Dear Dakota,

Outside of direct services, what is the best form of additional income for interior designers? What avenue is the most profitable and worth pursuing for a company with three employees? Furniture sales? Passive income downloads? Courses? Affiliate income?

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Owning a business can feel a bit like an experiment at times. Packaging things up, testing them, refining them, and testing them again. It’s only by going through this process that you can actually know what works and doesn’t for you and your clients. 

With Dakota Design Company being my second business (my first was a wedding and event planning company that I ran from 2007 to 2014 in Arizona and Illinois), I’ve certainly experienced my share of failures, but I’ve always learned from them (even if I needed to grieve and beat myself up for a bit first). 

There are always lessons to be learned in failure. Something that I think resonates with my clients is that I am a done-for-you service provider, just like they are.

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If your goal for the year is to automate as much as possible in your interior design business, you have to know this one thing before you invest in technology, consultants, strategists, or done-for-you services. 

If you've ever sent out an interior design proposal to a potential client (you might call it a contract, LOA, scope and service agreement, etc.) and then waited on pins and needles for their response…this tip is for you. 

Expire your proposals.

Most of our designers expire proposals within two weeks MAX. Some expire them within seven days.

Unless you’re a general contractor or a cabinet supplier, your interior design firm SHOULD NOT be ordering building supplies.

This is one area where I occasionally see interior designers taking on responsibilities that cause extra headaches and coordination. Not to mention that ordering building supplies doesn’t yield sufficient profit from markup to offset the hassle. 

Designers should refrain from placing orders for materials that would be considered building supplies.

Most of the interior designers we work with source primarily to-the-trade and custom products for their full-service interior design projects. Sure, they'll pull in a retail item here and there when it comes to accessories or styling items. But for the most part, if they specify something, they're ordering it through one of their vendor accounts. 

This may be how you run your business, or maybe you'd like to start selling more to-the-trade items (if this is you, be sure to check out our mini-course: Beyond Retail). Either way, I’ll bet you've heard questions similar to these from prospects before: 

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If you're anything like me, you have a gazillion things you want to do in your business. But how do you know where to start when you have SO MANY things you want to do? And on the flip side of that, if everything feels broken but you also want to add in more things, where do you begin?

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This week’s tech tip is all about organizing your ordering and tracking process to save you SO. MUCH. TIME.

Set up an orders@yourbusinessname.com email address and use that email to apply for all your vendor accounts. This way, all your order update emails go to that inbox AND once you hand over the ordering to a team member, they’ll have full access to that inbox and won’t need to log into your inbox to get order information.