Hello 🐇🐢
Two changes have reshaped our profession in the last few years. One is artificial intelligence, it sits in the headlines and forces us into continual development. The other has crept over us more subtly and it is this: marketing has stopped being something a design practice does alongside the work, and become the thing that determines whether there is any work to do.
Marketing infiltrated this issue in a couple of different guises, initially without me realising, but now I see it and have surrendered the whole thing over to it entirely.
The blog is about the marketing we fully intend and never do, and why in the fight for your attention, that particular work loses every time.
Then a longer piece for designers in their first year or two, about entry into the profession under your own banner, and the job that needs doing before you can start your design career proper.
1. This week's blogpost - What you do this August will feed your Easter pipeline
The marketing that fills your pipeline in Q4 was due in Q1, and the reason it did not get done is not laziness or ignorance. It is that the return is too far in the future to be felt and its source cannot be proven when it arrives, so work like that loses to work with a deadline attached, every time. A pipeline you do not feed does not stop being hungry because you were busy elsewhere. It waits, and it is hungrier next quarter.
Three things that do some of the work of a guarantee, and one qualification about which quick jobs are avoidance and which are not.
2. Long-Read: A Machine for Manufacturing Evidence
The newish designers I work with would like the type of business we all imagine: money in exchange for design services, systems and processes that hold, and that runs on rules you can learn and then rely on. A good living, honourably made.
However, in an accountability meeting this week (most of the designers present being in their first year) we were discussing the period before your business becomes viable: the antechamber, which every new practice crosses before any of those rules come into force. The antechamber is the stage before your business performs functionally. You cannot charge properly, because nothing yet supports the fee. You cannot decline the wrong client, because you have not met enough clients to know which is which. You cannot let the work speak, because there is not much of it and nobody has seen what there is.
So you compromise. The job taken at a low rate, the room you would not otherwise have done, the client you will decline in three years' time: in the antechamber these are purchases rather than failures, and what they buy is evidence. Evidence is the price of exit. Which means the critical task of a new practice is not the branding, or the positioning, or finding a voice.
It is a race to build a machine for manufacturing evidence.
If you are returning after a break, rather than starting out, you don't need me to tell you how marketing has changed while you were away. The rest of us are being slowly boiled, for you the temperature change is really stark.
What the machine looks like
Not a campaign. Campaigns run on enthusiasm and therefore stop after about six weeks. A machine is a standing arrangement that runs whether or not you feel like it.
Permission goes in at the front. Consent to photograph and publish belongs in your terms at signature, while goodwill is at its highest and it reads as a description of how you work. Six months later the same request is a favour, and a favour can be refused. Some clients will decline in any case, and private clients at the wealthier end decline more often than most, so try negotiating what you may use instead: rooms with the identifying details out, vignettes, no address, no exterior, a first name and a county.
Photography is a project phase, not the icing. It goes into the programme at the outset, with a projected date, like any other stage, and it is booked when the installation is booked rather than remembered afterwards. Book the stylist in the same conversation. It is an overhead to your business, like software and insurance.
Capturing the process is a rule, not an intention. The same handful of moments on every job: the before, two or three decisions while they are being made, the installation, the result. On your phone is fine for the first three.
The testimonial is free, but to capture one the end must be as good as the start, which is why client management throughout must be exemplary. A testimonial is good, one with a name is better, and one with a name and a photograph of the clients in their finished room is better still - if, I admit, a long-shot. A private, client photoshoot can be an inducement.
The account is written within a fortnight, while you can still remember why you did it that way. Problem, constraint, decision, outcome. And writing the account makes you fluent. The next person who asks what you do gets a considerably better answer, you will notice the difference.
And your face is in it somewhere, which now - sorry - means video as well as photographs. I would rather it did not, and I am aware this is the line most likely to make you stop reading. Photographs prove the outcome. You on camera proves the composure, and composure is a large part of what your client is actually shopping for.
None of it requires you to feel like it, which is the whole point of a machine. There is a door out of the antechamber, evidence is what opens it, and the machine is the arrangement that produces evidence on the days you are tired, behind on a client's drawings and thoroughly disinclined.
PLEASE NOTE: This not an edge. An edge puts you ahead of the field. This is now the cost of being considered at all.
3. Business in a Box, September cohort
Launching is overwhelming. The actual running of the business you establish, three years down the line, is the fairly straightforward part of it and most advice to designers addresses the later stages. What isn't usually discussed is: how do you get there?
Business in a Box is twelve weeks of live group work, led by me, that takes you from a business with no shape to a coherent offering built on a plan you have actually written. A description of what you do. A fee structure you can say out loud without flinching. Documents worth sending. A settled answer to where the next client comes from. It is not a course you watch. It is a cohort you turn up to, with work between sessions and somebody asking you where it is.
This cohort also receives The Interior Design Practice System in full, as course material: all the systems, processes and documents you need behind the scenes to deliver a great outcome. Plus, the entire client-facing document suite, from first enquiry through fee proposal, onboarding and presentation to handover and snagging, professionally written and ready to carry your own branding. It is the part of setting up that most people spend two years assembling badly, and you will start your business holding it.
If you are in the shallows of launching, or returning after a break long enough that the world of design has changed, this is the twelve weeks that gets it done.
The course runs from 21 September - Tuesday 8 December.
Group sessions, live online on Tuesdays at 10am, starting Tuesday 22 September.
Limited to twelve places.
4. Coming Up in Hothouse
📆 The Interior Design Practice System launch. Date TBA. The snagging protocol I have been writing this week sits inside it, along with the rest of the practice architecture. Formerly White Label Studio. Find out more here.
📆 Monday 21 September - Business in a Box opens. Twelve weeks' live group work, led by me, to get your new or pivoting business up and running by year end - first live session, 10am Tuesday 22 September. Join the group.
📆 Wednesday 23 September, 11am - Branding and Marketing Webinar, with Peter Burch of March Branding. I have seen the presentation and it is going to be good. The link to join this free, live webinar will be in the Hothouse group.
5. My Week In Hothouse
Don't let me detain you. It is Groundhog Day around here.
7/7 I am at my desk building the new programme, and other than client work, everything else is on the back burner. Including marketing. Before you accuse me of hypocrisy, I’m taking a gamble. I have a plan, it’s carefully worked out, and it delivers more in the long-term than the equivalent time stolen from social media marketing.
The plan is that next year I shift a meaningful proportion of my income onto material that sells and delivers while I am asleep. I prefer to call this ‘decoupled’ rather than passive income, because ‘passive’ gives no hint of the huge effort it takes to get it launched. It has taken nearly three years to build this platform.
Which brings me to my perennial niggle, the mailing list. 404. It has been my slowest-moving statistic for two years. I had hoped Meta ads would fix it. They have been running since June, and in that time Instagram has gained a hundred and sixty followers while the list has gained twenty-four (both roughly up 6%). Which tells me exactly whose asset I have been paying to build, and it was not mine. You’re welcome Zuck.
So, my hope has shifted to the website, which is being rebuilt by somebody else while I get on with course building.
Next week I will share a more personal note here. It has been written for a while.
Final Word
Everything in this issue asks a lot of you now and pays a long way off, at a moment you will not be able to trace. Which leaves you wondering whether it was a fluke.
Here is what I see every week. The designers who keep at it, without guarantees, get a fluke. Then another one. Then another. Somewhere around the fourth you have to stop calling it luck.
That is the secret, and it is not hard work, because everybody reading this already works hard. It whether you can still make yourself do it when there's no guarantee.
See you back down the mine,
Julia
Founder, Hothouse
Responses