Hothouse #81 - Already in the Building

Hello 👀

To you, and to a new month. It's the middle of the third quarter, and today we are turning our attention to the woefully neglected. Here are two items for starters. 

The first is the chunk of your life that you've deleted from your cv. Tt's the subject of this week's blog, and a choice most career changers will recognise the moment they see it named. The second is the business you own and never book a meeting with, which is the subject of “Steve”, below.

Both are assets sitting in plain sight. Both go unvalued for the same reason, which is that they are yours, and things that are yours stop looking like assets. The prior career feels like a shameful deviation rather than a training. The business feels like the thing you do the work inside, rather than a thing that needs work done to it. Neither ever complains, so neither gets attention.

Much of what a small practice needs is already in the building. It is just not on the desk.

1. This Week's Blog: The Decade You Left Off Your CV

For ten years I worked on the New York Stock Exchange, assessing a different industry every month. I kept it off my website, and I now see that was a mistake.

Interior design is what economists call a credence good. A client can tell you whether they like the finished room, but not whether it was the best available outcome for that budget and that building. They never get to see the versions other designers would have produced. When buyers cannot judge quality, they don’t stop deciding. Instead, they fall back on whatever is visible and comparable, and the most comparable thing across most design practices is price.

That is the real mechanism behind being shopped on price. It is not that clients are cheap. It is that identikit marketing has left them nothing else to select from.

Your previous career - all those years of expertise - is one of the very few things in your business that cannot be copied, bought or enrolled in. The post sets out three things to do with it.

Read the post here.

2. Accountability Groups: What Was Discussed This Month

My closed “Boardroom” accountability groups run under strict confidentiality, and they have to, because the value to members depends on being able to say things they wouldn’t in a Facebook comment. Without giving away any individual perspectives, here are some of the topics discussed at the Boardroom meeting last week.

Money and procurement structure. Fee proposals, including how to break out initial concepts: variations of the traditional structure of a fee proposal. Agent versus principal, what each obliges you to disclose, and whether to outsource procurement altogether. We plan a Boardroom workshop just on this, in the autumn. 

Hiring without the liability. Screening freelance and part-time help, and using a contract for services rather than taking on an employee.

AI, policy and fatigue. Where AI clauses belong, which is: in your terms; in a standalone policy; and in your onboarding pack. Also the practical side: using AI to build fee proposals, and to source materials. Also, protecting your practice from AI-assisted clients, and the growing backlash against photorealistic renders.

Visibility and pipeline. SEO, Google Analytics, trial reels, short 3-5 sec B-roll, and the question of founder presence, specifically how close you actually want your audience to get to you, and how much personal content that justifies.

The client lifecycle. Filtering the deluge of online business advice for your own business rather than someone else's. Protecting CEO time and the cadence for business planning. Task tracking and the done list. And off-boarding, the end of the project, which is where debriefs, referrals and repeat work are won, or, God forbid, lost.

Email me if you’d like to join the waiting list for groups launching in January. It's £600 for 12 monthly meetings, or £55 per month paid by instalment. 

3. Meet Steve

Every designer knows they should work on the business as well as in it. Very few do. The reason is not laziness or ignorance. It is that the business is the only client who never chases. It never sends an anxious Friday email, never asks where the drawings are, never notices it has been deprioritised for the ninth week running.

Here’s a fix I suggested in the Boardroom this week. Give the business a persona and a name. Call it Steve. Steve has appointments in your calendar, and Steve's appointments are moved for nobody, just as you wouldn’t cancel a client meeting four times in a row, or you wouldn’t skip filing your tax return...it's a mindset matter. Competing commitments get scheduled around Steve. They don't displace him.

So what should those appointments actually be? This maps directly to the Hothouse planning cascade.

One full day a year. Your Annual Planning Day. Book it now, for a future date, and treat it as immovable. There will be prep work to do in advance. Maybe you schedule it to follow completion of your annual accounts. A complete review of your business, a SWOT on where the practice genuinely sits, from which you take the two or three changes most needed by your business, attach a metric to each so progress is measurable rather than felt, then, split the necessary work across four quarters.

Half a day a quarter. In the quarter just ended, did you do what you said? Are those still the right objectives. Where are you against the metrics? What are the specific actions for the coming quarter: the next twelve weeks? Break each quarter into three (months) and assign deliverables to each month.

One hour a month. Take direction from the most recent quarterly review. What actions did the quarterly review send down to be completed this month? You don’t need to overthink it, just meet this month’s share of the to do list.

Twenty minutes a week. Twofold. What space do your client projects need this week; and where can you slot in this week’s share of business running/planning actions?

Here are two more suggestions from the Boardroom, both worth borrowing. Take Steve's time at the very start of the week, before client work has had a chance to fill it, because it will. And for the big set-piece events (annual and quarterly planning) leave your desk. Do it in a good hotel - a ‘destination’ - or a decent café. Put your phone on silent and let the change of environment stops the daily grind from interfering, this elevates the quality of your thinking - start treating these events with the seriousness they deserve.

4. Coming Up in Hothouse.

Tuesday 18 August - 11am -  New and Pivoting Designers Meeting - a live get together online, to chat about current issues and plan for the coming quarter. It has been a while. All Hothouse members welcome, join Hothouse here. The link will be in the group under 'Events'. 

White Label Studio Launch - Date TBA, find out more here. 

Monday 21 September - Business in a Box September cohort picks up their tools: 12 weeks' live group work, led by me, to get your new or pivoting business up and running by year end. 

Wednesday 23 September - 11am - Branding and Marketing Webinar, with Peter Burch of March Branding.

I have seen the presentation and it's going to be good. The link to join this free, live webinar will be in the Hothouse group.

5. Coming up for the BIID

I’ll be leading the following CPDs for the BIID in the autumn:

Thursday 24th September 10.30 - Business Planning And Strategic Clarity For Interior Designers

Thursday 12th November 10.30 - AI Foundations For Interior Designers: Working Confidently From First Principles

Thursday 19th November 10.30 - AI In Practice: How Interior Designers Are Integrating AI Into Studio Practice

The AI sessions tend to take care of themselves, but I’d like to put in a special plea for business planning - this is the answer to: how do I get better clients?

Book directly with the BIID.

6. My Week in Hothouse

I went back to Instagram this week. Twice, four stories each time, after a hiatus. It followed a difficult personal period in which face-to-camera was the one thing I just couldn't make myself do.

Why did I come back now? Not because I felt ready, and not because I found the right frame of mind. It ended because for two consecutive Sundays I wrote here that I would do it. Last week I felt like a dirty fraud when I fessed up that I hadn’t. I ask you, what is the point of writing about accountability and consistency when you don't model it? 

That is the whole mechanism. The Insta stories were certainly not top grade. But I did it, and without the promise here, I feel certain I wouldn’t have. I know my own past performance well enough to know that a fortnight of drift becomes six weeks without even noticing.

I keep banging on about it, but accountability is not a motivational nicety. It is a structural feature of a business, and it works precisely on the days when willingness does not. Showing up imperfectly and on schedule beats showing up beautifully, but sporadically, every time. I see the evidence of this every day, consistency is everything.

This newsletter is my accountability tool. Accountability and a commitment to consistent performance are the reasons you have anything from me to read.

Final Thought

Nothing in this issue is hidden. The decade is on your old CV. The business is the thing you sit inside forty+ hours a week. The archive of completed projects, the contractor who sends you work, the client you finished for three years ago and have not contacted since: all these things exist, but do you see their value?

That is the difficulty with assets of this kind. They don't visibly deteriorate and they never ask for anything, so there is no moment at which you are forced to nurture them. The audit only happens if you schedule it. That is the entire argument for structure, and it is the same argument as the one for accountability. Often the assets that make the greatest difference in your business are the least demanding.

So book your annual planning day.

Poor old Steve has been extremely patient.

Have a super August, 

Julia 

Founder - Hothouse.