Hello 👋
Bootcamp started this week, and work is under way. The first round of one-to-ones is complete, and what strikes me is how much clarity sits just beneath the surface. We are working through governing values and early-stage business plans: the foundational layer from which everything else follows. Positioning, message, marketing. In the coming weeks, we will refine this into something each designer can actually use: a clear, confident account of who they are, who they serve, and what they are offering.
Which brings me neatly to this week's theme: clarity.
Clarity is a necessity in a design business: clarity in the quality of your communications, the confidence of your proposals, the coherence of your marketing, the decisions you make without agonising. Many of our daily challenges arise from unresolved thinking - and no amount of productivity tools, social media scheduling, or proposal templates will fix that.
This week's newsletter explores two aspects of the clarity problem. The first is clarity on where you spend your time - your priorities. The second is in your marketing: what it means to have a message, and why visibility without one is not just ineffective but actively counterproductive.
Also this week: stolen crocodiles. My latest blog is about why keeping your ideas to yourself is the wrong instinct, and why the originator of an idea has nothing to fear from those who borrow it.
If you haven't read it yet, it is worth five minutes of your time...
1. This Week's Blog - Stolen Crocodiles
We can have a tendency, as designers, to be protective of our thinking. To keep ideas cloaked, for fear they'll be taken, and we'll be left with nothing. This post makes the case that the opposite instinct serves you better, and that the person who generates the ideas always has an advantage over the person who merely copies them.
2. Time Management, The Wrong Diagnosis
I delivered a webinar for the BIID this week, and here's the rough gist.
Most time management conversations eventually end up in the same place: apps and productivity tools. Adopted without taking other measures, they rarely work for long.
That is not because the tools are bad. Some of them are genuinely useful. But most of us have set out on an impossible mission - tackling chaos in our calendar is a bit like tackling chaos in our wardrobe, unless we have a major clear out at the same time, we'll soon be back in the same mess.
Here is the actual diagnosis: you do not have a time management problem. You have a clarity problem. And until you address that, no system will save you.
The finite hours it's scary to confront
Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks (highly recommended) makes a simple point: an eighty-year life gives you roughly four thousand weeks. That is it. There is no version of your life in which you master everything, pursue every interest, and run a serious business. The life you are living right now - whether ordered or chaotic - is the one you are choosing by default.
I spent years whingeing about wanting to paint. I thought it really mattered to me. But when I looked honestly at my four thousand weeks, I recognised that running this business and serving my clients well is what I am here to do right now. Combine that with spending a sliver of time with the people I love, and there's no time left. Letting go of painting was not defeat. It was a decision. And decisions, unlike vague intentions, restore both time and peace of mind.
Governing values are the real system
As we've been doing in Bootcamp this week, the first step to clarity is taking the time needed to really work out our governing values.
They aren't aspirational. They are the principles you would fight to preserve. They are the standards below which you will not go, regardless of the commercial pressure to do so. A designer who knows she will never take on a client who dismisses her professional judgement does not spend three weeks agonising over whether to pursue a difficult lead. She already knows. The decision has been made in advance, at the level of values rather than circumstance.
This is where most time management advice goes wrong. It assumes that a better system will allow you to ram everything in. But actually, you need to filter and say goodbye to aspirations that fall beneath a certain priority threshold. The Bootcamp designers are so busy, we did debate which side of the line we'd place 'eating', but fortunately it made the cut.
From values to the weekly plan
Once your philosophy is in place, the practical architecture becomes straightforward rather than overwhelming. The model I use moves from a three year vision, down through annual and quarterly priorities, into monthly focus, and a weekly planning session of around sixty minutes. Every level drips instructions down to the next. The daily to-do list is not a random collection of tasks; it is the operational expression of a strategic intent.
The app you are looking for won't deliver a miracle. But clarity might.
3. Waving is Not a Job
This message made its way onto LinkedIn and Instagram this week.
There is a phrase I first heard from an external examiner on the interior design degree course I ran. He would stand in front of a student's work, look carefully, and say: I can see you're waving, but I can't hear what you're saying.
He wasn't being unkind. He was identifying something precise: the effort was visible, but the idea wasn't resolved. The student had worked hard. What they hadn't done was arrive at a message.
I've been thinking about this recently, writing posts for social media.
When we dash something off in a panic, all we do is create a placeholder. Maybe people notice - but nothing memorable or meaningful is conveyed.
If we never showed up at all, we'd fail to attract any attention...but maybe wasting attention is worse?
The examiner's question was really this: what are you trying to say? And this week in Bootcamp we began answering this question. It's the same question we tackled in January during the Hothouse Planning Week. The answer is a distillation of:
- What kind of designer are you?
- Who are your clients?
- What do they need?
- How can you best serve them?
When you take yourself onto social media and wave, having answers to these questions is how you beat your way towards an active message.
And it all comes from business planning. Not spreadsheets. Not five-year projections. The work of resolving your idea clearly enough that your communication can do its job.
Business planning creates clarity, and clarity delivers a message you can pin to the wave 👋.
4. The Designed Self - 7 June, West Sussex
On Sunday 7 June, I am running a one-day, in person retreat with Nicky Herrington at Southdowns Retreat in Steyning, West Sussex, and I want to tell you about it properly.
The premise is this: in a founder-led interior design practice, you are not just the creative director. You are the commercial face of the business. Clients decide whether to trust you - whether they feel safe, reassured, and in the right hands - long before they have read your proposal or understood your fees. That decision is driven by presence: the way you occupy a room, conduct a meeting, handle a difficult conversation, and increasingly, show up on camera.
Few of us have been given a framework for thinking about how we present professionally, we either over-perform - becoming someone slightly different in public - or we retreat, making excuses and avoiding the limelight. Neither position serves our business.
The Designed Self Retreat addresses this directly. My role is to work with each attendee on founder presence as a professional construct: who you are, what territory you occupy, where your authority comes from, and how that should be expressed. Nicky's role - drawing on actor-informed practices, and her experience as a professional photographer - is to help you physically inhabit that, so that the way you breathe, stand, speak, and relate to a camera is consistent with the professional self you have designed rather than at odds with it.
This is not a confidence workshop. It is not a presentation skills day. It is a serious, intelligent piece of professional development for designers who understand that how they show up is a commercial asset, and who want to approach this with the same rigour they bring to their design work.
The day runs from 10am to 5pm, with a healthy lunch, and use of the sauna and swimming pond. Maximum 10 designers. £395. I hope to see you there!
5. Coming Up in Hothouse
Sales and Client Acquisition, Part II - Practical Applications The second of this month's webinars takes place on Tuesday 28 April at 2pm UK time. We move from philosophy to practice: how to apply the principles of client acquisition to your real pipeline, your real proposals, and your real conversations. You'll find the link to join in the Hothouse group.
AI for the Interior Design Studio - BIID I am presenting for the BIID on Thursday 21 May at 10.30am. This is the first of two webinars. For designers feeling a bit behind the curve, this introductory session will lay out the landscape. There's a more advanced webinar coming in June. Booking is through the BIID directly.
6. My Week in Hothouse
I've been hard on myself this year, scoring 'organisation' low because the financial management of my business needs an overhaul (this is coming in September, when we hit Financial Mastery in Hothouse) but, dammit, I'm going to give myself a boost this week, because - with a bit of help from Claude - I've used time carefully and crammed quite a lot in, and Q2 is trucking along nicely.
My clients are my priority during this busy time, so it's otherwise light on reporting here this week, but I will admit to being a bit peeved that I didn't get to log the LinkedIn impressions midweek, at 4,000. So here's photographic evidence:
Final Thought
Everything in this week's newsletter is, at root, the same conversation. The time management problem that is actually a clarity problem. The social media performance that is actually an unresolved message. The founder presence that is actually an unconsidered professional identity. These are not separate issues. They are the same issue, presenting in different parts of the business.
The upstream work - the governing values, the business plan, the deliberate decisions about priorities, about who you are and what you are here to do - is not a luxury you get to once the urgent things are done. It is the work that makes the urgent things manageable.
That is what we are doing in Bootcamp this week. And it is available to all of you, in one form or another, whenever you are ready.
Have a super week,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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