Hello π
Last week I focused almost entirely on AI, this issue is a deliberate change of subject. Apart from a mention the coming weeks' BIID sessions, there is no AI in it at all.
It is about direction instead. Over the course of a year I watch a good many design businesses at close quarters, and the pattern I see most clearly is that a business goes where it is driven. The designers who chart a course, and lash themselves to the wheel, get there with remarkable reliability. Not always quickly, not necessarily in a straight line, but they arrive.
What gets overlooked is that the reverse is also true. A business left undriven does not stand still. It drifts towards whichever projects happen to arrive and whichever clients push hardest. That is a direction too; simply not an intentional one.
This week: the blog on why clients take the lead from designers who bend; what a directed business looks like from where I sit; painting with numbers in Business in a Box; and the Annual Review questionnaire, released on Thursday.
1. This Week's Blogpost - Nobody Asks the Chef to Add Orange Zest
When you reserve a table at a great restaurant, you aren't buying dinner. You are buying the experience of being in expert hands. You would no more ask the chef to add orange zest to the first course than you would bring your own sauce, and that is not timidity. The whole pleasure rests on giving yourself over to expert vision.
The chef still asks about your allergies, and takes the answer seriously. What they do not ask is how you would like the sauce.
The post applies this to the designer whose clients keep redirecting the scheme. It includes the story of a designer who, before he qualified himself, twice hired different interior designers for his own home, and twice lost confidence in them; not because their taste was poor, but because every preference he voiced became the new direction. The brief belongs to the client. The creative response to it belongs to you, and protecting it is not arrogance. It is the service.
It closes with a question I would like you to carry into the Annual Review: where did you bend this year, when you should have led?
2. What Steering Looks Like
This year I have been working closely one-to-one with several designers who sit comfortably at tier three, maturity, and are eyeing tier four, stardom. They have different niches, different clients and different temperaments. Watching them over twelve months, what strikes me is how similar the changes have been.
They are owning their niche. Not describing it, owning it: the kind of work, client and place they are now known for, rather than the full range of things a designer might do.
Their messaging is sharper. Fewer words, said more often, in a clear voice that is recognisably theirs.
They are compromising less. They still listen hard to the brief, but they have quiet confidence in their creative vision, event when the client wobbles. They are confident in proposing fees, comfortable losing a bad fit client, and their ideal clients appear to trust them more for it.
They are planning fee increases. Not one day, but to a timeframe, with the reasoning written down. A useful test, if you are wondering whether your own fees need attention: if you win almost every proposal you send, you are probably too cheap. Winning around half is normal.
They are less distracted by noise. Once you know where you are going, much of what goes on around you becomes simply irrelevant, and that is a great relief.
And they are pioneering: new systems and processes, and new ways of working that their niche needs before it has thought to ask.
None of these changes is dramatic on its own. What they share is that each is a decision, made once and then held. That is what direction looks like from the inside. It is also, I think, where the authority described in this week's blog comes from. Clients do not defer to talent alone. They defer to a designer who plainly knows where they are going.
DESIGNERS' BOARDROOM 2027 - monthly accountability meetings
I will be releasing information soon on accountability groups for 2027. I also have two places opening up for year-long, one-to-one business coaching. Get in touch if you would like to know more.
3. Business in a Box: Painting with Numbers
In the earlier stages of business development, the Business in a Box cohort is deep in module two, and this week we have been painting with numbers.
Each designer is weaving together a picture of their future revenue, service by service and year by year: how much will come from consultations, how much from blocks of hours or design-only schemes, how much from full-service projects, and how that mix should change as the business matures. A new studio cannot yet sell the work that depends on established trust, so the early years lean one way and the later years another. Seen as a whole, the projection becomes a portrait of the business they intend to build.
Then comes the harder question. If you project the revenue, what are you doing to make it real?
Every figure in the projection implies sales activity. To take an illustration: four full-service projects next year, with one proposal in two converting and one enquiry in three leading to a proposal, means roughly twenty-four qualified enquiries. That is two a month, every month. Suddenly the marketing strategy is no longer a a vague intention around Instagram. It has a target, a cadence and a reason.
This is the same principle as the rest of this issue, applied at tier one. A number on a spreadsheet is a direction. The sales and marketing plan is the steering.
4. Annual Review: The Questionnaire Is Released on Thursday
This coming Thursday, 12 November, I release the Annual Review Questionnaire. It is the main piece of pre-work for the workshop on Thursday 26 November, and it will take you three to four hours to complete. If you want to join the workshop, I suggest you block the time in the coming fortnight to complete the exercise.
As this week's blog explains, driving your business involves holding clear future vision alongside an honest view of what currently stands in its way. The questionnaire addresses this year's frustrations and figures, each marked on its rung (Guessed, Reconstructed, Recorded or Read), and it asks the less comfortable questions, including where you bent this year when you should have led.
As ever, an honest attempt is all that is required. Guesses and ranges are welcome, and a blank is a finding, not a failure.
At the workshop we'll turn the review into decisions. You will leave with a one-sentence direction for the next three years, three priorities for 2027 each with a first action, a list of what you will stop doing, your main risk and how you will hedge it, and three figures you will know better by November 2027.
**Look out for the questionnaire release on Thursday, it will be available from the 'Files' tab in the Hothouse group.**
5. Coming Up in Hothouse
π Thursday 12 November. Annual Review: questionnaire released. Block three to four hours before the 26th.
π Thursday 12 November. Big Push: first check-in. For anyone already signed up in this closed group. Reply any time within 48 hours.
π Thursday 12 November. BIID AI Foundations for Interior Designers at 10.30am. Book here.
π Thursday 19 November. BIID AI in Practice: Studio Workflows at 10.30am. Book here.
π Wednesday 25 November. BIID Fee Clarity: How to Price, Structure, and Present Your Interior Design Services at 10.30am. Book here.
π Thursday 26 November, 10.30am to 12.30pm. Annual Review Workshop. Free, online and open to everyone. The link will be in the Hothouse group.
π Monday 30 November. Big Push: second check-in.
π Friday 4 December. Big Push deadline.
π Thursday 10 December, 10am. Big Push celebration.
6. My Week in Hothouse
Behind the scenes I continue work on my own annual review. This feeds into my Big Push pledge - to make brave and ballsy decisions about my business for next year - this work has already delivered a proposed new structure which serves a priority goal for next year: have occasional days off, maybe even a holiday. I look forward to catching up with the other pledgees later this week.
This week support arrived to help me with Instagram - I can't tell you how lovely it is to be posting regularly, without lifting a finger. Maybe it's coincidence, but I have also had a steady trickle of new followers (biggest percentage jump up in one week for quite some time) and sold a couple of short courses. Let's see if this continues.
Away from work, I am poised to move into my flat, will it be this week...will it be next? It is tantalisingly close, and I will certainly be in well ahead of Christmas.
I'll be closing for a break over Christmas, the last newsletter and blog of 2026 will go out on the weekend of 12/13 December. They will be back 2/3 January.
Final Word
A business with no direction is not neutral. Something is always steering it: the most insistent client, what your competitors are up to, the last thing you read before bed. The review on the 26th is a chance to take the wheel back. Keeping hold of it is the work of the year that follows.
See you next Sunday.
Julia
Founder, Hothouse
Responses