Dear Dakota: I’m Drowning Because I Have No Processes in Place in my Interior Design Business
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Dear Dakota,
My biggest problem is not having SOP's in place, and already having a team of 3. We are bleeding time and money right now and it's so painful. I grew fast, and am finding myself drowning and needing to re-adjust everything to ensure we can continue to stay afloat. Help!
This is a big one, and something I see with SO MANY interior designers. (Well, to be honest, all business types really).
The business grows faster than the systems.
In the beginning, you think, oh, it’s manageable to keep things in my head as I work with a project or two at a time. But as your company grows, your project size grows, the investment clients make in your services grows, and your team grows, there is SO MUCH MORE TO KEEP TRACK OF.
Here’s the thing:
You don’t need a process for every single thing you do in your company, and you don’t need a process for everything right.this.second.
Focus first on the process or processes that are client-facing, revenue-generating, or causing major bottlenecks.
For interior designers, this usually means:
Handling new inquiry submissions
Hosting a scope gathering consultation
Sending a proposal to a potential client
Onboarding a new client
Preparing clients for their design presentation day
Presenting a design
Processing revisions
Placing orders
Sending client order updates
Preparing clients for install day
Offboarding a client
So, where do you start?
My advice?
Pick the process that’s causing you the most stress or the one you want to remove yourself from ASAP.
From my experience working with hundreds of interior designers, the biggest pain points tend to be:
Handling and screening new inquiries
Onboarding new clients
Why? Because when you get these wrong and you either a) bring bad fit clients into your pipeline (you know, the ones that suck the life out of you with every email, phone call, and interaction) or b) you set zero expectations so new clients take the lead and run you ragged the entire project.
NOT great.
So focus on those two processes first.
Then, map out exactly what happens on i) the client side and ii) behind the scenes to make it run smoothly.
For example, a New Inquiry Process might look like:
Inquiry comes in
Review to see if it’s a good fit
Send templated response (good fit = pricing guide + next steps, not a fit = polite decline)
Follow up if no response within two days
If they book a call, send confirmation & add to calendar
If they don’t book call, do X
If they still don’t book a call, do Y
And so on.
The goal?
Make it repeatable. Remove yourself from as many steps as possible. Create assets, templates, emails, etc. for each step so you can control the experience but don’t have to be the one to send the thing.
If mapping these key processes out sounds overwhelming, then check out my Business Blueprint, Standard Operating Procedures and Tools for Interior Designers. This includes step-by-step processes for every major part of your client process plus tools for pricing your projects, mapping out your project start dates, and estimating furnishing investments for client projects—so you can skip the trial and error and start running your business like a well-oiled machine.
