Hello š£
And Happy Easter - this feels like a good moment to talk about growth.
Around here, we take the view that meaningful change is rarely sudden and never effortless. It takes time and consistent application, and it works best when it is built on a plan that is deliberate and intentional. I call this get rich slow - but it's not a counsel of low ambition; it's a counsel of realism.
Unrealistic expectations about how quickly things will change, or how easy it will be, do not produce faster results. They produce disillusionment, surrender, and a gentle roll backwards to square one.
The alternative is to set a pace you can sustain, make your plan, and get on with it - undistracted by the gap between where you are and where you thought you would be by now, and free from the second-guessing that fills that gap.
Spring has always been associated with growth and change. The evidence is everywhere: things that were dormant are visibly becoming something.
The question this issue asks is whether your business is doing the same?
This week: a new quarter, a fresh start, and an FAQ from the consulting room.
1. NEW QUARTER ENERGY
Q1 is done and last week I asked you to look back at it honestly - what went to plan, what didn't, where the gaps were between intention and reality.
Q2 begins now, and it deserves the same deliberate attention you would give to any significant project. Which is to say: it deserves to be designed.
Design
We are designers. We do not arrive at a finished room by accident, and we do not arrive at a finished quarter by accident either. Before a project begins, you establish what success looks like. We do the same here.
What is your goal for Q2 - 2026? For example, a number of new enquiries; a particular type of client you want to be working with by June; a marketing habit established and running; training completed; a process overhauled; a rate increased?
Write down your goal (note the singular here!). Make it concrete enough that at the end of June you will know, unambiguously, whether you achieved it.
What does your business most need from you this quarter?
Declare
Hothouse exists, in part, for this. When you say your goal out loud - to a group of peers who will remember - something shifts. The goal stops being a private aspiration and becomes a small public commitment. We are significantly more likely to follow through on things we have said than on things we have merely thought. That's why I publish my business KPIs here every week. I feel you watching.
So: what are you going for this quarter? Say it in the Hothouse group, this week if you can. The declaration is not a boast; it is a mechanism.
Deliver
For your Q2 goal/s, decide now how you will know you are on track. What will you check, and when? A monthly look at your enquiry numbers? A weekly review of whether you posted as planned? A fortnightly prompt to yourself to look at the pipeline?
Q2 has a hard stop. The summer holidays arrive, clients disappear, and the rhythm of the working year changes, whether you want it to or not. So we have a deadline, and deadlines are clarifying.
You have roughly twelve working weeks. They will go quickly. The designers who make Q2 count are not the ones with the most ambitious goals - they are the ones who decided, in the first week of April, exactly what they were building towards.
So, if you feel you missed the bus in January, thatās ok. Hereās your chance at a fresh start.
Design. Declare. Deliver.
NB - YOUR Q1 REFLECTION:
One more quick thing on the Q1 reflection that I asked you to do last week.
If you thought about it rather than wrote it down, I would gently encourage you to go back and write it. This is not pedantry. There is good research - Dr Lisa Miller's work on the achieving brain versus the awakened brain - suggesting that the act of writing shifts you into a qualitatively different mode of thinking: one that is less about audit and more about meaning.
The achieving brain counts and compares. The awakened brain asks what this period was actually trying to tell you. Both are useful, both need to be nurtured. Writing tends to activate the second.
I'll come back to this work properly in a future issue, it has significant implications for how we run our businesses.
For now, if your Q1 reflection is still in your head, get it on paper. Write about it.
2. THIS WEEK'S BLOG: NOT MORE. DIFFERENT.
There is a version of sales training that has been refined over decades into something close to a science. It has frameworks, funnels, conversion metrics. And it works...at a particular level of the market.
At the luxury end, it can work against you.
In this month's blog I look at why the strategies that serve you well in mid-market practice will quietly repel clients at the top end, and why the move upmarket is not a question of doing more, or doing it better, but of doing something categorically different. Including, first, some deliberate unlearning. It's a transition most designers make at some point in tier three.
The blog lays down the intellectual foundation for everything we are covering in April, we'll be building on this in the two Hothouse webinars mentioned below.
3. FROM THE CONSULTING ROOM - Pain in the Fee Proposal is Referred Pain
This week on Instagram I posted about something that comes up repeatedly in my consulting work. Iām sharing it here too as I want to make sure you don't miss it.
In medicine, referred pain is pain that is felt in a location other than its source. The classic example is the back problem that presents as pain down the leg. The leg is not the problem. The leg is simply where the problem makes itself known.
I see the equivalent of this pretty much every week, working with designers.
A designer gets in touch because their fee proposals are not converting. They have tried restructuring them, repricing them, rewriting them. They have agonised over the numbers, second-guessed their hourly rate, wondered whether they are simply charging too much. The proposal, they believe, is where things are going wrong, it's what they book to chat about.
We sit down together. We talk. And within a relatively short time, we are no longer talking about the fee proposal at all.
We are talking about their marketing.
Because here is what the fee conversation is actually telling you. If the clients arriving at your proposal stage are experiencing the fee as a shock, a barrier, or an invitation to negotiate, the issue is not the proposal. The issue is that those clients were never fully sold on the value of working with a designer before they arrived. They came in underprepared, for the investment, for the process, for what professional interior design actually costs and why.
And that is a marketing problem.
Your marketing is the first conversation you have with a potential client, long before they contact you. It is where expectations are set, where the nature and value of your service is either established or left vague. If your marketing attracts clients who are price-shopping, then your proposals will always feel like an obstacle to them. Because they are looking for a deal, and you are presenting a professional fee.
If your conversion rate at proposal feels like a problem, look further back in your processes. Look at what your marketing is saying, who it is reaching, and what kind of client it is producing. The pain is real, but perhaps it doesn't originate where you think it does.
INVITATION TO BOOTCAMP: This is exactly the work we do together in the Recipe For Success Business Bootcamp - five weeks that will change how you think about your practice, your clients, and your pipeline. It runs once a year. If you have been wondering whether it is for you, the fact that you have read this far is probably your answer.
4. INSTAGRAM PLANNING MATERIALS - Clear Head...or Mild Dread?
Following Milla Richardson's webinar on Instagram marketing - available to watch back on YouTube - Iāve added two companion resources to the Files tab in the Hothouse group.
The first is a workflow document. It takes you through the strategic groundwork that needs to happen before you plan a single post.
The second is a blank content calendar spreadsheet, designed to be used alongside the workflow.
Both are built around Milla's framework, they're for designers who want to approach Instagram with a clear head rather than a sense of mild dread. The system is not complicated. One to two posts a week, planned in a single sitting, scheduled in advance, repeated consistently. That is it.
If you attended the webinar, these resources will consolidate what you heard. If you didn't, be sure to watch it, and use the workflow document to get your social media calendar under control.
Both are under the Files tab in Hothouse now.
5. COMING UP IN HOTHOUSE
Sales and Client Acquisition - Webinar One: Theory
Tuesday 14 April, 11.30am UK
The first of two sessions this month looks at the principles behind selling professional design services - why the standard sales frameworks do not translate to parts of this market, what the psychology of the luxury client actually looks like, and what needs to change in how you present your practice before any practical technique becomes useful.
Sales and Client Acquisition - Webinar Two: Practical Applications
Tuesday 28 April, 2pm UK
The second session takes the theory into practice. Language, process, the client journey from first contact to signed agreement, and how to handle the moments where most designers lose ground.
The link to join both webinars is in the Hothouse group.
6. MY WEEK IN HOTHOUSE
This is the final week of the five-week challenge I set myself to reverse the red out of my KPIs, and it has (mostly) done what it was supposed to do. LinkedIn impressions is still showing red this week, but the five-week focus has returned me to regular posting (including speaking to camera) on both Instagram and LinkedIn, and, more importantly, I have found a rhythm. That matters more than the numbers. I'll be using the spreadsheet and workflow inspired by Milla's webinar to plan Instagram content from now through Bootcamp, it will be interesting to see how more strategically-planned social media content performs.
Now I am looking forward into Q2. I'm intentionally putting myself under pressure and, if I can keep up the pace, I will reward myself with time off in the summer (when my clients are away).
Bootcamp runs for five weeks in Q2 and is, in practice, a full-time job, working one-to-one and in groups with interior designers who are rethinking and repositioning their businesses. Grafting intensively with individuals is the work I love most, and April/May is full-on. That is not a complaint; it is a planning constraint, and I need to treat it as one.
This quarter also carries two significant deliverables that do not move: Meta ads launching in Q2, and a major new product launching in June. Both require work that starts now. The filming for the ad campaign needs to be done next week. The new product development needs to begin in earnest immediately, the June deadline is fixed, if I do a small amount each day, I'll get there.
The work I'm doing now was planned in Q4 last year. By Q3 this year, it will be delivered. It will put my business on an exciting new footing.
The next time you hear from me I'll be back in Spain - April-June is the best time of the year in Andalusia, and I can't wait to get back up into the mountains with the bees, butterflies, and spring flowers.
FINAL THOUGHT
Are you feeling a shift? The spring equinox. The clocks changing. The seasonal message of renewal. Right now there's an energy to harness, an opportunity to grasp.
It requires you to decide what this quarter is for, say it out loud, and then show up for it consistently - it's just twelve weeks.
Happy Easter.
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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