Ep 1: Is this podcast for YOU? The Intro Episode

In this first episode, host Rebecca West introduces the heart and soul of the Stuff Interior Designers Need to Know podcast. With over 17 years of residential interior design experience, Rebecca shares her mission to help designers, especially those new to the industry or transitioning from other careers, gain the respect and success they deserve. Whether you're a solo designer or leading a team, this podcast will offer valuable insights on everything from business strategy and client communication to working effectively with industry experts like contractors and bookkeepers. Tune in for solo episodes and interviews that will help you take your design career to the next level!

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Stuff Interior Designers Need To Know. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Rebecca West and I've been a residential interior designer since 2007. This podcast is my way of making sure that I can share what I've learned with other people who want to be great at the job of being an interior designer. So this first episode is obviously here to help you figure out if this podcast is for you. I started it because I really love the work that I do, but I find that too many people don't take interior designers seriously. And that includes interior designers. We aren't necessarily respected by other people in our industry, contractors, architects, and engineers, sometimes even our clients. And unfortunately, sometimes we earn that lack of respect by not really following through on all the details that we need to provide in order to give the best service to our clients. So this podcast is here to help us all get better at our jobs. The topics are going to be wide ranging. Sometimes there'll be a solo episode where I'm sharing what I've learned and other times I will be interviewing industry experts like my favorite bookkeeper who specializes in helping interior designers with their books. Or my favorite contractor who really, really loved the design files that we put together for our mutual clients. I want to hear from these industry experts on how we can make their jobs easier, and therefore make our jobs easier, and end up giving more successful results for the contractor, for the architect, for us as the designer, and most importantly, of course, for the client. So that's the big picture of what this podcast, Stuff Interior Designers Need To Know, is going to be about. It will be about the things you need to know as a business owner and as a designer, and sometimes just as a human to survive the wild rollercoaster that comes with being a business owner. So I figured I should probably tell you a little bit about my specialty as an interior designer and also who this podcast is really for. Let's start with that second one. My clients and listeners tend to be newer designers anywhere from being in their very, very first year or about to launch phase of business all the way through their fifth year of being in business. There are definitely exceptions to that rule and I have several designers on my client list who are 15 to 20 years into the biz, but mostly my clients are in their first to five years. Also most of my clients and listeners tend to have been around the block a time or two, maybe they're new to being an interior design business owner, but they aren't necessarily new to being an interior designer, and they're definitely not new to being a grownup. They may have raised a kid or two. They may have had a career or two. Maybe they've even gone through a marriage or two. What I love about working with this kind of client is that they're coming to this career like me after another couple of chapters have already closed. And what's great is that that means we've got this rich history to pull from as we're trying to find their niche and their place in this industry. All that background makes it much easier to help them distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace and connect with the kinds of clients that will be just right for them, their strengths, their skills, their talents, and their passion. I find that opportunity to help second career, third career people, pivot and leverage those interesting lives into a whole new chapter to be really compelling. On that note, occasionally you'll hear me talk about some of the programs I offer for interior designers, because while I have been a residential interior designer since 2007, I am exclusively a business coach for other interior designers because I put my business on sabbatical to move to Paris for reasons that are not important right now, but I'm sure I will talk about on future episodes. My programs mostly revolve around finding your niche, finding your place in our industry, marketing and communicating your specialty to the people who want to find you and hire you. And then once they have found you and hired you, communicating effectively with those clients and their contractors and making sure that you're putting all the design details together well, so that they get the deliverables they need to create the home that they want to live in. I also talk a lot about the onboarding process and setting clear expectations with your clients because they don't know what to expect when working with us, if we don't tell them. So when I'm talking about my own expertise and the things that made me successful in this industry, those are the kinds of things that I will be talking about. No matter what we're doing, the goal of every single episode is simply to help us all become better at our jobs, and sometimes I'll be learning right alongside you because the learning curve really never plateaus in our industry. That can be exhausting, but it's also wonderful because this is not a job you are ever going to get bored in. So a little bit more about my background so that, you know, what kind of designer I was. That's important because if you're ever looking for a business coach, the alignment between what I know and what you want to do is just as important as the alignment between your clients and what your great at. So, let me tell you briefly about my background. As I mentioned, I started in 2007 as of recording this, that makes it 17 years, that I've been in the industry. Very early on I knew exactly the kinds of clients I wanted to target. I called them real people living in real homes. I focused on homes that were 3000 square feet and under in a micro territory, only a 10 mile radius outside of my office in GreenLake, in north Seattle, in the state of Washington. I loved that demographic because I really felt like I could make a big difference in their lives, by helping them reshape their homes, whether that was helping them choose a new paint color(color was one of my big specialties), or remodel their whole home. I loved being really efficient and really focused and helping them get through those remodels really quickly, by going through an extensive, detailed planning process, because I knew that these real people with their real homes didn't have second and third homes that they could go live in. And they also didn't have a whole bunch of extra money that they could just throw away if things didn't work out. I knew that the work that I was doing for them really mattered in a way that wouldn't be true if I was serving the luxury market. So that's who I targeted. My company started out, like they all do as just me. I was a solo preneur. I said I was never going to have employees. And then I learned that never is a dangerous word to say in business because just like raising a child you don't really know how they're going to grow up. You don't know what kind of grown up they're going to turn into. All you can do is establish your values and try to help them be the best grownup they can be once they get there. Business is the same way. You want to establish your values and you want to stay true to those values. But you also want to know that you're going to have to pivot and navigate things that you can not see coming. Things like recessions and pandemics and positive things like needing to hire a team because you grew bigger than you could handle on your own. At my peak, I was about 13 people on my team. And now I am back to just being myself. And I will say that there are pros and cons to both of those things. It is wonderful and exhilarating to have a team of people that you're collaborating with, but it's also complicated and can be really stressful, especially when you know that you're responsible for other people's income. On the other hand, it can be very lonely and isolating to be a solopreneur... But there's nobody that you have to answer to, so in some ways the stress level is a lot lower, too. I'll be speaking from all of those perspectives, but really focusing on residential design and, specifically, design only. I set up my company so that I was paid for being an excellent designer, not for selling furniture and not for project execution or project management. So while I can speak to those things and a number of my clients offer that more white glove full service experience as compared to the services that I focused on, if you're looking for specific help on manufacturing or sourcing to the trade high, high end luxury projects, or doing project management, then there are probably other podcasts that will give you even better information than this one. So that's this podcast in a nutshell, it's Stuff Interior Designers Need To Know, specifically residential interior designers, and it's all about helping us all be at our craft and at our business, helping ourselves take ourselves more seriously and having more respect for our own work, and therefore gaining the respect of our industry colleagues, which is so important if we're going to deliver our best work to our shared clients. So I hope you'll listen along. Obviously, you know the battle cry, please subscribe, please leave reviews if you like what you're listening to. But what I'd really like from you is to come on over to Instagram at@beseriouslyhappy and say hi. Tell me what you're learning from the podcast because, once you start the marketing game, you're going to know that sometimes it feels like you're talking into the void and you wonder if there's anybody truly listening in. Well, know that if you're my client, I'll be listening to you. And if you're listening to my podcast, I'd love to know that I've got your ear. So come on over to Instagram, say hi at@beseriouslyhappy and I look forward to sharing all the future episodes with you. Thanks for being here. And until next time, may your residential interior design business make you seriously happy.