Hello š
Welcome to the halfway mark, six months into the year, and this week's two threads turn out to be the same problem seen from different angles. The blog looks at why the start of July counts as a proper fresh start, structurally no different from the first of January, and asks what happens to a plan once half the year has already run its course.
This week's Systems and Processes session spent its hour on procurement, which is the same question in miniature: how a concept on a screen becomes a sofa on a site, correctly specified, correctly priced, correctly installed. Neither is solved by good intentions. Both need a structure and method to carry the abstract version of the thing into the concrete one.
Across my accountability groups, here is what six months of intentional work actually looks like at the halfway point.
Designers who spent the spring rebuilding their positioning, a new brand, a new website, a clearer sense of who they actually want to work for, are now using that positioning to filter clients. One member turned down a demanding, unreasonably fast turnaround this month telling us that this was the first time a no had felt like a decision rather than a loss.
Designers who put a system in place in January (rather than simply resolving to work harder) are the ones for whom July doesn't feel like catching up. One member moved her whole practice onto a single organised platform this spring; another hired specifically to have someone hold her to her own priorities. In both cases the system is now shouldering work that used to depend entirely on memory and willpower.
And the clearest example this month: a designer whose consistent marketing - the sort that produces no immediate result and is easy to abandon around week six - has caught. She is now fully booked into the autumn. The marketing itself has barely changed since January, and it was accountability and support that kept her doing it.
None of this required getting January right. It required treating the plan as something to stick to, not something to have got perfectly the first time.
1. This Week's Blog - The Plan You Parked In January Is Still Waiting
If, back in January, you made a business plan for 2026, this is the natural point to audit it.
If you've so far escaped making a plan this year, you are not off the hook!
The Plan You Parked In January Is Still Waiting sets out the five-level structure I use to carry a decision made in the abstract all the way down into an actual Tuesday afternoon.
2. Systems & Processes Part III - Procurement Webinar Report
The third instalment of the Systems and Processes series ran live online last week and took on procurement: the part of the job that turns a signed-off concept into a physically delivered, correctly installed room. It's probably the part of our business where designers find the fee structure hardest, and profit most volatile.
Two ideas from the session (I described these as our procurement blind spots) are worth carrying into your business operations.
IDEA ONE
The first is the perception of what we do, versus what we actually do. At design school we are taught the design process, it's pretty much all we study. This aligns with the public perception that designers spend most of their time designing.
This does us a huge disservice and sits at the heart of a problem that will be exacerbated by AI incursions into our domain. We actually spend only a small minority of our time designing. Most of our time is spent deploying advanced professional skills: managing both complex and risk-laden projects; and small, demanding businesses. The bulk of the job is structuring, planning and specifying, organising, administrating, chasing, and coordinating, and a designer who doesn't clearly enunciate this ends up facing the DIY trap: a client who assumes the concept is the tricky bit that needs design assistance, and the rest they can do for themselves.
IDEA TWO
The second is the "double dipping" question: the accusation that markup (or handling fee) plus time-charging on the same piece of procurement is charging for the same work twice. It isn't. A markup or handling fee covers a commercial transaction, sourcing, trade access, the retail-adjacent part of the work. Time-charging covers a managerial one, seeing that item safely from factory to final fitting, navigating complex and chameleon circumstances: service levels that no retailer offers.
The session also set out the six-stage procurement lifecycle (spatial planning, specification, client sign-off, sourcing and pricing, purchase orders, delivery and installation), and the three operating models on offer:
Principal - you contract with the supplier and resell at a markup. Most lucrative, but you carry up to six years of statutory liability as the retailer of record.
Agent - the contract stays between client and supplier; you charge a handling fee (for the service of facilitating). This demands full transparency: all trade discounts - including commissions and kick-backs - belong to the client unless your contract says otherwise, both in writing and with the client's explicit agreement.
Hybrid - Principal for solvent suppliers you trust to perform, Agent for the high-risk items. This is the most commonly adopted model.
One warning worth repeating on its own: operate as Agent but take client money into your own business account rather than a separate client account, and you risk being reclassified in law as Principal, with all the liability and little of the financial reward.
Watch the recording here on YouTube.
3. Coming Up in Hothouse
The final installment of our Systems and Processes series runs this coming week, on Tuesday 7 July at 11am. The link to join is in the Hothouse group.
Systems and Processes Part IV: Where AI Belongs (And Where It Doesn't)
Bring your last three fee proposals. Leave with a system that writes the next one.
4. Business in a Box - Now With White Label Studio
Design school taught you the design process. It didn't teach you the business wrapped around it, or, how to handle your clients.
If you are contemplating a launch, or newly serious about a practice that has so far run on instinct and goodwill, you'll recognise the overwhelm, the paralysing perfectionism. Saying yes to almost everything. Pricing low for the experience. Confident with a client until the conversation turns to fees, and frozen on the fringes of social media.
You don't lack talent. Starting and running a business is just as complex as the delivery of the design process. There's a whole other course you haven't yet taken.
Business in a Box is a twelve-week, live, cohort-based programme that closes that gap in sequence: business planning, marketing planning, and, new this run, the full White Label Studio system included, so instead of building your operational infrastructure from nothing, you are handed a working version and shown how to adapt it.
If this week's procurement webinar read as a glimpse of a business you haven't built yet, rather than one you're already running, that is precisely the gap this programme exists to close.
The course runs from 21 SEPTEMBER - 11 DECEMBER.
The classroom is live online on Tuesdays, 10-11.30am.
Early Bird pricing until 31 July - Ā£890. Full price thereafter - Ā£985.
Three of twelve places are already taken.
Contact me to chat about Business in a Box, or sign up here.
5. My Week in Hothouse
For new readers: I mentioned in this week's blog that I track my key performance indicators here, every week, in public. That transparency is a form of radical ownership. This accountability works remarkably well, and doesn't wear off over time - it's magic really. Before I started doing this, I could drift for weeks without acting at all.
The penultimate column remains my nemesis: the mailing list. This week it grew by five, to 388. In the same seven days, Instagram followers grew by thirty-two. I'm better at gathering an audience I don't own than one I do, which is the opposite of what I want, and precisely why the Meta ads campaign, live for the past month now, and a website refresh due in a few weeks' time, both exist.
If Hothouse itself is new to you: it's a free resource hub for interior designers, hosted on Facebook. I run monthly webinars there on points of practice, and I deposit documents and frameworks to help you build a stronger business. It's about the business of design: intentional, planned, and consistently delivered. It's what I model here in plain sight, so you know I walk the walk.
Hothouse membership sat at 299 for a fortnight, then jumped to 308 this week, crossing 300 for the first time. I do not know exactly what moved it, but thank you to all of you for arriving, for staying, and for being the reason that final column keeps climbing. We are all in this together.
Final Thought
A system is not a personality trait. Few of us can hold a six-stage procurement lifecycle in our head, or carry a January decision all the way to December. The people who make it look easy have simply built something that does the remembering for them.
Increasingly, those systems are a matter of definition. If pure design is only a tiny part of our job, "designer" is a misleading name for what we actually do.
An AI-assisted client looking at a finished concept has every reason to conclude we've done our bit, because the only word we have given them, "designer", tells them precisely that. It says nothing about the other ninety-five percent: the management expertise, the specifying, the chasing, the risk carried, the years of liability quietly assumed on somebody else's behalf.
We can no longer afford to stay silent on the 95%. If we don't define, own, and promote the true shape of this work, we hand every AI-assisted client the exact permission they need to believe a finished concept is a finished job.
It's time we stopped hiding our light under a bushel.
Have a super week,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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