Is your business at odds with your creativity?

Running a business and creativity are often at odds. The creative side wants to be creative -without restrictions and that could be finding the perfect sofa, exploring every option, scrolling through hundreds of pages of options. But that is not sustainable for business, Clients don’t want to pay you for hundreds of hours of sourcing. This is why lack of time-management is hurting your business.

Your job is to find that balance of being creative and making money. Because there is a point that your creativity will make you unprofitable. Or that your profitability will make you not very creative - and you’re just turning out carbon copies of your own designs or recreating designs on Pinterest.

Find your sweet spot.

You have to manage your time. You have to know that to be profitable you can’t go over X hours for a project. Even better, know the numbers to make a great profit, a good profit, and where you are just breaking even.

Some designers are naturally good at this balance. They are efficient with their time and can manage how they spend it.

However, most designers I meet are not efficient with their time, they don’t know how long typical business tasks take, they may not even pay attention to their time because they don’t want to.

One of my business mottos is: It doesn’t matter what pricing structure you use, what matters is that you are consistent and charge for all your time. We should not be giving our time and expertise away for free. (Read more about Why Discounts Are Hurting Your Business.)

The sneaky profit-depleter.

While, I’ve shared some scary math about giving time away before, here it is again.

Let's say you charge $125 per hour.  

You also don't charge for ONE hour a week.

You are leaving $6500 on the table by skipping a single billable hour in a week.  

Now let's say you don't charge for a measly TWO hours a week.

That is $13,000 you aren't getting.  

If you up that to one hour a DAY?

$31,250.  Thirty one thousand two hundred fifty dollars!!!

Most of the time when I talk about leaving money on the table and billing for every hour, I am referring to not billing clients for time already spent, because you feel like it’s too much time and can’t bill them. But what if we take a step back and see if it’s our time-management that is the reason that you feel like you can’t bill them.

If you are spending 10 hours finding a sofa: not efficient. If you are exploring the dozens of ways a built-in cabinet can be designed and redesigned that is not efficient.

There is a balance between the client’s budget, your design fees, and your time. In other words, you can easily eat through all your own profits because you’ve invested too much time in a client project that doesn’t have the budget to pay you for all that time. So who loses? The designer.

The client often win because we give them so much extra time to make sure that everything is just right. In my experience, the difference between really good and perfect to a client is minimal - but to a designer it can be the difference between paying bills and not.

Improve time-management for more profits.

So if you feel like your time management is hurting your design business, take some time to examine it. Can you be more efficient? Here are some areas to take a look at:

• Perfectionism - Never being satisfied and/or thinking that there is something better (even if it’s only marginally better). This mindset can easily cause you to spiral into spending too much time on a project.

• Have a specialty - When you have a specialty you are in your zone of genius - going outside will take more of your time, brain-power, and energy, making you less efficient. Doing this on every project? - extremely time-consuming.

• Work with good people - build relationships with vendors will make your design business more efficient. You don’t have to spend time vetting new vendors, they know your style and you know their level of quality.

• Use the same vendors - When you give yourself this parameter, it will automatically improve your time management. You won’t have to familiarize yourself with new businesses, get signed up for a trade account, question the quality, and you’ll be limited to their products. This also helps build relationships and can lower prices for you because of the quantity you purchase.

• Manage client expectations - Clients can get in the way of your time-management efforts, so my best advice is to communicate often and clearly about what they should expect and what you expect from them. Being clear about the timeliness of decisions and payments from the beginning can go a long way in aiding you in a smooth and efficient project.

What time-management steps do you take to make your business more efficient?

About The Author

Hi! I’m Capella and I’m an interior designer who helps fellow designers build their businesses. Forget secrecy and competition, I believe designers should support and uplift each other. By helping and boosting one another, we can elevate the business of interior design together! Hang around a bit and I’ll share all the business “secrets” no one else wants to talk about.