Hello 👋
This week we’re making the distinction between a busy practice and a built one.
Busy is not the problem. Busy can be good: the kind that finds you sought after, in the zone, choosing between good options. The kind that feels like evidence. But there is another kind of busy that is simply the accumulated consequence of never quite having had time to design how the practice works. Processes that grew rather than were built. Documents adapted from documents adapted from documents. A client journey that functions because you know how it functions, and for no other reason.
The psychologist Julian Rotter would have something to say about this. More on that below.
This week's newsletter is about infrastructure, not in the dry, administrative sense, but in the sense of architecture: something designed, intentional, and load-bearing. Something that was chosen rather than that happened.
June is Systems and Processes month in Hothouse. Yes, it’s vegetables 🥦 rather than pudding - not the most glamorous part of the meal - but the bit we all know is good for us (#eatyourgreens).
1. This Week's Blog
Five Signs Your Practice Is Ready For A Systems Overhaul
The signs are not dramatic...if you’re lucky. They don’t announce themselves as a crisis. They show up as low-level anxiety, as hours spent rebuilding documents that should already exist, as scope creep conversations you weren't quite prepared for, as the dawning realisation that you'll never be able to hand this over to an assistant as long as the process lives entirely in your head.
If any of that is even remotely familiar, this week's blogpost is worth your time.
2. Theory of the Week: Locus of Control
In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter proposed a deceptively simple idea: that people differ meaningfully in where they locate the source of their outcomes.
✅ An Internal Locus of Control:
What happens to me is largely a product of my own decisions and actions.
❌ An External Locus of Control:
Outcomes are determined by circumstance, other people, luck, or forces beyond my influence.
He wasn't making a moral argument, it was an observational one. Since then, research has consistently found that the internal orientation correlates with better outcomes across almost every domain measured: professional performance, resilience, health behaviour, financial decision-making.
Rotter did not consider it a fixed personality trait, instead it is a learned orientation. Yes, life can beat your internal locus out of you, it can be unlearned...but it can also be relearned.
An interior design practice built on accumulated habit (processes that grew rather than were designed, documents that evolved rather than were built) is, structurally, an external locus practice. Things happen to it. It responds. It absorbs. It copes.
A designed practice is an internal locus practice. It decided, in advance, how things would go.
The systems are not the point, the fact that you have agency is.
3. Coming Up in Hothouse in June
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY:
- Wednesday 10 June at 10am
- Wednesday 24 June at 10am
I'll be running two Hothouse webinars on systems and processes - the practical architecture of a well-run interior design practice.
We'll look at this through the lens of the design process, we'll cover what a complete studio system actually looks like, which documents do the heaviest lifting, and how to close the gap between how your practice currently runs and how you want it to run.
It will be a complete rehearsal of the professional delivery of the design process: the best order, all the steps, along with all the necessary parts.
If any of the five signs in this week's blog landed (or, if you have some of your own) it would be lovely to see you there.
We’ve tackled some grand ambitions before, but this one is the mother!
4. Something Is Coming
I have been building something for a while now. I am not quite ready to announce the detail - but I am ready to say that it exists, and that it is almost finished.
If you have ever found yourself wishing that someone would simply hand you the complete working infrastructure of a well-run interior design studio - every document, every template, every stage of the client journey mapped and ready to make your own - you would be getting warm.
There will be a pre-launch offer for those who want to be first. If that is you, hello 🙂 - the waitlist is open.
Join the wait list - no obligation 🤗
5. From Bootcamp - Week Four of Five
Four weeks in. The designers on this cohort have achieved something much harder than it sounds: they have defined their businesses with rigour, not in the vague, aspirational sense, but with a precise account of why working with them specifically would be valuable and exceptional.
From that foundation, they have identified the clients most likely to recognise and want that value, mapped where those clients and their referring collaborators can actually be found (in person and online) and built a marketing plan to reach them. Pricing is going up; confidence is following.
In parallel, we’ve been working through the interior design process itself, stage by stage: every step documented, every client meeting scoped, every script considered, every outcome defined.
As we enter the final week, each designer will present the clear new vision of their business, along with plans for its growth. But as ever, the best thing to come out of Bootcamp is the bond that has formed within the group. Designers at very different stages of business development, with distinct specialisms, and all wholeheartedly invested in each other's success.
In an industry where isolation is perhaps the biggest challenge, this has to be Bootcamp's greatest gift.
6. My Week in Hothouse
Honestly, I was scared to do my numbers this week. But the whole point of Hothouse is to model consistent application and radical ownership* because I believe these pave the route to success.
So, there they are 👆. Actually, it helps to compare against the numbers from the first week of January: right now I'm stuck in neutral at best, but there has been forward motion. Regular readers will know that I have temporarily parked marketing, this was an intentional decision to get me through a busy period while I maintain standards elsewhere. So much red, so little green, but that's to be expected. From the start of June I'll be back on it.
In the good news column, the agency project to create digital marketing for my evergreen products has just delivered a chunk of work - a light brand refresh, and production of 24 Meta ads - I guess we are halfway through, and I'm hoping for a significant boost to marketing in Q3. This will be an interesting case study for anyone looking to create decoupled income.
Next week I'm leading a BIID webinar on the preliminaries of working with AI in your business, and will be catching up for a monthly update from last year's Business in a Box graduates (hearing how a push on Instagram marketing is panning out). I also have a cluster of meetings with the small number of designers who work intensively with me, one-to-one, each month (Boardroom Bespoke). And, as we prepare to close the doors to the Bootcamp 2026, every designer will present their future business vision and detailed plan.
There's a lot to look forward to in the coming week.
*Radical Ownership - a leader accepts complete and unqualified responsibility for everything within their domain - outcomes, failures, team performance, and circumstances - without exception or deflection. Nothing is someone else's fault. Nothing is bad luck. If something went wrong, the question is always: what did I do, or fail to do, that contributed to this?
Final Thought
Rotter's insight was not that some people are born with agency and others are not. It was that agency is a posture: one that can be practised, developed, and, with the right conditions, taught.
The designed practice and the accumulated practice might look similar from the outside (well, that is until the designed practice takes off 🚀). But the difference is felt from the inside: in whether the process serves you, or whether you are perpetually serving it. In how fast you’re paddling to stay afloat.
June will be about closing that gap - see you in Hothouse - can't wait!
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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