Hello 👋
And welcome to this week's newsletter.
There is a concept that sits at the heart of everything we do here, and this week's newsletter makes it unusually visible. It is the idea of the gap.
Not failure. Not falling short. Simply the distance between where you are right now and where your business needs you to be. That gap exists because you are building something. It's a mark of ambition, not a measure of inadequacy.
This week, we are working on four of them.
The commercial gap - the distance between what your current circumstances allow you to earn and what your business could generate if you thought beyond the boundaries of geography and in-person delivery. This week's blog explores your options.
The perceptual gap - the distance between how you believe you present to the world and how you actually do. This week's first homework exercise turns an honest lens on your website, using your competitors as the calibration point.
The aspirational gap - the distance between who you are today and the standard your business already implicitly holds you to.
The embodied gap - perhaps the most difficult of the four, because it cannot be closed with a spreadsheet or a strategy. This is the distance between knowing who your business needs you to be and being able to walk into a room and be that person. Nicky Herrington joined us on Tuesday to begin that conversation, and there is an opportunity to continue it in person in West Sussex next month.
That's what we do here: I work with you in the gap.
1. This Week's Blog: Passive Income for Designers
This week's blog asks a question that many designers are circling without quite knowing how to frame it: if your income is entirely tied to your time and your location, what are your options? Whether you live outside the Golden Zones (areas of high disposable income, discussed in the blog two weeks ago) or simply want to build something more resilient, the post maps the spectrum from slightly decoupled to fully decoupled (decoupled is more accurate than passive) - and is direct about what it actually takes to get there.
Read it here.
2. Founder Presence Webinar 2, with Nicky Herrington
In the first webinar, we made the case for why Founder Presence matters, why it is business infrastructure rather than vanity, and why the gap between your technical expertise and your client's perception of your value is one of the most commercially significant gaps you can close.
This week, Nicky brought her expertise as a professional actor and photographer to bear on the harder question: why, even when designers understand the case intellectually, so many find it genuinely difficult to step forward and embody it? The discomfort is real and it is physiological - what Nicky describes as the difference between a regulated and a disregulated state, and the way that state transmits itself to an audience before you have said a single word.
The good news is that this is trainable. Nicky introduced practical, manageable steps for building the nervous system's capacity to handle visibility, from private recording as inoculation against self-consciousness, to the body-first preparation that helps high-energy temperaments find steadiness before the camera rather than wrestling with it during.
Both webinars are now available to watch here.
And if you'd like to move from theory to practice, Nicky and I are running a one-day retreat together on 22nd March in Steyning, West Sussex, where we'll do exactly that work in person.
3. The Designed Self Retreat – 22nd March, Steyning, West Sussex
The webinars have made the case. The retreat is where the work becomes physical.
On 22nd March, Nicky and I are hosting a one-day in-person retreat at Southdowns Retreat in Steyning, West Sussex - a small, focused group of designers working seriously on the gap between who they are and who their business needs them to be.
The day begins before you arrive. The pre-work - a guided retreat workbook - asks you to design your founder presence on paper first: the curated, commercially relevant version of yourself that your practice most needs. The day itself then moves that definition from the page into the body, working through nervous system regulation, breath and voice, and a thoughtful, layered approach to camera presence.
You do not need to enjoy visibility to be there. You simply need to want a professional self you can rely on.
Places are £395. Discover the full details and book here.
4. Gap Homework: The Mirror Test
Thinking about the perceptual gap mentioned in this week's introduction (the distance between how you believe you present to the world and how you actually do), are you interested in seeing your positioning with fresh eyes? Using AI to critique your website is very quick, and incredibly revealing.
Here is the homework:
Step one. Think of three designers you regularly compete against for work, or whose practice you admire and whose success you'd like to emulate. Find their websites.
Step two. Open a conversation with your AI tool of choice (I'm currently using paid-for Claude 👍) and use this prompt:
"I am going to give you the URL of an interior designer's website. Please review it and tell me: how distinctive is this designer's positioning? Who does this website suggest they work with, and what does it suggest they offer that is different from any other designer? How professionally does it present? What is working, and what is unclear or missing? Here is the URL: [paste URL]"
Do this for each of the three, one at a time, in the same conversation. Read the responses together. Notice what makes one more compelling than another.
Step three. Then ask:
"Now please do exactly the same analysis for my website. Here is my URL: [paste your URL]. Based on everything you've seen today, how does my website compare? Where is my positioning clear, and where does it leave a potential client with unanswered questions?"
Step four. If the response identifies gaps, follow up with:
"What are your specific recommendations for strengthening my positioning on this website?"
A note on how to receive this. We practise Radical Ownership here - which means we do not look at our businesses through the lens of failure or inadequacy. We look at them clearly, because clarity is what makes improvement possible. If the AI tells you something uncomfortable about your website, that is not a verdict. It is a starting point. Everything it identifies is something you can work on. That is precisely what the gap is for.
5. Coming in March: Marketing and Brand Expression
February has been about you - your presence, your positioning, your website, your professional self. March takes that work public.
In March we make our next stop among the Seven Pillars of Design Entrepreneurship: Marketing and Brand Expression. The seven pillars represent the key areas of business practice that every founder-led design practice needs to build strength in - not all at once, but steadily, over time. A business that is genuinely balanced across all seven is a business that can withstand almost anything.
We'll have two live webinars in March on this subject (one with a special guest, more info next week!).
Details and joining links are under the Events tab in Hothouse - and if you are not yet a member, join us here.
6. My Week in Hothouse: Working in the Gap
It would be hypocritical to set you homework on competitor analysis without doing it myself. So this week, I did.
I gave my own website the same treatment I'm asking you to give yours, and the AI served up a finding I could not argue with 🤦♀️. At roughly 6,500 weekly visitors - traffic that the blog and newsletter have built steadily over the past year 🙌 - the absence of a subscriber pop-up means I am almost certainly leaving around 65 new mailing list subscribers on the table every single week. A 1% conversion rate is a conservative industry assumption. It is a straightforward gap to close, and I have no good excuse for not having closed it sooner. Radical Ownership in action.
I've been working seriously on my own founder presence - defining it with more precision than I have previously applied, and thinking carefully about how it needs to show up across the business as we move into March, because marketing without a settled sense of who you are and what you stand for is effortful in all the wrong ways.
I want to go into March's focus on visibility feeling grounded rather than scrambled.
I am also experimenting with a more efficient approach to Instagram. If it works the way I hope it will, I intend to post more frequently in March and measure the difference. LinkedIn has been more active this week; three posts drove impressions meaningfully, though profile views have been steadier. I am watching the numbers rather than drawing conclusions yet.
Finally, I'm genuinely looking forward to the retreat. Being largely based overseas means I rarely meet my clients, and I miss it. Also, if I am honest, I'm also looking forward to receiving Nicky's embodiment work myself - because a significant part of what I am planning for the coming months depends on showing up with the kind of authentic, regulated presence I've been asking you all to develop.
7. A Final Thought
Every piece of work in this newsletter - the blog, the homework, the webinar, the retreat, March's marketing focus - is an invitation to look at your business honestly and then do something about what you see.
That is the gap in practice. 'The Gap' isn't a problem to solve once and move on from: it's a place you learn to work in steadily, without drama, over time.
A university lecturer friend says she relates this to yoga practice - in yoga when you feel resistance, you know that's where the work is needed, you'd never say, oh that's hard, I won't go there again.
Perhaps it's all about growth mindset: the designers who build something durable are not the ones who find the gaps smallest. They are the ones who mind them the least.
Have a super week,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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