116. 3 Essential Things to Focus On in Q1 for Your Interior Design Business
Do you feel overwhelmed by all the different ways you could be running and growing your interior design business at the start of this new year? It's easy to get caught up in the excitement and start chasing "glitter goals" that lead to scattered action and inconsistent results. But what if you could focus on just a few key areas that would set a strong foundation for achieving your biggest goals in 2025?
In this episode, I'm sharing the three most impactful things you can focus on in quarter one to gain traction and build momentum in your business. By constraining your focus and committing to targeted strategies, you'll be able to make meaningful progress towards what you truly desire, whether that's bringing in your best-fit clients, increasing your profitability, or creating a smoother day-to-day in your business.
Join me as I dive into the importance of nurturing relationships, gaining visibility through aligned marketing efforts, and integrating the lessons learned from the previous year. Plus, I share some powerful questions you can ask yourself to get clarity on how to apply these focus areas in your unique business. Let's set ourselves up for an incredible year ahead!
My annual goal-setting workshop, Create Your 2025 Roadmap, is coming to you soon! Mark your calendars for January 9th and 16th 2025, and click here to register.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why constraining your focus is the secret to building a sustainable and thriving interior design business.
How establishing and nurturing relationships with collaborators, clients, and team members impacts your business success.
The importance of visibility and marketing in continuously growing and upleveling your interior design business.
How to identify aligned marketing strategies that play to your strengths and business goals.
Why integrating lessons learned from the previous year is crucial for reducing stress and overwhelm in the new year.
The power of choosing intentional beliefs about your capacity for success and what's possible for you to achieve.
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55. Time Management Mistakes: Are You Setting Yourself up for Failure?
77. PR for Interior Designers: The What, Why, and How with Molly Schoneveld
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 116. In this one, I'm gonna be sharing the three most impactful things you can focus on in your interior design business at the start of this year to set a strong foundation for achieving any goal in the coming year. Whether you wanna make more money, bring in your best fit clients and projects, or smooth out those rough edges and those things that maybe didn't go so well so that the day-to-day running of your business feels so much better in the coming year. We're gonna talk about what you need to focus on and why it's so important.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am recording this about a month before it's going to air. So I'm having one of those moments where I feel like I'm in a time warp, and I'm kind of in the future, but also very much in the thick of starting the December month and all that that brings. So by the time that this airs, I'll have had the holidays. We will have been in Costa Rica for two weeks as a family. I'll have wrapped up a bunch of end of year stuff. So I will have to report back on how all of that goes when I'm in front of the microphone again, when it's actually 2025.
There are a few things though that I do want you to know about for the beginning of this year. The first is that I'm going to be leading a panel discussion for classic home at the Las Vegas market. I'm super pumped about this. I don't have the details totally ironed out to share with you. But know that that's coming. And if you're going to be at Las Vegas market, I would absolutely love to meet you in person, whether that's at the event or if you see me out and about, but we can talk about more of that later when I've got the details finalized.
The other thing I want you to know about is that Create Your 2025 Roadmap is tomorrow if you're listening to this episode, the day that it's released. This is my two part goal setting workshop where we'll map out your year. And then of course, coach on all of what that brings up, whether that's prioritization, creating time to work on your goals, hiring and delegation for what you want to accomplish.
There is so much we can work on together and I'd love to see you there. If you want to join us, all you have to do is go to desicresswell.com/resources. And even if you missed that initial call, you can still sign up, catch the recording, and then join us for the group coaching call and still get my live support on January 16.
The last thing that I want you to be aware of is private coaching. Now, I'm not sure if there's a spot available at the time that this is airing for one-on-one support. But if you want to be the first to know about my availability for Design to Thrive coaching partnerships, the waitlist is where you want to be. So you can go to desicresswall.com/coaching, you can learn all about how that works, and then add your name to the waitlist.
Even if you're not interested in a long term partnership, I highly suggest that you still sign up for that waitlist. Because I've been toying around with the idea of doing some single one-on-one strategy sessions in the coming year. So if I do decide to do that, I will be sending it out to those of you who are on my newsletter. And I know that the spots are going to be limited. So if that's something that is piquing your interest, make sure you're on the list.
Alright, so let's talk about the topic for today. We're in a brand new year as you're listening to this. And I want to offer some suggestions as to what I believe are the most essential things to focus on in quarter one of the year to grow your interior design business and achieve your 2025 goals.
One of the biggest challenges of being a designer CEO is that there's so many different ways and methods that you could use to run and grow your business, and so many different things that you could be doing all the time. And I think this especially shows up for us at the beginning of the year when we've got that fresh start mentality. Kind of the world is our oyster and we're gonna dive in and we're gonna make it all happen. This is a fun energy to have in the business. And I want you to hear this and I think you'll know that it's true.
It can also be a really chaotic energy that leads to overwhelm and distracted and scattered action, starting and stopping initiatives, and lots of pulling the audience as I call it. Getting everyone and anyone's opinion about what you should do, how you could do it, what they're doing, should you be doing that thing, or there's that overconsumption of education through podcasts or courses without taking action on that knowledge. One of my dear clients calls this glitter goals, glitter like you know what you'd use for a craft project. You know that idea of throwing the glitter in the air and the goals are just all over and it's totally a mess.
And if you've been listening to the podcast or you're familiar with my coaching philosophies, you know that I always coach my clients to constrain their focus so that they can actually gain traction and build momentum, doing fewer things at a time, and being consistent and making that measurable progress over time is going to be what creates the best results, not the glitter goals. It's not about how much you do right now. That's not what will determine your success in your interior design business over the next year. It is about your ability to choose a few targeted strategies and really commit to them and produce compounding results over time. That is the secret to building a sustainable and thriving interior design business.
And the glitter goals, they are very shiny and sparkly and pretty, and they create a mess that is impossible to pick up. And if you are not on board with constraining focus or for your brain has some resistance to really dialing in what you decide to do in quarter 1 of this year, I want you to go back and listen to episode 5. It's titled the power of constraint and I'm going to give you the hard sell on doing fewer but better.
Now is really the time to slow down your mind and focus in on a few key areas that are going to set yourself up for success in the coming year and help you make that meaningful progress towards what you really truly desire in your business. Today, I want to share three of the most impactful elements you can focus on at the start of the year and I want you to think about these as overarching themes or buckets. You as the designer CEO get to decide exactly what each of these themes or buckets means to you in your interior design business and how you want to leverage these areas according to your 2025 vision. Of course, if you want my help with this and narrowing things down and prioritizing and determining what's most important out of these themes, like how they're actually implemented, definitely sign up for Create Your 2025 Roadmap where we can talk through this live. But on this episode, I'm gonna be giving you those core themes and also giving you some questions you can be asking yourself to start to decide what these themes look like specifically for you in your own business and what's important to you in this coming year.
These areas of focus that I'm suggesting for the first quarter of the year, these can really be things you focus on throughout the entire year, but I especially want you to give them time and attention now, because they are long game strategies. You're planting seeds now, which gives these various elements time to take root and blossom in your business. So you aren't trying to plant seeds hastily water and expect them to harvest two days later. I have an entire episode, episode 51, on playing the long game if you're interested in that concept.
But for now, I want to dive into exactly what I want you to focus on in quarter one. The very first thing is relationships. All successful businesses are built on strong relationships. Personally, I think this is especially true in such an intimate field, such as interior design. Your pipeline, your project outcomes, the health of the business, it all depends on solid trusting and mutually supportive connections.
You've got collaborators or referral partners. You need these key relationships in terms of your projects, whether that's trades people, showrooms, local work rooms, the other people that interact with your ideal client that let them know about your business. They're all required for you to create these beautiful designs and have them executed at the highest level.
And then there's the current and past clients who allow you to do the work that you love. Now and in the future for those clients you'd love to work with again, or the ones that tell every last friend they have about hiring you. And there's the people who help you run the business, whether that's employees that you have in the business or contractors or service providers that support you in some way. You're not meant to operate in a silo or carry the weight of running the business on your own.
The questions I want you to consider in terms of how you implement this theme of relationships are what are the relationships you want to establish and nurture this quarter and also in the coming year? And as a follow-up to that question, how do you wanna go about establishing and nurturing relationships in a way that feels aligned with the way you like to meet people, connect with others and stay in touch? This could relate to how you want to reach out to others or meet up with them or stay in contact, whether you prefer one-on-one, small groups, maybe bigger events, virtual, in-person, a combination of both. It really is up to you and what works best for your personality and your capacity and how you like to engage with others.
The relationships you wanna establish could be people that you want to work with. It could be a gap you need to fill in how you're servicing your clients. It could be a new vendor that's gonna help you offer a line that's going to be better pricing for you to increase your profitability and offer a better product to your clients. I mean, it could be anything, but we want to look at what are those relationships you wanna establish and nurture, and how do you want to go about doing that?
The second thing that is so important to focus on and will have a huge impact in how your year goes is visibility and marketing. Now, I see visibility and marketing in your interior design business really as a piggyback off of the relationships piece that I just discussed. I personally believe that all marketing is relationship building because it is you authentically sharing who you are, what you do, who you do it with, and how you can help. You're bringing that attention, that visibility, to how you uniquely serve the people who want and need your help.
And you need marketing and visibility in order to grow and expand your interior design business. You need to be getting out in front of new people and continuing to stay top of mind for those of you who already know you so that you can nurture that relationship. You want to be able to continuously have a full pipeline. You want to know what to expect in terms of the projects that are going to be coming in for your capacity, your team support, your financial health of the business. And you want to be able to continuously up level the size and type of project you're bringing into your interior design business.
And that requires marketing and visibility, just like establishing and nurturing relationships, making others aware of your business, and continuing to help them remember what you do. That can look a lot of different ways. This does not just need to be posting on Instagram. There's so many options. Of course, it can be posting on Instagram, but I just wanna be very clear about that because Instagram just always comes up.
You could think about other service providers who share a similar ideal client, but you each serve that client in a different complimentary way. Or you could think about community partnerships where you can give back to organizations in your area and also connect with potential ideal clients who share similar values. You could be introducing yourself to builders and architects you want to work with, or having a touchpoint with past clients, whether that's through gifting or meeting up in person.
You could host events at your studio, or offer a referral opportunity to either referral partners or past clients. You could be thinking of publications you wanna get in front of and identifying what projects you might wanna pitch and what that means now for how you plan for project photography or who you might need to enlist to help you get the press that you desire. In episode 77, I had Molly Schoeneveld on and she is incredible at helping to dissect this PR piece for interior designers. So if that's something that interests you, make sure you go back and listen to that.
But what I want you to really understand is that there's so many different ways that you can think about marketing and visibility in your business, but it's important that you do it because the marketing and visibility you do now is going to help you have the projects, the profitability, those portfolio photos that you want to have at the end of the year.
I know that marketing and visibility can kind of sound a little intimidating. So with this category, what I want you to remember is that marketing and visibility really is engaging with people, authentically talking about what you love to do and how you do it, and sharing how you can help them. It really is that simple. The questions I want you to consider for how you apply this category to your business is how do you wanna gain new visibility and keep visible through marketing in your interior design business?
You can consider what your strengths are, what's worked well for you in the past, what's something new you might be excited to try, even if you're a little nervous, but make a decision now and start to make a plan. Decide what types of marketing will align most with where the business is going and the projects you want to work on. And of course, you have to ask this question of yourself, how are you going to consistently make time to engage with these activities? You don't need to do everything when it comes to marketing and visibility, but you do need to do some of these. So narrow it down and make a commitment to yourself to stay focused and committed.
The third thing I want you to focus on in the first 90 days of this year is lesson integration. In episode 111, where I talked about the five key ingredients to make 2025 your best year yet, one of those key ingredients is to evaluate the past year with curiosity so you can learn from your wins and your losses. Before you go about blazing ahead with a huge new initiative in this year, make sure that you have integrated the lessons learned from the previous year and closed the loop on those lessons.
If you know there are holes in your contract that lead to some shaky client encounters, make those changes now. If you can see where you are leaving money on the table, do what needs to be done to start bringing that money into the business so you have the financial resources you need to invest in the coming year. If you have a team member not contributing in the way that you need them to, do not put off that conversation and the setting of expectations and consequences.
Maybe you've decided that you needed more help because you were completely stretched than last year. Make a plan to get that job description written and posted so you can hire. Quarter 1 is the time to integrate the lessons learned from last year and clean up loose ends. So you are not dragging that baggage into the coming year and creating all sorts of unnecessary stress and overwhelm for yourself. And usually self judgment is also included in here because you're kind of blaming yourself for what you haven't done yet, even though you've already kind of trying to move on. So let's just cut that out. I know it doesn't always feel exciting to clean things up or fix what's broken. It's shiny.
It feels more exciting, more glittery to start something new, but do yourself a favor and close the loops, make decisions and take action on what you already see must be addressed to help you get where you want to go. The questions I want you to use to identify how you're going to apply this category is what are the lessons I've learned from last year? And how will I integrate them into my plans for this quarter?
A key follow up question here is why is it important to do this now? Your brain probably is going to tell you we can do that later. There's more pressing things. You need to really show yourself why this is important. What is the long term impact of addressing these lessons learned now? Because shiny object syndrome will hit, you're going to get distracted, you're going to have some new idea, and you need to have a compelling reason to stay focused on what it is you need to do now.
Those are the three categories I want you to be focusing on. And of course, we have to throw in a bonus category, which is mindset. We have to be focused on mindset in the beginning part of this year. I mean, honestly, I want you to be focused on mindset every day. Let's be real. We need to have this all the time. But I think especially at the beginning of the year, you have to decide what you want to believe about yourself, your capability and what's possible for you to achieve in the coming year.
The brain is always working to confirm its beliefs and biases. And so if you're believing something really crappy about yourself or about last year, or what you're able to do this year, we don't want that lingering. You will always act in accordance with the beliefs you hold about yourself, because of your brain wanting to be right. It wants to prove itself true. So we need to make sure that the internal narrative you're carrying with you day in and day out is serving you and where you want to be at the end of this year.
I highly encourage you to grab a pen and paper, even just spend five minutes journaling on this and ask yourself, what do I want to believe about myself? What do I want to believe about my capacity for success? What I'm capable of, what is possible for me in this coming year? And how am I going to show up in my business to prove these beliefs true?
Not in a perfectionist fantasy way of like you are going to be this idealized version of you every single day, and always focus on these three things in the coming quarter and do it perfectly. Not at all. But in the overarching scheme of things, who do you know yourself to be? And what do you want to believe about how you're going to show up for yourself, your business, your clients, and your goals in this coming year.
The impact of focusing on relationships, your visibility in marketing, lesson integration, and all of that supported with the belief in yourself and what you can accomplish is going to have a profound effect on the trajectory of your year. I really want you to give yourself some space to decide how you're going to execute in each of these categories.
When you focus on these overarching themes and make decisions for yourself about how you want to approach these, and how they're going to directly support your goals, you lay such a solid foundation for what you can create in the year ahead. This is you having the opportunity to step into the role of being a proactive CEO who is nurturing your business and giving it what it needs so that you can have what you need and want from the business.
Go back, listen to this again, if you need to, take some notes, pull out your pen and paper or a digital document if you wanna plan that way and use this as your springboard. And then of course, you can join me and create your 2025 roadmap to do all of this with my help.
I'm going to be back next week with a brand new episode as always. And I'm really excited because I'm going to have my clients Kasey and Regan of Blue Pencil Collective joining me on the show. They reached out and they said, we want to share some of our coaching takeaways. And we want to talk about specifically how we use relationship building in our business, and also how they've changed their discovery call process to really elevate the client experience and ensure that they're bringing in the best fit projects for their firm. And of course, we're gonna cover so much more because that's just what we do here.
Make sure you're subscribed to the show so you do not miss that one. Regan and Kasey have so many insights and wisdom to share with you. So I wanna make sure that that one pops up in your feed.
And the way to ensure that that happens is to subscribe to the show. That is what I have for you today. Until we connect next Wednesday, I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am recording this about a month before it's going to air. So I'm having one of those moments where I feel like I'm in a time warp, and I'm kind of in the future, but also very much in the thick of starting the December month and all that that brings. So by the time that this airs, I'll have had the holidays. We will have been in Costa Rica for two weeks as a family. I'll have wrapped up a bunch of end of year stuff. So I will have to report back on how all of that goes when I'm in front of the microphone again, when it's actually 2025.
There are a few things though that I do want you to know about for the beginning of this year. The first is that I'm going to be leading a panel discussion for classic home at the Las Vegas market. I'm super pumped about this. I don't have the details totally ironed out to share with you. But know that that's coming. And if you're going to be at Las Vegas market, I would absolutely love to meet you in person, whether that's at the event or if you see me out and about, but we can talk about more of that later when I've got the details finalized.
The other thing I want you to know about is that Create Your 2025 Roadmap is tomorrow if you're listening to this episode, the day that it's released. This is my two part goal setting workshop where we'll map out your year. And then of course, coach on all of what that brings up, whether that's prioritization, creating time to work on your goals, hiring and delegation for what you want to accomplish.
There is so much we can work on together and I'd love to see you there. If you want to join us, all you have to do is go to desicresswell.com/resources. And even if you missed that initial call, you can still sign up, catch the recording, and then join us for the group coaching call and still get my live support on January 16.
The last thing that I want you to be aware of is private coaching. Now, I'm not sure if there's a spot available at the time that this is airing for one-on-one support. But if you want to be the first to know about my availability for Design to Thrive coaching partnerships, the waitlist is where you want to be. So you can go to desicresswall.com/coaching, you can learn all about how that works, and then add your name to the waitlist.
Even if you're not interested in a long term partnership, I highly suggest that you still sign up for that waitlist. Because I've been toying around with the idea of doing some single one-on-one strategy sessions in the coming year. So if I do decide to do that, I will be sending it out to those of you who are on my newsletter. And I know that the spots are going to be limited. So if that's something that is piquing your interest, make sure you're on the list.
Alright, so let's talk about the topic for today. We're in a brand new year as you're listening to this. And I want to offer some suggestions as to what I believe are the most essential things to focus on in quarter one of the year to grow your interior design business and achieve your 2025 goals.
One of the biggest challenges of being a designer CEO is that there's so many different ways and methods that you could use to run and grow your business, and so many different things that you could be doing all the time. And I think this especially shows up for us at the beginning of the year when we've got that fresh start mentality. Kind of the world is our oyster and we're gonna dive in and we're gonna make it all happen. This is a fun energy to have in the business. And I want you to hear this and I think you'll know that it's true.
It can also be a really chaotic energy that leads to overwhelm and distracted and scattered action, starting and stopping initiatives, and lots of pulling the audience as I call it. Getting everyone and anyone's opinion about what you should do, how you could do it, what they're doing, should you be doing that thing, or there's that overconsumption of education through podcasts or courses without taking action on that knowledge. One of my dear clients calls this glitter goals, glitter like you know what you'd use for a craft project. You know that idea of throwing the glitter in the air and the goals are just all over and it's totally a mess.
And if you've been listening to the podcast or you're familiar with my coaching philosophies, you know that I always coach my clients to constrain their focus so that they can actually gain traction and build momentum, doing fewer things at a time, and being consistent and making that measurable progress over time is going to be what creates the best results, not the glitter goals. It's not about how much you do right now. That's not what will determine your success in your interior design business over the next year. It is about your ability to choose a few targeted strategies and really commit to them and produce compounding results over time. That is the secret to building a sustainable and thriving interior design business.
And the glitter goals, they are very shiny and sparkly and pretty, and they create a mess that is impossible to pick up. And if you are not on board with constraining focus or for your brain has some resistance to really dialing in what you decide to do in quarter 1 of this year, I want you to go back and listen to episode 5. It's titled the power of constraint and I'm going to give you the hard sell on doing fewer but better.
Now is really the time to slow down your mind and focus in on a few key areas that are going to set yourself up for success in the coming year and help you make that meaningful progress towards what you really truly desire in your business. Today, I want to share three of the most impactful elements you can focus on at the start of the year and I want you to think about these as overarching themes or buckets. You as the designer CEO get to decide exactly what each of these themes or buckets means to you in your interior design business and how you want to leverage these areas according to your 2025 vision. Of course, if you want my help with this and narrowing things down and prioritizing and determining what's most important out of these themes, like how they're actually implemented, definitely sign up for Create Your 2025 Roadmap where we can talk through this live. But on this episode, I'm gonna be giving you those core themes and also giving you some questions you can be asking yourself to start to decide what these themes look like specifically for you in your own business and what's important to you in this coming year.
These areas of focus that I'm suggesting for the first quarter of the year, these can really be things you focus on throughout the entire year, but I especially want you to give them time and attention now, because they are long game strategies. You're planting seeds now, which gives these various elements time to take root and blossom in your business. So you aren't trying to plant seeds hastily water and expect them to harvest two days later. I have an entire episode, episode 51, on playing the long game if you're interested in that concept.
But for now, I want to dive into exactly what I want you to focus on in quarter one. The very first thing is relationships. All successful businesses are built on strong relationships. Personally, I think this is especially true in such an intimate field, such as interior design. Your pipeline, your project outcomes, the health of the business, it all depends on solid trusting and mutually supportive connections.
You've got collaborators or referral partners. You need these key relationships in terms of your projects, whether that's trades people, showrooms, local work rooms, the other people that interact with your ideal client that let them know about your business. They're all required for you to create these beautiful designs and have them executed at the highest level.
And then there's the current and past clients who allow you to do the work that you love. Now and in the future for those clients you'd love to work with again, or the ones that tell every last friend they have about hiring you. And there's the people who help you run the business, whether that's employees that you have in the business or contractors or service providers that support you in some way. You're not meant to operate in a silo or carry the weight of running the business on your own.
The questions I want you to consider in terms of how you implement this theme of relationships are what are the relationships you want to establish and nurture this quarter and also in the coming year? And as a follow-up to that question, how do you wanna go about establishing and nurturing relationships in a way that feels aligned with the way you like to meet people, connect with others and stay in touch? This could relate to how you want to reach out to others or meet up with them or stay in contact, whether you prefer one-on-one, small groups, maybe bigger events, virtual, in-person, a combination of both. It really is up to you and what works best for your personality and your capacity and how you like to engage with others.
The relationships you wanna establish could be people that you want to work with. It could be a gap you need to fill in how you're servicing your clients. It could be a new vendor that's gonna help you offer a line that's going to be better pricing for you to increase your profitability and offer a better product to your clients. I mean, it could be anything, but we want to look at what are those relationships you wanna establish and nurture, and how do you want to go about doing that?
The second thing that is so important to focus on and will have a huge impact in how your year goes is visibility and marketing. Now, I see visibility and marketing in your interior design business really as a piggyback off of the relationships piece that I just discussed. I personally believe that all marketing is relationship building because it is you authentically sharing who you are, what you do, who you do it with, and how you can help. You're bringing that attention, that visibility, to how you uniquely serve the people who want and need your help.
And you need marketing and visibility in order to grow and expand your interior design business. You need to be getting out in front of new people and continuing to stay top of mind for those of you who already know you so that you can nurture that relationship. You want to be able to continuously have a full pipeline. You want to know what to expect in terms of the projects that are going to be coming in for your capacity, your team support, your financial health of the business. And you want to be able to continuously up level the size and type of project you're bringing into your interior design business.
And that requires marketing and visibility, just like establishing and nurturing relationships, making others aware of your business, and continuing to help them remember what you do. That can look a lot of different ways. This does not just need to be posting on Instagram. There's so many options. Of course, it can be posting on Instagram, but I just wanna be very clear about that because Instagram just always comes up.
You could think about other service providers who share a similar ideal client, but you each serve that client in a different complimentary way. Or you could think about community partnerships where you can give back to organizations in your area and also connect with potential ideal clients who share similar values. You could be introducing yourself to builders and architects you want to work with, or having a touchpoint with past clients, whether that's through gifting or meeting up in person.
You could host events at your studio, or offer a referral opportunity to either referral partners or past clients. You could be thinking of publications you wanna get in front of and identifying what projects you might wanna pitch and what that means now for how you plan for project photography or who you might need to enlist to help you get the press that you desire. In episode 77, I had Molly Schoeneveld on and she is incredible at helping to dissect this PR piece for interior designers. So if that's something that interests you, make sure you go back and listen to that.
But what I want you to really understand is that there's so many different ways that you can think about marketing and visibility in your business, but it's important that you do it because the marketing and visibility you do now is going to help you have the projects, the profitability, those portfolio photos that you want to have at the end of the year.
I know that marketing and visibility can kind of sound a little intimidating. So with this category, what I want you to remember is that marketing and visibility really is engaging with people, authentically talking about what you love to do and how you do it, and sharing how you can help them. It really is that simple. The questions I want you to consider for how you apply this category to your business is how do you wanna gain new visibility and keep visible through marketing in your interior design business?
You can consider what your strengths are, what's worked well for you in the past, what's something new you might be excited to try, even if you're a little nervous, but make a decision now and start to make a plan. Decide what types of marketing will align most with where the business is going and the projects you want to work on. And of course, you have to ask this question of yourself, how are you going to consistently make time to engage with these activities? You don't need to do everything when it comes to marketing and visibility, but you do need to do some of these. So narrow it down and make a commitment to yourself to stay focused and committed.
The third thing I want you to focus on in the first 90 days of this year is lesson integration. In episode 111, where I talked about the five key ingredients to make 2025 your best year yet, one of those key ingredients is to evaluate the past year with curiosity so you can learn from your wins and your losses. Before you go about blazing ahead with a huge new initiative in this year, make sure that you have integrated the lessons learned from the previous year and closed the loop on those lessons.
If you know there are holes in your contract that lead to some shaky client encounters, make those changes now. If you can see where you are leaving money on the table, do what needs to be done to start bringing that money into the business so you have the financial resources you need to invest in the coming year. If you have a team member not contributing in the way that you need them to, do not put off that conversation and the setting of expectations and consequences.
Maybe you've decided that you needed more help because you were completely stretched than last year. Make a plan to get that job description written and posted so you can hire. Quarter 1 is the time to integrate the lessons learned from last year and clean up loose ends. So you are not dragging that baggage into the coming year and creating all sorts of unnecessary stress and overwhelm for yourself. And usually self judgment is also included in here because you're kind of blaming yourself for what you haven't done yet, even though you've already kind of trying to move on. So let's just cut that out. I know it doesn't always feel exciting to clean things up or fix what's broken. It's shiny.
It feels more exciting, more glittery to start something new, but do yourself a favor and close the loops, make decisions and take action on what you already see must be addressed to help you get where you want to go. The questions I want you to use to identify how you're going to apply this category is what are the lessons I've learned from last year? And how will I integrate them into my plans for this quarter?
A key follow up question here is why is it important to do this now? Your brain probably is going to tell you we can do that later. There's more pressing things. You need to really show yourself why this is important. What is the long term impact of addressing these lessons learned now? Because shiny object syndrome will hit, you're going to get distracted, you're going to have some new idea, and you need to have a compelling reason to stay focused on what it is you need to do now.
Those are the three categories I want you to be focusing on. And of course, we have to throw in a bonus category, which is mindset. We have to be focused on mindset in the beginning part of this year. I mean, honestly, I want you to be focused on mindset every day. Let's be real. We need to have this all the time. But I think especially at the beginning of the year, you have to decide what you want to believe about yourself, your capability and what's possible for you to achieve in the coming year.
The brain is always working to confirm its beliefs and biases. And so if you're believing something really crappy about yourself or about last year, or what you're able to do this year, we don't want that lingering. You will always act in accordance with the beliefs you hold about yourself, because of your brain wanting to be right. It wants to prove itself true. So we need to make sure that the internal narrative you're carrying with you day in and day out is serving you and where you want to be at the end of this year.
I highly encourage you to grab a pen and paper, even just spend five minutes journaling on this and ask yourself, what do I want to believe about myself? What do I want to believe about my capacity for success? What I'm capable of, what is possible for me in this coming year? And how am I going to show up in my business to prove these beliefs true?
Not in a perfectionist fantasy way of like you are going to be this idealized version of you every single day, and always focus on these three things in the coming quarter and do it perfectly. Not at all. But in the overarching scheme of things, who do you know yourself to be? And what do you want to believe about how you're going to show up for yourself, your business, your clients, and your goals in this coming year.
The impact of focusing on relationships, your visibility in marketing, lesson integration, and all of that supported with the belief in yourself and what you can accomplish is going to have a profound effect on the trajectory of your year. I really want you to give yourself some space to decide how you're going to execute in each of these categories.
When you focus on these overarching themes and make decisions for yourself about how you want to approach these, and how they're going to directly support your goals, you lay such a solid foundation for what you can create in the year ahead. This is you having the opportunity to step into the role of being a proactive CEO who is nurturing your business and giving it what it needs so that you can have what you need and want from the business.
Go back, listen to this again, if you need to, take some notes, pull out your pen and paper or a digital document if you wanna plan that way and use this as your springboard. And then of course, you can join me and create your 2025 roadmap to do all of this with my help.
I'm going to be back next week with a brand new episode as always. And I'm really excited because I'm going to have my clients Kasey and Regan of Blue Pencil Collective joining me on the show. They reached out and they said, we want to share some of our coaching takeaways. And we want to talk about specifically how we use relationship building in our business, and also how they've changed their discovery call process to really elevate the client experience and ensure that they're bringing in the best fit projects for their firm. And of course, we're gonna cover so much more because that's just what we do here.
Make sure you're subscribed to the show so you do not miss that one. Regan and Kasey have so many insights and wisdom to share with you. So I wanna make sure that that one pops up in your feed.
And the way to ensure that that happens is to subscribe to the show. That is what I have for you today. Until we connect next Wednesday, I am wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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