1. What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is a free professional development group for ambitious interior designers, built around the Hothouse Method of Business Growth: Design – Declare – Deliver.
✨ Design – we plan our businesses with care and creativity
✨ Declare – we set bold goals and targets in public
✨ Deliver – we track progress and celebrate results
Hothouse is for designers who want more than inspiration - it’s for those ready to take action.
At the heart of my work is a theory of interior design business evolution. Over time, practices move through four distinct tiers - startup, growing pains, maturity, stardom - each with its own challenges, mindset shifts, and growth opportunities.
My coaching is designed to help you level up, to elevate your business with intention, so you’re not simply drifting forward, but actively shaping the next stage of your business.
Wherever you are now - starting out or refining a mature practice - Hothouse brings structure, momentum, and community to help you get to the next level. 🌱
2. How to Work With Me
Whether you’re just starting out or ready to level up, there are several ways we can work together:
🌱 Hothouse (Free Membership Group)
A private Facebook group for practising interior designers. I check in regularly to offer input and answer business questions alongside our brilliant peer community.
💬 One-to-One Consultations
Book a focused session to tackle a specific challenge or explore a new opportunity in depth. Available via the Coaching page of my website.
📦 Blocks of Consultations
Ideal if you’re working toward a long-term business goal or want consistent support while establishing your studio and working with your first clients. Ask me about my ‘6 for the price of 5’ offer.
🚀 Business in a Box
A structured, supported 90-day programme designed to help you launch your new interior design business with clarity, confidence, and strong foundations. DM me to join the waitlist.
📈 Recipe for Success Bootcamp
My flagship business planning course, blending one-to-one coaching with peer group sessions. Designed to help you push up into the next tier of business evolution - with a clear plan, defined targets, and the momentum to grow. Drop me a line if you’d like to join the waitlist.
3. 💸 No “just right” fee model?
Susie Rumbold (past President of the BIID) recently hosted an excellent podcast, with guests Anna Burles (Run For The Hills) and Andrea Benedettini, chatting about the thorny subject of fee calculation.
Listening, what struck me most was this: these are all highly experienced, successful designers, and yet they rethink their calculation strategy every single time. There is no ‘Goldilocks’ model that’s “just right” for every project.
This week on the blog I explore the issue: why do so many designers feel unsure, anxious, or underpaid when it comes to fee proposals?
My list of “Top 10 Fee Proposal Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)” shares the most common problems designers report - and where to look to address these with confidence.
4. 🚦 Your Fees, Supercharged: A New Course to Take Control of Your Charging Strategy
I get quite aerated discussing fees and charging - not because I don’t love the topic (I do!), but because so much of the advice out there is conflicting and fuzzy.
So many thought-leaders love to diss ‘hourly rates’ and gesticulate vaguely towards ‘value-based charging’ - but they rarely explain what that actually means in practice, or how to calculate a fair and profitable fee. Zero help for someone looking for clarity in a very complicated topic.
So I built a self-paced course - £59 from my website - that does exactly that. It’s rooted in practicality, not fluff.
And it’s built around my 10 Dos of Calculating Fees:
✅ Do use time-based data to calculate a fee.*
✅ Do have a set hourly rate (and challenge yourself to push it ever upwards!)
✅ Do build in all your overheads, desired salary, occupancy rate, and non-billable time.
✅ Do charge fixed fees to remove uncertainty for both designer and client.
✅ Do convert that fixed fee into a monthly retainer, paid in advance.
✅ Do get paid before you start work.
✅ Do allocate generous, realistic time estimates for every step - and reconcile time/progress daily.
✅ Do base the whole thing on a crystal-clear, granular scope, with exclusions and variations.
✅ Do present your fee proposal beautifully - and in person.
✅ Do act decisively the minute the real-world timeline and your projections begin to diverge.
*And here, I don’t mean “charge by the hour.” I mean use your hourly rate as a key input in the fee calculation - a foundational figure that underpins your pricing system.
The course includes 1 hour 20 minutes of video content across 17 bite-sized lessons, plus:
🧮 Smart spreadsheets to calculate your hourly rate and build out fee proposals
📄 Templates and advice for client-facing documents
🎨 A visual plan for a beautiful fee presentation
💭 Mindset shifts to help you talk about money without apology
Your hourly rate is a data point you can physically grapple with - a dial on your business dashboard that you can tweak, tune, and improve. It’s not just a number; it’s a mechanism for growth.
Once you’ve calculated it with care, you can begin planning strategic hikes and taking intentional action to raise it - what I call Veblen strategy.
I want every designer to see their business as a machine with moving parts - parts you can oil, hone, and optimise, like a finely tuned racing car. That’s how you gain control, speed, and performance.
👉 Learn how you get paid properly.
5. 📸 Styling Is Not Optional
Join me for a chat with interiors stylist Sam Grigg, where we’ll explore the power of styling as the final - and essential - step in the design process.
If you want your work to attract clients, get published, and feel fully resolved, styling can’t be an afterthought. It’s the polish that sells the vision - and it’s often the part that brings the most joy.
Whether you’re styling your own projects or working with a photographer for the first time, this session will give you practical tips, fresh insight, and renewed motivation to finish beautifully.
🗓️ Wednesday 24th September at 1pm (NOT 12PM AS I WROTE LAST WEEK!! - sorry!)
📍 Find the link under the ‘Events’ tab in the Hothouse Facebook Group
Don’t miss it - this is the ha’penny worth of tar that could save your whole ship.
6. 🚀 The Big Push is coming 🚀
📅 Date for your diary: join the live launch session on Wednesday 1 October at 10.30am UK time, link under the ‘Events’ tab in the Hothouse group.
Do you want to grow your business in 2026? The Big Push is about making one small, intentional change that creates big results - like a domino effect for your business. This Q4 initiative will help you clear a roadblock, set a target, and build a foundation to launch into 2026 with momentum.
7. Fear of looking clumsy…
When I did my teaching qualification, we studied J.S. Atherton’s concept of “Learning as Loss”, and it’s stuck with me ever since. In a nutshell, he argues that learning often means letting go of familiar beliefs, assumptions, or even parts of our identity - and this loss can feel like grief before it feels like growth.
At university, a healthy course typically sees 5% top grades, 5% fails, and a big clump around a C. At KLC I lost count of the students who’ve grieved over a C, saying things like “I’d never accept my child coming home with a C!” ...But a C is a perfectly decent mark - it just reflects where you are in your learning.
You have to practise - sometimes a lot - to get good at something. Why on earth would your performance warrant an A first time out!?
Do you avoid business challenges for fear of falling? Here’s what I posted on Instagram this week…
8. ✨ Hothouse Long Read: Why Business Planning Isn’t Optional – It’s Your Survival Kit
This coming week inside Business in a Box, we’re returning to the quiet power of planning - not because it’s exciting, but because it’s essential!
Before we start our work on marketing - before we post a reel, write a caption, or set up a newsletter - we need to know what we’re selling, who we’re selling it to, and what role that marketing effort plays in the bigger picture of our business.
Here’s why I’m such a stickler for planning first and why I believe it’s the foundation of every successful creative business.
1. Business Planning is an Act of Intentionality
- Business growth doesn’t happen by accident - it’s forced into being.
- Planning is how you declare: I want this. It turns dreams into deliberate actions.
2. Planning Lightens the Load of Decision-Making
- Entrepreneurship is exhausting. Every day involves many decisions.
- A well-thought-out business plan reduces decision fatigue - by giving you pre-made answers.
- When the fog rolls in, your business plan acts as a compass.
3. Marketing Without Planning Is a Recipe for Burnout
- When you don’t know your audience, your offer, or your goal - marketing becomes guesswork.
- Designers spread themselves thin trying to be visible everywhere, without knowing why or what for.
- A marketing plan should take direct instruction from your business plan.
4. Goals Create Momentum - and Accountability
- Revenue targets lead to sales targets. Sales targets lead to action.
- Once you set a number, you stop hoping and start hunting.
- Business planning brings your goals into the present: What can I do this week to hit my target?
5. A Business Plan Isn’t Static - It’s a Growth Engine
- As your practice grows, your business plan must evolve.
- Your mindset at Tier 1 won’t serve you at Tier 3 - so your plan must adapt.
- Regularly shaking up your business plan is how you level up.
🪴 Why We Always Start With the Plan
Whether you’re just launching your studio with Business in a Box or pushing for growth with Recipe for Success Bootcamp, you’ll notice something: we always start with business planning.
Not because it’s trendy - but because it’s foundational.
This week in Business in a Box, we’re refining that foundation - so that when it’s time to market your services, you’ll be doing it with focus, confidence, and a clear commercial strategy.
9. A Favour 🙏
Each week I send this newsletter off into the void - and honestly, I have no idea if it’s landing. Your feedback makes all the difference. Once you’ve browsed this copy, could you hit reply and tell me: what in today’s edition did you find most useful or interesting? And what didn’t resonate? Your thoughts will help me shape content that genuinely supports you.
10. 🌱 My Week in Hothouse
Aargh - LinkedIn, yes, I took my eye off it again and the momentum has collapsed. My bad. Get back on that hamster wheel!
-438 🤦♀️
But! Even with social media frustrations, I am genuinely excited for what’s ahead. The Big Push is almost here, and I want a huge finish to 2025. So I’ll be starting up Meta Ads again (I'm apprehensive, they are really hard and the tech is frustrating) but, come Q4, I am determined to bring energy and clarity to my own business alongside yours.
I'll be watching my mailing list subsribers 👀 and Instagram followers 👀, with targets for each. What will you measure and grow?
11. Final thought 🔥
Success in design isn’t built on spreadsheets alone, nor on mindset mantras in isolation.
Success is forged where the two meet - clarity of thought AND clarity of heart.
As Peter Drucker once said: “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” Pair business acumen with self-belief and resilience, and you’ve got a force multiplier.
That’s the balance I want you to carry into the Big Push: strategy in one hand, courage in the other. Together, they’ll carry you further than either one could alone.
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