Becoming the entrepreneur your business has been waiting for.
🌱 What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is a free professional development group for ambitious interior designers. We’re here to set targets, build habits, and stay accountable. The goal? Clear, confident, commercial progress, made week by week.
Each month we focus on a different business theme, supported by tools, teaching, and live events. Hothouse isn’t about theory, it’s all about action. Whether you’re recalibrating your brand, building your pipeline, or raising your rates, Hothouse is here to support the doing.
Design entrepreneurship is a creative act: Hothouse brings structure and momentum to help your business grow. 🌱
✨ April Intentions and Focus
As ever, this month we’re setting goals, building new habits, and using accountability to drive progress.
In April our focus has been Fees and Charging – not just getting to grips with the theory and being rigorous, but how to force your fees into growth mode, how to use fee calculation to manage the project to perfection, how to double or triple your chances of client conversion, how to present fees to your client, and how to emerge from the whole thing victorious and smelling of roses. 🌹
🤝 Join Us! It’s Free
Click here to join the Hothouse Facebook group.
📹 Fees & Charging – Both Webinars Now Available
Both Hothouse webinars on fees and charging are now live – here's the link to watch both.
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Webinar One: How to calculate fees, methods of charging, along with strategies to force your hourly rate upwards over time.
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Webinar Two: A walk-through of a full-service fee proposal using my spreadsheet calculator and Gantt chart (I shared the source documents in Hothouse, look under the 'files' tab at the top of the group). We talked about selling to high-net-worth clients, boosting your conversion rate by actually speaking to or 'meeting' prospective clients, and the power of presenting fees in person, not by email.
💡 Concepts Aired in Hothouse This Month
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Veblen Services – become a Veblen service: create the allure, then justify the price - get the clients and revenue you deserve.
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Discovery Calls – (needs a better name!) get prospective clients on a call or into Zoom, fast - increase client conversion.
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Fee Proposal Presentations – present in person, don’t hide behind your keyboard - increase client conversion.
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Client Multiplier – adjust fees (specifically around client touchpoints) for high-maintenance clients: anticipate where client 'A' will need more 'you' time than client 'B' - manage jobs better.
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Fee Strategy – your job is to construct the optimal suite of services to deliver the desired transformation for a given brief; your job is not to worry about affordability for your client. Services and transformation first...the cost is a detail (because realistic expectations of scope and quality are benchmarked at the briefing stage). Don't second-guess your clients' priorities and thresholds.
📋 HNW Client Cheat Sheet – Top Professions & What They Value
Following on from last week’s blog on HNW clients, I shared a quick-reference guide to the highest-earning professions in the UK, along with what each group tends to value in an interior design service. This is a useful shortcut if you’re working on brand alignment or refining your marketing message.
🧠 Race Day 2 – Brand Voice & Strategy
Thursday’s Race Day focused on Brand Voice. There’s an AI prompt saved in Hothouse under ‘Files’ to help you uncover your brand's tone of voice and compare it to well-known brands. It’s genuinely insightful to see your voice reflected back at you, and it can help refine your content across platforms.
🗓️ NOTE: DATE CHANGE - Race Day 3 will now run on Tuesday 27th May, 9.30–3.00pm
📝 New on the Blog – What Makes a Design Entrepreneur?
This week’s blog looks at the entrepreneurial qualities I’ve noticed in the most successful designers to graduate from KLC. Spoiler alert: it’s not always the ones with the most polished design portfolios who succeed. Read the blog here 📍
🤝 Thinking of Starting a Business Partnership?
A few reflections on my own former business partnership – and what made it work.
If you’re considering going into business with someone, check:
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Are your governing values and business values aligned? Check your GVs here
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Between you, are you the full iceberg? (see graphic above 👆)
Louise and I ‘completed’ each other professionally – and I’d always recommend this kind of alignment before going into business together. In particular, ensure that the business is of equal priority to both partners.
🚀 Bootcamp Launches This Week!
Bootcamp 2025 begins on Tuesday at 10am with a brand-new cohort of ambitious designers. We’ll set long-term goals, create business plans, and start embedding the habits that will drive growth through the rest of the year: diarising meetings for the rest of 2025 will be one of our first tasks.
Doors close on Monday evening - there is still a sliver of time to join us: add accountability and intention to your 2025 business growth recipe.
I WANT TO FOCUS ON BUSINESS GROWTH IN 2025!
📆 My Week in Hothouse
I’m on track with my April goals:
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✅ Bootcamp prep (absolute no.1 top priority!)
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🔄 New self-directed course nearly ready
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⏳ Meta ads due back online soon (...admittedly cutting it fine with this one!)
Back in January I knew April/May would be 2025's toughest pinch point – running a high-quality Bootcamp while delivering marketing, and finishing course production, means my own business development is playing second fiddle for a few weeks.
Stealing time for new courses up is having an impact on my business growth focus: it’s frustrating, but tracking weekly progress helps keep me honest and spurs me on.
I have new initiatives brewing - growth will return in June - in the meantime I'm practising compassion: forgiving myself for this necessary, temporary freeze on ambition.
📌 Don’t Forget – Pinterest Webinar with Kat Dooney
🗓️ Wednesday 7th May at 1.30pm – Pinterest for Interior Designers
Pinterest is a significant driver of traffic, especially for service-based businesses. Join Kat Dooney from Stripe Social as she shares how to use Pinterest strategically to boost visibility and generate leads.
Before the webinar:
✔️Set up a professional Pinterest account now
✔️Upload one photo of your work daily, so you’re ready to go in May.
🎓 Need a Quick Induction?
If you like the way I handle business and personal development, here are a couple of quick-fire, self-paced courses - teaching from first principles - in a similar style:
Perfect if you want to brush up, or fill a gap.
📅 Dates for the Diary
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Friday 25th April, 9.15am – Bootcampers Board Meeting (by invitation only)
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Tuesday 7th May, 1.30pm – Pinterest Webinar with Kat Dooney
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Tuesday 27th May, 9.30–3.00pm – Race Day 3
It's likely my output will drop for the next five weeks as I divert energy to Bootcamp. However the newsletter and Hothouse will continue on, and my full focus will return here at the end of May.
🌸 Final Thought – You Are the Catalyst
If there’s a theme emerging in my work right now, it’s this: your business needs a catalyst, and that catalyst is you.
It’s not just about your service, or your pricing, or even your marketing plan. It’s about the person leading the business – their mindset, visibility, voice, and direction. When you step into that role intentionally, your whole business changes shape around you.
Growth happens from the inside out. 🌱
Know a designer who’d benefit from this kind of support and focus?
Feel free to forward this email or invite them to join the Hothouse community. We’d love to have them with us.
Wishing you and your loved ones a very Happy Easter 🐣 !
Julia
Founder, Hothouse
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