The Top Client Facing Processes You Need in Your Interior Design Business
In order to successfully run a streamlined interior design business, it’s essential to have your client-facing processes nailed down. The corporate world often refers to processes as SOPS (Standard Operating Procedures), but most of my designers and wedding planners don’t–so I'll call them processes to keep it simple.
Having worked in medium-sized corporations with 250+ employees and offices in multiple states, all the way to nonprofits with a revolving door of board members and chairs, I’ve found that no matter what size or type of business you’re running, having documented processes IS KEY to working efficiently. This is especially true in the interior design and wedding planning world.
Let me share an example.
When I was on the board at a nonprofit, I started as the marketing chair and was given a few logins to access the software I would need but nothing else. No brand guidelines, no processes, no templates, no timelines, nothing.
This was an issue for so many reasons–the two main problems being a) I was confused and wasted tons of time trying to gather all that information from previous board members, and b) I saw how the company suffered from insane inefficiencies. The same is true for your clients when you don’t give them clear directions and guidance at the start of your partnership. They will be confused because nothing will feel cohesive, which will cause them to lose trust and question you more. And your business will suffer as you miss out on opportunities to wow your clients and run your operations efficiently.
WHY YOUR INTERIOR DESIGN CLIENTS SUFFER WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A CLIENT PROCESS IN PLACE
The first issue with not having a process in place is there is a lot of inconsistency. Every interaction is different, which makes the client feel uneasy and doesn’t allow them to build trust with you and feel like they really know your company/brand.
The second issue is when a client doesn’t trust you, they’ll naturally have more questions because they’ll need you to calm their fears and concerns about what they’re seeing on the surface.
The third issue is that this inconsistency causes them to think you don’t have your stuff together, and they’ll doubt you as a professional. They’ll carry that doubt through their entire experience with your company and will likely be watching and waiting for that first mistake they know you’re bound to make.
WHY YOUR INTERIOR DESIGN BUSINESS SUFFERS WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A CLIENT PROCESS IN PLACE
Each of the client-facing issues also directly relates to a backend issue.
For one, when you have no documented data or templates to run your processes, you create everything from scratch with each client. It becomes so painful because it requires a heavy investment of time upfront to prepare for each new client you work with, and the mindlessness of continually recreating the same thing for each new project will burn you out quicker than the client work will.
A second backend problem with not having a client process in place is that no one knows who the point person is. It’s unclear who’s giving the final answer or approval, so everyone gets pulled into the decision-making process, and there are SO many questions for the entire team–NOT EFFICIENT!
A third backend problem with not having a process in place is clients aren’t going to feel comfortable paying top dollar if your business doesn’t look and feel professional. This is directly related to their loss of trust in you and having to ask a lot of questions. How can you design my home or wedding if you can’t even design a consistent social media feed? How can you charge $XX,XXX for your services if you can’t even call me back even though your website said to call you?
You can see the negative trickle-down effect for your clients and for your company when business processes aren’t documented.
Now, I know it can be a lot of work to document the processes for your business, and I also used to think, Bleh, who needs SOPS? This stuff is easy to do without a formal checklist.
But then, one of my daughters decided to come into the world a few weeks earlier than expected, even though I still had one last event on the books before I was planning to go on maternity leave.
Talk about a WHAT the FAQ, right? Side note: I ended up wearing my one-week-old daughter at the event while my husband walked around the venue site with our other daughter in a stroller, waiting to take my newborn when I had to interact with my clients and their guests.
The things we do so we can do the things we love, right?
When I had in my head that I wanted to stay small and didn’t need processes or SOPs because it was just me and I could manage it all, I forgot to take into account how that kind of thinking assumes everything in my life is constant and nothing will ever change. My workload will never increase or decrease, my children will always be healthy and in school, I will always feel 100%, I will never spill coffee on my computer and lose it for a whole week, etc.
And if we know anything, we know that is far from the truth. Life happens, and the reason I built my business and my clients built their business is so they COULD have the flexibility to do work when they wanted and focus on their health/family/travel when they weren’t working.
But what happens is something goes off-kilter. A kid is home sick. You take on a project that spirals out of control. Your house floods and you can’t work.
And then you get behind. And you can’t remember all the things you were trying to balance so delicately in your head and across five different notebooks.
And then you drop the ball, make mistakes, and miss a deadline.
I completely understand all the details being tracked at any given moment by my interior designers and wedding planners. It’s a lot.
And that’s why I am such an advocate for having documented processes for your interior design business or wedding planning business.
The top client-facing processes you should have in your interior design business, with the most important first (in my opinion based on what I’ve seen to instantly make a difference), are…drumroll please…
Client onboarding process ← This is my #1 most important process (read my onboarding tips here)
Sales and discovery process
Consultation process
Proposal process
Kickoff meeting process
Trade day process
Design process/sourcing/products
Presentation day process
Ordering & reselection process
Install day process
Photoshoot process
Claims process
Offboarding process
You might be looking at that list of client-facing processes with overwhelm, but here's the thing: you’re already doing these processes in your business! So they are in your head and available to you. You just have to get them out of your head and onto paper or a digital checklist. Or, you can check out our done-for-you resource, The Designed to Scale® Business Blueprint here.
How do you know which client process to start with when you don’t have a lot of time to write SOPS?
Here are the questions I ask my clients to quickly identify where we need to focus our process building:
What is your process for this phase?
Is this phase working? If not, what’s not working?
What questions and pushback do you get from clients at this stage?
What frustrations do you have at this stage?
And then, we repeat this for each phase of their process (proposal, onboarding, design, ordering, etc.) and then we can instantly see where they need to refine, improve, or create.
Ask yourself, what phase of my client process is presenting the biggest struggle?
Are you getting inquiries but not ideal ones?
Are you getting no inquiries at all?
Are your clients super confused and crossing boundaries throughout the whole process?
Are you working your tail off yet not making any money?
Are clients not approving their designs quickly?
Are your clients asking questions nonstop during your design phase and management phase?
Are clients still hanging on even after their project is complete?
Are you getting referrals from past clients?
Then, look at the parts of the client process that can be managed by someone other than you, the business owner.
The ultimate goal of a client process or SOP is to be able to document it so you can hand it over to someone else. Anyone should be able to easily follow the step-by-step process and get it done. So if your design process will always be yours, but you know you can hand off the onboarding process, then you’ll want to prioritize creating a process for the onboarding phase and not for the design phase just yet.
You can look at your process with the last few clients and see where the confusion and frustration happened. Was it at the same phase every time? If yes, then focus on that process first. If it’s happening at multiple phases, fix the one that is the most impactful and client-facing first, then move on to the next one.
How to create SOPS for your interior design business
Once you’ve gone through the questions above and have identified the most impactful process to formalize, here are the steps for documenting it.
Choose where your processes will live. A project management software like Asana, Trello, or Clickup? Editable Google Docs? Or a combination of both?
Imagine you’re doing the process with a client and write out the steps you would go through, no matter how small they seem. For example, if during your onboarding process, you countersign your contract and send that as a separate email from the onboarding email, write that note down.
Once you’ve written the steps out, link any software you need to use to manage the process and any files/links/templates you use when completing each step. If it’s really complicated or too tough to type up, use Loom to record yourself completing the process on your computer. For example, if you send a welcome guide in your welcome email and a special link for booking their kickoff meeting, link both of those items right in the document or checklist at that step so the information is readily available. Here are some more ways you can use Loom to elevate your client experience process.
If you have certain policies for each phase, like maybe you like the onboarding gift to go out within two days of a signed contract and payment receipt, have a POLICIES section so again, you can remove yourself from the questions your team might have when various scenarios present. I share industry best practices for policies throughout each phase in the Designed to Scale® Business Blueprint.
Once you’ve drafted it, I recommend USING it with your next project and following the steps you wrote out to make sure that’s actually what you do. If not, add, edit, or update so it is exactly what you would do with a client. This is an important step if you like things to be done a certain way, as most business owners do.
Once it’s been updated, now think, where do you want these to live so they will be easily accessible to you and your team? If you bury it deep in a google drive folder without any link to the outside world (like in your Asana, Trello, or Clickup), or save it as a PDF so it can never be edited, it lowers the chance it will be used and updated.
My personal tips for creating processes for your interior design business
TIP NUMBER ONE: USE A CHECKLIST (SO YOU CAN CROSS THINGS OFF) & TEMPLATES
My personal preference is to have the SOP in an Asana checklist/template and then use google docs for the templates for any steps or additional resources needed within that process. For example: in my Asana checklist for my blog posting process, I have a checklist of things I do when creating the blog post, and the Asana template has a link to my blog drafting template in Google. I then make a copy of the template and use it for each new blog post I draft. See exactly how we set up and use Asana by downloading the complimentary Asana Blueprint.
TIP NUMBER TWO: CREATE A PROCESS LIBRARY SO YOUR TEAM HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE PROCESSES IN ONE PLACE (AND MAKE THEM EASY TO SEARCH)
Again, I use Asana for managing my business and my processes, and have a Training Library for my team where I store all the checklists for our processes. If it’s a checklist that is specific to another project (like maybe it’s our Pinterest workflow process), we will double tag that checklist to our Marketing project (so it will appear in the Training Library and the Marketing project) so it can be easily referenced.
TIP NUMBER THREE: INCLUDE YOUR POLICIES FOR EACH PROCESS AND GIVE YOUR TEAM AUTONOMY
I like things a certain way, and I’ve never been one to shy away from investing in the work with time, energy, or dollars to ensure I get what I want. That being said, I also know it’s silly to have a team and then create an environment where they are too nervous to make mistakes and ask questions on everything, therefore pulling me back into every detail. Nope!
If you create policies for each of your processes, like WHEN things must go out, WHAT your exceptions are to the rule, WHO must sign off, etc., then your team can make decisions with that information guiding them.
TIP FOUR: HAVE YOUR TEAM CREATE THEM
If it’s a process one of your team members is currently doing, even if you know they’ll be with you forever, have them document the processes they handle and add them to the Training Library. If they ever leave, you’re up against having them use their last two weeks to detail everything they do to train someone new while you scramble to manage their workload and onboard and train a new employee.
TIP FIVE: NOW DELEGATE THOSE PROCESSES TO YOUR TEAM
It’s hard to hand things over, and that’s a normal part of growing your business. But if you’re doing all the ordering, all the customer service, all the finances, all the social media, you’ll get further and further from doing the thing you started your business to do, which is also the most profitable: create beautiful homes/events for your clients.
TIP SIX: CROSSING THINGS OFF A LIST HAS PHYSICAL BENEFITS
I love having my processes listed in Asana so I can make a copy of the process when it needs to be done and then cross the items off the to-do list as I go. It’s actually a fact that your brain releases dopamine when you cross something off your list, and this makes you feel happy and motivated to continue doing tasks because you love the awesome feeling you get with every item completed.
TIP SEVEN: YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE A PROCESS FOR EVERYTHING
Ordering office supplies? Ordering lunch for a client meeting? Some stuff is straightforward enough that you don’t need a full on checklist or process, BUT if it’s something you do more than once in the same way, you can include those details in a recurring checklist or as part of a larger process. For example, in your presentation process checklist, ordering lunch can be one of the steps, and within that step, you can list the three places you order lunch from, what CC to use, what a typical order is for key staff members, the email to send to clients to get their preferences, etc.
So keep this in mind: if you delegate a process or parts of a process, does it allow you to do more of [insert: the thing you love]? If yes, hand it over and plan to do a check-in before anything goes out to a client to calm your nerves. But then, after one or two times, hand over the reins completely and know there might still be mistakes, it still might not be perfect, but you’ll have that much time and bandwidth back in your brain to move forward on the work that drives your company forward (even if that means you now get to take more time off and relax, restore, and enjoy the life you’ve created by starting your own company).
If you need help with creating processes for your interior design business, be sure to check out the Designed to Scale® Business Blueprint for the 22 processes and standard operating procedures you need for managing your design firm. If you want a sample of what a process looks like, be sure to download my Install Day Process and Install Bag Packing List below.
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