Welcome to February.
If you measured your business through January - tracked your activity, and benchmarked yourself against a plan - you’ve already completed one twelfth of the year. That matters. Not because January was perfect, but because momentum has begun.
This is the point where intention starts to harden into habit. Do this for another month or two and the effort required drops away - I promise - the work begins to move under its own steam. The doing of it becomes its own reward.
If you didn't - that's fine - you can start now, in February. No time like the present.
What follows in this issue is all about that shift: from reaction to design, from hope to structure, and from sporadic effort to calm, compounding progress.
1. This Week's Blog - Charging for Freelancers
This week I've answered a question I’m asked all the time: how should I organise hourly and daily rates in my business, once I have a visible team?
If you’re considering freelance support for your studio, this week’s blog post will steady your nerves and give you a clean, professional way to price it. I’m sharing what’s normal in practice, how to introduce a simple rate card, and the calm language to use if a client questions why your freelancer isn’t billed at cost.
2. Instagram - Discretionary Luxury
This week on IG I shared that interior design businesses often stall for one simple reason: we behave like we're selling a necessity, not a luxury.
A plumber can set up shop and demand does a lot of the heavy lifting, because the problem is urgent and non-negotiable. But a tired kitchen, a “one day” renovation, or a house that doesn’t quite feel right can be postponed indefinitely. Clients can browse, hesitate, compare, and quietly back away, especially when multiple designers look plausible at first glance. How on earth do you choose 🤷♀️.
When a luxury purchase feels uncertain - when, on the surface, all the available options look the same - people default to the simplest filter available: price. And that’s how talented designers end up stuck with inconsistent enquiries, price sensitivity, comparison shopping, stalled growth, and that creeping exhaustion and self-doubt.
The fix isn’t posting harder. It’s building a better engine: owning your business and designing it intentionally for a discretionary market. That’s the work. And it’s extraordinarily calming once you see it.
If you want to build a better engine, that’s exactly what we do inside Recipe For Success Bootcamp.
From 20 April to 22 May, we’ll work in a focused peer group, (with each designer also having five intensive 1:1 meetings with me - one each week) to move 10 interior design businesses into intentionally profitable positions, built for a luxury market (not a “hope it works out🤞” one).
This is your one opportunity this year to do this work with me in this format.
If you’re ready to replace inconsistency with a designed, deliberate business engine, reply here and we can have a chat.
3. Rule of thumb: Maintenance and Growth marketing.
Growth vs Maintenance Marketing
Here’s a simple rule of thumb I shared during January's Hothouse Planning Event that’s worth repeating.
Look at your pipeline.
- If you have more than six months of work booked, you’re in maintenance marketing → ½ day per week
- If you have less than six months ahead of you, you’re in growth marketing → 1 full day per week
This is a rough rule-of-thumb designed for a small interior design practice running on a 5-day week, not a marketing department with a budget and a team. It’s pragmatic, not punishing.
The most common mistake?
Taking your foot off the pedal because the pipeline looks healthy.
That’s how feast-and-famine cycles are created.
And if you’re thinking, “But what if it works too well?”
That’s the best problem you can have!
Too much demand is not a crisis. It’s a pricing conversation.
You raise fees to rebalance supply and demand.
Marketing isn’t something you do until you’re busy - it’s something you calibrate because you want to stay in control.
Keep it steady. Keep it intentional.
4. My Week in Hothouse
This has been an energising week at Recipe for a Room HQ (currently in Cambodia, and relocating this weekend to Bangkok).
At the end of last year I carried out a deliberately granular review of 2025, examining every dial on the business dashboard to identify both pressure points and latent potential. As ever, this was done in collaboration with AI, and the resulting analysis was bracingly clear.
The pressure lay in a familiar place: a capacity ceiling created by doing too much myself. The opportunity, equally clearly, sat in the development of digital products, marketed digitally. I needed structural support, more hands, in order to grow. This week, that support arrived. I’ve engaged a specialist, and together we’ve launched a focused project that will run over the next three to six months. I will have new self-directed courses arriving in the first half of 2026...more news coming shortly!
In Business in a Box - my "launch your design business" course - I advocate a quick and dirty approach: start before everything is perfect, let the market respond, and refine in real time. That’s exactly how I’ve built this business over the past two years. Now it’s time to tidy the edges, strengthen the systems, and tackle the jobs I didn't have time to do while getting up and running.
All of which leaves me feeling quietly excited about 2026 - and once again reminded of the power of knowing where you’re going, and why.
Strategy, intention and consistency remain the work: design, declare, deliver.
I missed my Hothouse chat this week. My personal pledge this year is Radical Ownership so here we go: I could have fitted it in, I wasn't disciplined/organised enough - no excuses.
However, as ever, I have this newsletter firmly in the back of my mind when I post on Instagram and LinkedIn, and (added this year) speak to camera - I know I'd procrastinate if you weren’t watching - so, thank you.
5. FEBRUARY IN HOTHOUSE: Founder Presence 3rd, and 17th February
February in Hothouse: Founder Presence
As promised, this year in Hothouse we’ll be cycling through the Seven Pillars of Design Entrepreneurship, one most months, treating them like circuit training for your business. February is where we begin, with Founder Presence.
Founder Presence is a critical driver of business performance in the luxury sector. This is not something a plumber needs to think about. But if you run a design business, you are part of the product. Your studio needs a brand ambassador at the helm, someone willing and able to step into visibility as the version of themselves the business now requires.
On Instagram this week I said that, when all options look the same, clients default to price as the deciding factor. Founder presence is the key to standing out, looking original, being magnetic. As digital competition proliferates, founder presences is the moat around your business.
📅 There will be two live sessions in Hothouse this month, both at 10am UK time, on Tuesday 3 February and Tuesday 17 February.
In the first session, we’ll begin designing the founder persona your business needs: how you show up, what you stand for, and how authority, confidence and clarity are expressed through you.
In the second session, I’ll be joined by acting coach and photographer Nicky Herrington for a conversation about embodiment. We’ll explore how awareness and control of your physicality underpins presence, and how to design a professional self that can be inhabited rather than performed. How to remain as authentic in public as you are in private...with designed differences between the two modes.
Founder Presence is not about becoming louder, slicker, or more extrovert. It’s about becoming legible, trustworthy, and congruent. And it’s foundational work.
Join Hothouse - my free resource hub for interior designers - to take part!
6. Final Thought
There’s a quiet confidence that comes from running a business you’ve actually designed.
Not louder marketing. Not busier weeks. But a growing sense that you’re steering rather than reacting. That pricing makes sense. That marketing is calibrated, not frantic. That visibility is intentional, not performative.
February is early enough in the year to course-correct, and late enough for patterns to be forming. If you’ve started measuring, keep going. If you’ve begun showing up more deliberately, stay with it. Momentum doesn’t announce itself loudly, but once it’s established, it’s remarkably hard to stop.
If you want help converting this early-year energy into something that genuinely carries you through the rest of 2026, join me in Recipe for Success Bootcamp this April. Places are first-come-first-served, early bird closes soon.
I’ll be working with just 10 interior designers, in a focused peer group with intensive one-to-one support, to turn Q1 clarity and determination into fuel that fires the whole year — and beyond.
Happy February 💘
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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