Hello 👋 and welcome to this week’s Hothouse Newsletter
This issue is about the unglamorous but essential supports that make a design business sustainable - the pricing decisions, systems and structures, the management skills that quietly do their job day after day, long after the initial excitement has passed.
1. This week’s blog: Accidental CEOs: What Designers Are Never Taught About Running a Business
Many interior designers arrive in this industry via a previous life in the corporate world - retail, law, finance, HR, consulting, management. Yet when they retrain in design, it can feel as though they are starting again from scratch, leaving all that former experience behind.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
If you have spent years operating within a large organisation - managing people, projects, deadlines, budgets, clients or stakeholders - you have already absorbed many of the behaviours that underpin effective business leadership. You understand how decisions are made, how responsibility is carried, how time is respected, how problems are surfaced and solved. You know what it means to prepare, to prioritise and to deliver.
You may be relatively new to design practice, but you are not new to leadership.
So if you are building a design practice after a first career elsewhere, take heart. You are not starting from zero. You are bringing with you a depth of professional experience that can give your new business structure, resilience and authority from the very beginning.
This week’s blog post explores the learned behaviours that many corporate leaders absorb over time - C-Suite behaviours - it also offers a reassuring reminder that if you didn’t come up through that system, these skills are entirely learnable; once you see their value, you can begin to adopt them deliberately, which is exactly the work we’ll be doing together inside Hothouse this year.
Read the blog. And join Hothouse.
2. Tiers Of Design Practice
If you've recently subsribed to the newsletter, it may help to know that everything I teach is grounded in a simple but powerful framework: the tiers of interior design practice. It’s a way of understanding where your business sits now, what level of income and clients it currently supports, and what needs to change to move it forward. Here’s a short introduction to the system, and how the different tiers tend to show up in real life.
A BRIEF EXPLAINER OF THE TIERS
Tier One - Startup
New or early-stage designers. Irregular work, low confidence in fees, inconsistent pipeline. Often taking whatever work appears. (Business in a Box clients).
Tier Two - Growing Pains
Working regularly but financially squeezed. Clients may be demanding or price-sensitive. Income inconsistent or lower than expected for the effort involved. (Bootcamp clients).
Tier Three - Maturity
A stable, healthy income. Fewer, better projects. Respectful clients with realistic budgets. Time to think, market, and run the business properly. (Bootcamp and Bespoke clients - my 12-month, 1-2-1 intensive programme, currently fully-subscribed).
Tier Four - Stardom
Reputation-led. Highly selective. Strong financial performance and a steady stream of desirable enquiries. (Bespoke clients - as above).
I refer to tiers regularly in my work - the best strategies for your business have to align with your current performance, and where you'd like to head next.
3. Better Clients: Bigger Budgets
Most designers say they want better clients, bigger budgets and more creatively satisfying work. A key consideration is:
Q: Can your current market actually sustain the business your trying to build?
This week on LinkedIn I shared a short commercial reality check: a clear-eyed look at what a healthy, profitable design practice really requires, and the quiet mismatch that keeps many talented designers working too hard for too little.
If you’ve ever wondered why a Tier-Three income still feels just out of reach, this post may provide a useful lens.
Our work inside Hothouse this month, focused on Founder Presence, is designed to address many of these “better client, bigger budget” frustrations directly.
And for the designers joining me in Bootcamp in April, this will form a central strand of our one-to-one work together as we refine positioning, visibility and commercial alignment.
Read the full piece on LinkedIn.
4. Founder Presence: the business asset nobody teaches
Most interior designers assume their work will speak for itself.
It doesn’t.
In this week’s webinar (now on YouTube), I introduced Founder Presence - the felt experience of encountering you - and why it has become one of the most powerful commercial levers in a crowded, discretionary market.
When designers look and sound the same, clients default to price.
When a founder feels distinct, credible and intentional, price becomes secondary, and ideal clients feel a pull to work with you.
Founder Presence is not confidence, charisma or personal branding.
It is the designed role you inhabit on behalf of your business: the version of you that makes clients feel safe, certain and ready to proceed long before they enquire.
In the video I explore:
- why interior design is a luxury purchase and therefore deeply relational
- how generic language quietly commoditises your service
- the “trust gap” between visibility and sales - and how presence bridges it
- why clients often decide they trust you months before they contact you
- how to begin consciously designing the role your business needs you to play
If you’ve ever wondered why some designers attract ideal clients with apparent ease while others remain stuck explaining their fees, this will resonate.
🔥 Next: from design → embodiment
WEBINAR TWO
Founder Presence: Embodiment
🗓️ Monday 17 February, 10am UK, live via the link in Hothouse
This second session moves from theory into practice.
I’ll be joined by actor and voice coach Nicky Herrington, who will guide us through how to physically inhabit the founder role you design - using posture, voice, breath and presence to create authority and ease without performance or self-consciousness.
Because a well-designed founder presence is only powerful when it can be comfortably lived in.
Ad Break - WARNING - one week remaining on the Early Bird offer on Recipe For Success Bootcamp. Get in now, if you'd like to pay £895 instead of £985.
5. My Week in Hothouse
I can feel the new-term edge of January starting to wear off. The clarity I had a few weeks ago is being muddied by proximity to the work, and if I’m honest, I’ve lost a bit of focus. This wasn’t a great week for hitting my own commitments. Things got last-minute. I got sloppy. Of course, we also moved from Cambodia (January) to Bangkok (February) and - truth be told - changing location does have a modest impact. But that's an excuse - it's not like changing location was a surprise.
I was productive last week: I delivered the Founder’s Presence webinar, which has generated good energy in Hothouse, added it as a new video to YouTube, and I've kept up the rhythm of blog and newsletter.
LinkedIn and face-to-camera content, though? Very much done at the wire. And frankly, thank goodness for this newsletter. Without the discipline of reporting in here, some of those things simply wouldn’t have happened.
One real lift this week has been hearing from designers who’ve also started measuring their business weekly 🙌 - if that’s you, thank you. It genuinely gave me a boost. It's so nice to know that I'm not doing this alone.
I’m also increasingly pleased with how the Founder’s Presence material is distilling, both for my clients and for myself. It’s crystallising into what feels like a genuinely separating principle between practices that thrive and those that stall. That’s exciting.
Another positive note, I’m loving working with a digital marketing specialist. After doing everything solo for a couple of years, having someone inside the business with me, sharing planning and decision-making, has felt unexpectedly emotional. In the very best way. Motivational.
So, looking ahead, I need to be more tasky on LinkedIn and face-to-camera video. Next week I'll diarise these early and treat them as non-negotiable. Also - no post this week on Instagram - another red blot. Momentum doesn’t maintain itself. It needs managing, even (especially) when the novelty has worn off.
6. A Thought for Valentine’s Day ❤️🔥
Nina Campbell famously observed:
This Saturday, I’ll spare a fond thought for my loyal and versatile telescopic tripod.
Of course it's a super videography tripod, but it also becomes an impromptu desk (propping up my phone while I work); doubles as brand photographer (bluetooth remote included); and - taking almost no space - travels everywhere with me.
This week it became a perfectly-located, perfect height makeup mirror.
In business, as in life, practical support is priceless.
7. Final Thought
What quietly holds a business together once the romance wears off?
- sound pricing structures
- clear boundaries around fees and scope
- professional systems (contracts, processes, retainers)
- reliable support, whether human or infrastructural
- habits that compound over time
- Radical ownership - no excuses, clear-eyed analysis of good and bad, shouldering the full responsibility
All of which sit underneath the visible, creative, Instagram-friendly surface of an interior design business. And all of which we’ll be pursuing in monthly deep-dives in Hothouse this year...see you in there!
Wishing you a productive, collaborative, supportive week,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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