how you're so intentional with your choices and your design along the way. I won't go too much into spec projects as our next sort of thing. Cause I have mentioned a few times, but if you don't have any before and afters create a fake set. Of before and afters for a dream job and display them as if they were for a real client. You can easily display at the bottom generated by AI. This design is not at implementation stage because it isn't, but it's actually also not an invoicing stage. It's a dream client, or you can like honest. I'm always really honest about myself. I could come out and say, this is a speculative project. It is not for real client. No. Real floor plans or Privacy has been breached here. This also been generated by AI as it is not for a real family or something along those lines. I could probably word that better, but I'm sure that you could work it out. And then you can show people the sorts of things that they would. get along the way, your concepts, what do they look like? How do you deliver selections and procurement? All of those beautiful things that you are working on and you're perfecting, and you can show off and show them, what it is that they will get for their money. Cause that's one great thing about the portfolio type thing. If you can show an end to end of your documents, people understand a little bit more. Oh, I get it. I can see the beautiful 3D renders, I can see how the concept is delivered, I can see the hours and hours of work that goes into this beautiful deliverable. So if you have documentation that makes you really proud, I always go on about that, I am a huge believer in things like all the plug and play templates in the framework and the methodology that I teach because I know as the girls get to learn how to do the scope of works, the fee proposals, everything is just really pretty and it all links and it works really well and the feedback is really great. So I know that once you perfect it and you've saved this master copy and you know that's your documentation, you can feel a little bit more confident about sharing spec project like. Plugging in fake details, fake client brief and end result and showcasing it on your website or, wherever else it is that you want to host this type of project.

Speaker 5:

Today's podcast episode is proudly brought to you by Purefloor. Purefloor is a cleaning solution that I use in my own home. I have a white rug, a white sofa, three boys, a dog, a cat, and a husband. I definitely need this in my life. And because it's all natural, it's soap and chlorine free. It's a hundred percent a plant based formula, and 000 square meters of surface. Cozzy lives, am I right? It's gone a long way and it's been a total game changer for us at home. So thank you Purefloor for sponsoring Designing Success.

Speaker 2:

Okay, it'd have been remiss of me not to talk about social media presence, especially if you don't have clients yet. This is a place where you can really start to actively grow a community, get out there, find people who are interested in design, or need your help, or Connect with what you do. You can consistently post on social media, even if it's not before and afters. A lot of people do not have their own proper before and afters for the first two, three years, sometimes depending on the size of the projects. So do not wait for this. Make sure that you're always creating a presence on social media. And I think, we talk about what do you share behind the scenes content, you building out your sample library, you're going and learning about alternative benchtop materials, take people with you, sit in the car and say, I've just stepped out of the. Showroom at Talestone. And I learned this, that, and the other sort of giving people a bit of tips and a bit of guidance, because chances are they didn't take an hour out of their work day to just go and learn about benchtop materials and the changes that are happening inside of the industry right now. So you can help them. You can bring them some information, talk to them about client stories and phone calls and challenges. Just anything that will help people engage and reply to you. Maybe a frustration that you're having. people will be having that frustration within the industry or finding a selection. I spoke before about a leather recliner, I would get on there easily and say, how hard is it to make a beautiful one? Like I literally only know of one leather recliner. Tan soft caramel tan leather recliner type seat with an ottoman that they sell at freedom that I would include in a design. Other than that, I just roll my eyes and I'm frustrated. But if I went and talked about that on my stories, I feel like a lot of other people would say, yes, if you find one, tell me, because we keep telling our husbands to drag them out onto hard rubbish. Now you're not all going to love this, but I think if I were to do It all again, there's a few things that I would change in terms of my initial content strategy. I think was really far too Instagram only heavy. So I would definitely go back and create an email marketing. And I'll talk about that in a little bit, but I think I would look more for the opportunities and the gaps. I feel like I did a lot of things because that's what everyone was doing. And I saw other graduates stepping out of interior design Institute and building their Instagram and getting a following and la step one, step two, step three, and just followed what they were doing. And now when I think about it, I think about. All the girls that I work with and all the girls that I coach and the opportunities and the gaps in the market that we're constantly looking for. And I would say, hands down, there's no excuses in this current environment for not being able to make time for multiple platforms because of the amount of support that we can get. For example, I would learn to use AI. Properly for my brand, making sure that I understood how to prompt it correctly. I understood how to get really great insight into that potential client. And to, as I'm learning more about who they are, I'd also be teaching AI the same thing. So I had a little assistant brainstormer in my back pocket. And I also think there's a real opportunity in the interior design world to get stronger on AI. Pinterest. Go back and listen to the Pinterest episode that we did a few episodes ago. It is a really eyeopening because the first place anyone ever goes to when they're looking at doing anything about their home is Pinterest. And my other advice would be to look at TikTok or LinkedIn because I don't think there are enough designers using either of those platforms effectively. And now I don't normally say, I would not say to you as you're starting a business, You should focus on LinkedIn. You should focus on this. I'm merely saying you should investigate if that is the place where you actually should. I don't know your ideal client. I'm not coaching you. A podcast is a broad, actionable, practical ideas, but I'm not creating a strategy directly for your business because I'm unaware of your challenges. I'm unaware of your own ideal client. So you'll need to give this stuff. a bit of thought in the background, but I would be looking for opportunities. Who am I trying to talk to? Where are they? And how can I do it a bit differently to the person down the road? Because you really want to be standing out. What makes you different? And for growth and conversion, that might be LinkedIn. It might be TikTok. So it's just worth thinking about not everything is just Instagram. And you hear everyone you've ever listened to on a marketing or business podcast will be telling you the same thing. No eggs in one bus. Don't put all your eggs in the Instagram Zuckerberg basket because it's a dangerous game that we play. Okay, just a few more to go. Free consultations. Look, I would rather be giving away a consultation for free and gaining experience and actually using it as an opportunity to test or like a pilot run to end test my processes to iron out any bumps along the way to think, Oh, I actually don't have a templated email for invoice delivery. I didn't notice. So now I can go back and write it. So I would be giving away that free consultation for the first two or three people when I kicked off my business so that I can test everything and decide, Oh, I haven't got this template in order, or I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to this particular part of the workflow or the process. So it needs attention. If it's free, you're hardly going to get any kickback when there are mistakes because there will be mistakes. You oh, look, I can help you problem solve them. Cause that is such a huge portion of what we do as a designer, but you'll probably feel more confident about it because you haven't actually charged. I would never say this free consultations. It's exactly that a one hour consultation. It is not a free end to end seven month renovation job. I'm not in any way. It implying that you should do some of these big things for free. I'm just saying offering an initial consultation to a prospective client or a 60 minute, one hour free consultation to someone in the community and in exchange, getting a review, like we spoke about earlier for gathering testimonials, but also getting to practice like a beta round end to end your processes is mutually beneficial. So you don't feel so much like you're just giving it all away for free. Okay. I've talked about this a fair few times in across all the podcasts and it's around local area marketing. I am a huge believer in local area marketing, especially if you are doing full service design and you want to be doing onsite visits and working with local contractors and working in your local area, it's obviously not as important to my business as an e designer where locality is irrelevant, but it's really important if you want visibility in your community that leads to new opportunities and you want to. So I would say get those flyers in Canva, get it done first, show them what you've got. If you don't have I worked with someone the other day and we were doing a pitch pack and she said, Oh, I don't really want to showcase. I've got 600 Instagram followers. It doesn't feel that fancy. And so we showcased her engagement rate because it was upwards of five or 6%, which is amazing. Excellent. So just think about the things that you can showcase that you do. Perhaps you have a specialty area or interest like sustainability. You just need to draw that information out of you. It is in there. You have so much to talk about and really targeted local area flyers as well. So thinking about your Shire for me, the Macedon Ranges, you could have something that's hello, homeowners of Macedon and Macedon Ranges. I'm your local interior designer, like really. Getting in there on the localness of the fact that I'm around the corner. I'm here to help. I'd love to come over and get the ball rolling on making some serious changes to your home. There's a lot of examples on Canva. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need some beautiful images. You definitely want to be showing your face on this one because it's about building trust and them knowing that you are here, but it doesn't have to be a formal headshot. Honestly, if you don't have it, just get something on the iPhone and get it to print. You're going to print these over and change them and deliver them in other places and they will evolve. But if you are so paralyzed by perfectionism that you never even make one, no one knows that you exist. Okay, community involvement is really big. Can you donate a voucher to the kindergarten? Can you volunteer design services for a local cause or charity? Can you do a little workshop at the neighborhood house? Is there somewhere you can increase your visibility? Chat to people get to know people and watch your word of mouth referrals really increase. I'm not suggesting that you're giving up hours and running full day workshops and doing all this stuff. I'm suggesting something really quick, really maybe you just have a 20 minute session on sideboard styling or console entry or ways to wow your hallway entry and talk about the place of lighting like don't forget your big pendant sets the tone and all that kind of stuff to a little workshop, a lot more than you think, and if you actually sat down to write it all out, use chat GPT. If you need some help on just mainframing it and structuring what sorts of things you could talk about. But then you would actually be able to run a really cool event. And it really, you're just focusing on building relationships. So people didn't pay for this. You're volunteering your time. So there's no pressure. Just get out there, get meeting people, show them a little bit about what you can do, and then give them an offer to book a consultation with you. Everyone that's at the. Chat could get 50 off an initial consultation, paid initial consultation, obviously. And it could just be something nice that won't be appropriate for all of you, but for someone out there listening to this, you might be like, you know what? That's a great idea. I actually do have access to When I left my corporate job, I remember thinking that I would return and run a styling session in the boardroom because we would occasionally have pop up, people would bring their jewelry for sale, or there'd be a Wednesday 11am yoga class in the boardroom that you could register for and stuff like that. It was a big thing that HR used to do, but you could absolutely reach out to some larger corporate businesses and say, Hey, I'd be willing to come in and do a therapy session. 25 minute styling session all around zoom backdrops. For example, I'm just like thinking this stuff up on the fly, but you could go in and you could give recommendations about how they could improve their zoom backdrops when on work from home days and run through that. And they could, all come into the boardroom and it's really quick and you just do a little bit of that, then hand out your flyers. If you want to connect, if you want a consultation for that, you've got 50 off voucher. And even them just knowing that you exist, that they can use a discount code that they can reach out to you for styling tips. These are all things I'd rather be doing something like that on a group volume. So maybe you've got 15 people in the boardroom that you're talking to, then speaking to 15 people individually and getting nowhere. I think it's a really quick turnaround way to build yourself a bit of public speaking experience, build in something fun to do. You could even take in something to style. Again, I'm making all this stuff up on the go, but you could create a little event that could really help maybe even kickstart the first one or two people in your business for clients. The last one for me, and definitely my favorite is email marketing. Do not wait. Everyone puts this I'm going to do this later. I'm going to do this when I've got clients. I'm going to do this when I'm a little bit more experienced. You can work out so much by sending out newsletters with updates, tips, offers. You can work out what people click on, what they don't click on, what they like, what they don't like. Email marketing has a 47 percent conversion rate. It is the highest converting marketing tool that you have, and it's Every single designer I work with puts their hands in their pockets and looks the other way when I say, let's do email marketing. Cause they're like, Oh, who will I be talking to? I don't know what to say. Then let it organically build over time. But if you do not get an email marketing platform, create some content, ask for subscribers and slowly chip away at building that you'll never have an email list. And by the time you feel confident to go, like you're three years in and you're like, It's time for email marketing. Then you're starting at zero plus mom and dad on your email marketing list. Whereas if you are building and collecting subscribers and we get a lead magnet and we get some things going, you could effectively collect email addresses for three years, even if you're not really sending much and then start focusing on email marketing in year three. And you would start with 1500 people on that list to talk to. If 1500 people are converting at 47%, that's incredible, right? Enough out of me for today. Guess what? You are getting a very big treat in the month of June. I have decided to take a tiny break with my interview schedule. I've got a lot of stuff going on as I restructure the framework. I have been really excited. I've been building it out. I've been really adding a lot and creating things for the scale of the Side of the course, which is for interior designers who are not starting up, but looking for strategy and how to scale their business. So I'm building a lot of tutorials around AI and workflows and like a whole bunch of stuff that is really important and necessary for the next level of your business. And it takes a lot of time as does editing interview episodes. So for the month of June, for the remaining. we have, I am going to be bringing to you my favorite interviews over the last 80 episodes. So we have over 40 interviews and I'm going to pick my sort of top four and reshare them this month because some of you won't have gone back and heard some of the earlier ones. There are some excellent conversations that I think are critical to. The learnings that you can take out of the podcast designing success. And I would love to see more people discover those episodes and really have a listen. They're not what you think. They're not the most popular designers that I've ever interviewed, or even the most popular episodes, but they're the ones that I'm like, this is Deserves a little bit of extra love because this was an incredible conversation of which there are so many. I look forward to sharing my top four with you for this month and then it will be back to normal new guests arriving in July. Chat to you next Tuesday. Bye for now.

Speaker:

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.

Speaker 3:

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.