In 2024, my team and I wrote 49 original blog posts for interior designers (this one makes it 50). That’s a big dip from 2023, when we wrote 90 original posts (based on our own experience!!). What can I say? We love nothing more than sharing insights to help interior designers improve their business operations and client experience.

While we didn’t write as many blog posts this year, we introduced plenty of new ways to help interior designers through our trainings in The Workroom. This year’s highlights included:

• Beyond Retail: Increase Revenue + Profits by Selling Wholesale Furnishings

• Elevate Your Design Presentation live training 

• Mastering Asana for Interior Designers

• Permits to Punchlists: Essential Construction Training, Management, & Pricing Tips for Interior Designers 

And I can’t forget to mention the three cohorts of our signature program, The Designed to Scale® Method. What an honor to help so many designers through my tried & true framework. 

If you haven’t had a chance to dive into those resources linked above, I highly recommend checking them out. In the meantime, don’t miss our 10 most popular blog posts of 2024. These are the posts that resonated most with our community of interior designers—each one thoughtfully crafted, 100% human-written, with no shortcuts or AI assistance here.

And, of course, a huge thank you for being here, reading my blog, The Weekly Install®, The Design Brief™, and my Instagram posts. 

YOU fuel everything we do.

Alright, let’s count down the top 10 posts of the year.

Dear Dakota,

Is it okay to stop growing my business?

Join The DTS Files for my advice and insights and to find out what stage your business is in.

For all of us, the end of the year marks the time when we either 1 ) scramble to get things done that we promised ourselves we would check off our list OR 2 ) we call it a loss and start planning for the year ahead.

If you fall into camp #1, this means you might be approaching deadlines that force YOU to finish things you MUST do before year’s end.

CEUs (continuing education units) are that way. YIKES! Along comes the end of the year, and you realize you haven’t completed the CEUs that are required.

Many interior designers DO NOT have a requirement to complete and document CEUs. But, we are team education over here and believe it is ALWAYS good to learn new things and keep your existing skills honed. 

Everyone can benefit from increasing their own competencies and knowledge!

So, if you’re scrambling to complete your CEU requirements for the current year, OR if you’re looking ahead to the upcoming year and want to plan your educational and/or upskilling goals, this post is for you. 

We’ll address: 

1. Who may need to complete CEUs

2. How CEUs should be tracked and reported

3. Where CEUs can be found (who offers them)

4. How to achieve your educational goals if you do not have a CEU requirement

One unfortunate reality of living and working in the digital age is that it opens wide the opportunity for people to engage in intellectual theft. The National Crime Prevention Council has reported that more than 45% of all U.S. businesses have suffered losses due to intellectual property theft. 

Almost half! 😖

All a person needs to do is visit a website and download or copy some content—whether it’s an artistic creation, written subject matter, or a saleable product.

Often, the creator or business owner is unaware this has even occurred, while the thief benefits by presenting the content as their own without putting in the actual effort or actually owning the content. 

In the two months prior to the writing of this blog, we at Dakota Design Company have identified SIX separate instances where designers have used our intellectual property without permission. These instances included people selling our materials, using our copyrighted content in their competing services, or providing our templates as bonuses inside of their paid programs.

SIX cases. In two months. 

I’m sharing this with you, my DDC community, because I know you care about the integrity and ethical standards of our industry. I’m also sharing because we’ve had to devote significant time and resources to managing these situations, from collecting evidence, engaging legal services, and creating processes to further protect our IP.

Join The DTS Files for my advice and insights.

The question of ethics comes up a lot with the creative small business owners we talk to. This is true not only for our clients—who are interior designers—but also with other business owners we interact with who support both our business and interior designers’ businesses (including marketing consultants, brand designers, PR consultants, attorneys, CPAs, bookkeepers, copywriters, HR consultants, photographers, stylists, etc.). 

And, if your business is in the online space, it can sometimes feel like there are NO ethical constraints and stealing is rampant. A small percentage of people even behave as though they will never be caught, or they just blame “their copywriter,” who must have done any infringing or copying without their knowledge. 

Join The DTS Files for my advice and insights.

As an interior designer, I know you love the magic of designing a room from scratch, seeing it all the way through to the final installation, and professionally photographing it so you can showcase it in your portfolio. Designers tell me that executing an entire project soup-to-nuts, from initial conception through final staging IS the most fulfilling professional experience they have. 

But, sometimes—whether it’s your capacity and availability at a specific time, or whether your experience level means you don’t do full-scale projects, or whether your current clients do not have those all-encompassing needs—a full-service project format may just not be a service type that aligns with your business. 

Enter: a Designer by Your Side service.  

Join The DTS Files for my advice and insights.

Why Talk About Professional Ethics & the Interior Design Industry?

The topic of professional ethics—acting in ways that embrace accountability, responsibility, and fairness—can be a tough (and nuanced) one to wrap your head around. 

Yes, we all (hopefully!) recognize the need to act with integrity in all of our professional exchanges—with clients, colleagues, and industry partners—but there is limited and sometimes ambiguous guidance to tell us how to do that. 

This is a serious and important topic, so I thought, let’s try to tackle it.

Join The DTS Files for my advice and insights.

An interior designer recently reached out to us with a frustration. She was in the process of putting together a scope of work for a full-service design project that involved construction, and she was spending quite a bit of time researching the answers to several questions about what could/should be done in this home to meet the homeowner’s needs.

This interior designer didn’t go into a lot of detail about the nature of the questions she was trying to get answers to, but, yes, in a project that involves construction, often there are several considerations that need to be evaluated before the project direction and full scope of work can be developed. 

The interior designer indicated she was putting in a LOT of uncompensated work merely to get a reasonable and workable SOW developed for her client.

Unpaid work???? Uh, no!

In a situation like this, where the appropriate design direction needs to be investigated, and questions need to be answered (perhaps getting conceptual pricing from contractors) BEFORE a SOW for a project can be definitively determined, a designer should ….

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