Organize your Interior Design Business with Asana and Google Drive

May 28

Updated October 2023

There are a million tools and methods available for organizing your interior design business - and we’ve helped interior designers set up a LOT of them. What I’ve learned through my years of operations work, project management, and owning two businesses is that the most important thing about how you run your business is to actually use the tools you’ve chosen and use them to their fullest.

Our favorite business management tools for interior designers are Asana, Google Drive, Honeybook, and Squarespace (among others). (If you want to talk software for managing your product library and sales - that’s a separate conversation!).

When my clients come to me and tell me they are using any of these tools, I jump for joy because I know we are going to be able to do SO much cool stuff to streamline their behind-the-scenes operations. Be sure to grab my complimentary Asana Blueprint so you can see how we use Asana with our interior designers and wedding planners.

Back when I had my wedding planning biz, I used my website, my blog, a directory site, and my client & vendor referrals to grow my business. My biggest focus back then was sharing valuable resources on my blog (I posted a new blog every.single.morning), serving my clients well and asking for testimonials, and sending handwritten letters to every client & vendor I worked with.

I had a multi-page checklist that I printed for every new client. This checklist went into the top of each client binder, and I would work through that list and check things off as I went for each project. Once the wedding was over, it didn’t stop there. I had about twenty items on my post-wedding checklist, and I never missed a thing.

For me, having everything in Microsoft Office (Google Drive wasn’t launched yet!) and then printed on paper was how I organized my entire business. And even when it was busy wedding season and I was working with brides in multiple states, this system worked well because I consistently used it with every project.

Woman with laptop and text overlay Simple Tools for Organizing Your Business

DOWNLOAD THE ASANA BLUEPRINT HERE

While it matters what software you use based on your specific needs, it matters more that you use your software consistently and to the fullest.

How Interior Designers Can Organize Their Projects and Behind-the-Scenes

I find that even my most seasoned clients aren’t always consistent with their software or their processes, or they are, BUT they’re running everything from their brains with nothing documented. This gets really difficult as you start to get busy with bigger projects (things fall through the cracks) or when you bring on new team members (you have to spend SO much time training someone new, so the task of hiring seems more daunting than it needs to). Click here to read more about my top processes for your interior design business.

One of the first things I do with my interior design clients when we start working together is talk through their service offerings and client-facing processes. From there, we put everything to paper (or computer) to map out the steps that go into delivering each phase of their service(s). Then we organize it so it works for them and the software they are currently using (yes, over the years, we have become familiar with setting up and organizing many different software programs. Today, we specialize in Asana, Honeybook, and Dubsado).

Once we have the client processes nailed down, we then work on the back-end processes...all the behind-the-scenes tasks and details that take place in order to complete the client work. Then, of course, there are all the operational tasks (the non-client stuff) to organize--marketing, finance, sales, admin, etc.

I’ve had clients in Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Basecamp, Monday, and Hive and my favorite software of them all is Asana. Asana is a project management tool that allows you to set up teams/departments and projects within each team so you can manage and assign tasks, communicate with team members, and track progress.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLIMENTARY ASANA BLUEPRINT HERE

Once you have your teams and projects set up, you can link documents from your Google Drive inside the description for the corresponding tasks and projects in Asana so everything is accessible with the click of a button.

All communication about those tasks can be found right within each task—pretty amazing (and way fewer emails for you).

What Happens When Your Interior Design Business Is Organized

The operations work we do with our clients is similarly transformative to the work interior designers do with their clients to transform their homes. We start off by talking about what’s working and what’s not. Then, we talk through their goals and vision for how they’d like the behind-the-scenes of their business to look and feel. Then, we create the step-by-step plan and build out the software and systems to get them there.

Sure, our work may not physically be as beautiful as a brand new, perfectly designed room or a gorgeous new construction home, but to see the changes that take place in a business when the back end goes from hot mess to streamlined and efficient is seriously a dream.

Download the complimentary Asana Blueprint here.

I remember when one of my clients was worried because she didn't "feel busy". Because we forecast and review financials every month, I knew she was on track for her best quarter ever...so we dove a little deeper and she realized it was because everything was running efficiently and she wasn't pulled in a million directions. She had a clearly defined process for each phase of her design service, her team knew what to do at each phase, and we had all the tools and resources in one place so it was easy to follow the steps and cross things off as they went. She was removed from having to remember all the little details and being pulled in a million directions; she could finally focus on doing the design work that was the most profitable for the company.

It's all about spending the time ONCE to set everything up correctly and then making small adjustments as your business grows and changes. And when you have everything organized, it gives you more time and space to see what’s working and make improvements on what isn’t.

If you don’t have time to organize your business when things are slow, how will you have time to do it when your pipeline is full and you are in the weeds with client work?

Need processes for your interior design business? Grab them here.

How Interior Designers Can Organize Their Businesses With Google Drive & Asana

Whether you run your business with checklists, software, a paper planner, or a combo of all three, taking the time to organize your interior design business is worth every second. I used to use a combo of software + paper lists, but then finally went all in on my software and no longer use paper lists to keep track of anything in my life (personally or professionally). Everything lives in Asana!

HOW TO SET UP ASANA FOR YOUR INTERIOR DESIGN BUSINESS

If you’re ready to use Asana, here’s what I recommend.

Create all your departments/teams in Asana (see how I do this here). I recommend setting these up the same way big companies structure their departments: Executive Team, Operations, Marketing, Client Services, and Clients (you may have a few others as well depending on your company).
Then, within each “department” (or Team as Asana calls them), you’ll create Projects to organize the tasks and resources specific to each project. For example, in my Operations Team, we have a project for each of the ladies on my team, we have a Training Library with all of our SOPs and training materials, and we have a Team Hub where we can all communicate and track meeting notes, and then we have a few templated projects that are we duplicate for each of our client projects based on the service booked.
Then, within the tasks in those projects, you can add all your links and resources. These links may come from Google Drive files, appointment scheduling links, form links, etc. Just be sure to include everything anyone might need to complete each task in a project within the respective task.

Need SOPS (standard operating procedures) for your interior design firm? Check out the done-for-you processes here.

TIP: Most of the interior designers we work with use a free Asana business account. You can set up a free business Asana account by signing up with your @companyname.com email address. Be sure to set yourself up as an organization (not a workspace).

HOW TO SYNC GOOGLE DRIVE WITH YOUR ASANA

Within each project, we recommend including a Resources Section, where you can house all the details and tools necessary to complete the tasks in that project. Things like links to Google Docs and Google Sheets, links to PDFs or client-facing materials, links to the software you use, etc. This makes it easy for you and your team to quickly find what you’re looking for without having to spend minutes or hours searching through your Google Drive.

For example, if our to-do list in Asana says it’s time to update our monthly business stats, my team can click right into the corresponding task to find our stats tracker in our shared Google Drive so they can update the information there.

HOW I SAID GOODBYE TO PAPER LISTS

I used to be a sucker for paper lists and crossing things off as I went but as I put more and more into Asana, I realized they were just a waste of time and creating additional and unnecessary stress. Now my Asana houses all my personal and professional projects, tasks, and goals. It houses 95% of my team communication. It has replaced almost 100% of all internal meetings. And, when I work with teams who still use paper, email, and in person meetings, I feel like I’ve time traveled a bit.

I’m able to manage my entire company, my team of four plus outside contractors, our Designed To Scale Method designers, our Foundations designers, our private clients, our Design Library & Workroom customers, and our insane marketing calendar (2 blog posts/week, one weekly newsletter, Instagram posts and stories, Pinterest pins, FB/Instagram ads, our guest interview outreach series, and media pitches) all inside of Asana.

The Asana Inbox and Asana My Tasks are where you’ll find me for most of the day when I need to know what to do next.

While I also use Honeybook, Flodesk, and Squarespace heavily to organize and automate parts of my business, that’s more for the client experience side (proposals, invoices, contracts, waitlist emails, onboarding, and offboarding). I love when clients come to me and are already using Honeybook and Squarespace because I know we can use these tools to create so many amazing experiences for their clients. And because they’re already familiar with them, they won’t be as overwhelmed as they would have been if we had tried to implement several new software programs while refining their process.

How To Get Started With Asana For Your Interior Design Business

If you are struggling with using Asana or Google Drive to run your interior design business, I recommend starting small and getting into the habit of having Asana as your first program/first tab in your toolbar. Start small by using the My Tasks section to map out your tasks in whatever way makes the most sense for you: Due today, Due this week, Outsource. Or Client Work Urgent, Client Work Admin, Business Work Urgent, Business Work Admin. Then, each morning, open up the My Tasks and start working through them.

To really leverage it for your interior design business, I recommend you start with refining your processes. Then, create the client experience workflow for each service (check out the complete Client Experience Templates here) because that’s typically the most pressing.

My favorite recommendation is to set up a board in your Asana to give you a bird’s eye view of your entire active pipeline of leads and clients. This way, you can grab notes from all your notebooks and whiteboards and checklists and plug everything into one place. Often, this process alone is freeing because you’ll be able to see all your open projects in one place and you can finally realize, OH YEAH, NO WONDER I’M SO OVERWHELMED!!

Asana can do SO much, and I encourage every interior designer to use some sort of official project management software to manage their tasks, projects, teams, and internal communication.