Mistakes We’ve Made
We are celebrating re:Design’s fiercely 5th birthday this month and naturally that has us reflecting back on the good ol’ days and how we’ve got to where we are today. It might be more typical to share our success stories, but we felt it’s more interesting and/or helpful to anyone thinking about starting a design business to focus on the mistakes we’ve made along the way and how they’ve shaped us. It’s also an opportunity for anyone who has worked with a designer to see the other side of the coin!
We look back and just shake our heads sometimes when we talk about some of the assumptions we made when opening up our own studio. We definitely made some choices that lost us money and also had some ideas we just knew were going to take off and flopped instead. So, if you care to find out about some of our “whoops” moments, here are what we think our top 5 mistakes were - or at least the things that taught us the most!
Sign On The Line
When we started re:Design, we were very lucky to have some friends and family that needed some design work and were happy to support our new venture. They would refer us to their friends and family, and for the first year that kept us very busy! The issue this created was that these were all people we knew and therefore didn’t feel we needed any formal contracts. We talked with the clients about what services they needed, we did the work and they paid! It was very easy! As we started to expand our client base, we started to understand that working with people outside of our trusted “bubble” wasn’t as straight forward.
Without going into an overly obnoxious rant, our take away was that not everyone understands or communicates scope the same way, payment expectations are not universal, clients asking for more does not mean they understand or consent to paying more, admin and communication time is sometimes assumed as free and making sure you get paid before getting started or doing any work is critical - just to name a few!
Today we have evolved our process to include a very clear scope summary and breakdown of our process and deliverables that is reviewed in person or remotely with all potential clients before they sign off. We also break down what is considered to be extra scope and how that is handled. We take deposits on all projects before we get going and have all clients sign a contract. All of this adds a ton of upfront admin time, but it saves us the inevitable fight later on when someone wasn’t clear on something and now they don’t feel that they got what they signed on for and don’t care to pay for it. To be honest, even now we add and make changes to our contracts because new challenges come up all the time. What is most important as a designer is to protect yourself from being taken advantage of from people who don’t want to pay you for your work that you’ve done.
2. Pimpin’ Out Our Services
When you’re first getting started, you look for any and all ways to build a project portfolio. One of our ways was to offer our services to other professionals as contract work. This meant that builders or other industry professionals were able to hire us at a lower hourly rate and we would essentially work for them. Now, we love contract designers. We currently work with a few and it’s great! Where it failed for us was that it was very hard to build our brand and identity while technically being employed by someone else.
Sometimes the work wasn’t ours to share and in one of our most regretful experiences, we did not share the same values as who we were working for. Since the clients weren’t technically our clients, our hands were tied. Needless to say, it didn’t last for us, but it did teach us how important it was for us to do things our way! This was a great learning phase in our journey to where we are now and really solidified that we stand behind our transparent communication style! We now “partner” with other professionals without working for them and discounting our fee just so they can make a profit from our work.
3. A Swing and A Miss
We were so excited about our O.G. '“A La Carte” design services. Boy did we think we were breaking the mould! We created a spa like service menu that laid out every sort of design service you could need and a price associated with each service. Much like a spa menu, the point was clients could pick whatever they wanted, putting them in control of how much or little they needed. We had a ton of these printed and would hand them out whenever we could! We bet there is still boxes of them in the back of a cupboard somewhere. They were just so cute. So what was the problem? We learned that having the clients pick only the services they wanted left many gaps in the information provided - which led to issues during construction.
If you go on our website you will notice that we still have an “A la Carte” service option available, but it’s changed from being client driven in selecting services to us creating a custom service plan unique to what we feel is required for their needs. For most clients, renovating is new to them and they benefit from us educating them on what they will require for their project, because to put it simply, they have no idea (and nor should they).
4. Design Is A Luxury
A problem we wanted to solve was that there always seemed to be acceptance for architectural and engineering fees, but interior designer services weren’t always “in the budget”. We felt that interior design had such a stigma of being a premium, yet expendable service and we wanted to change that. Creating a brand, but also a service that was approachable and accessible to everyone was at the core of re:Design’s mission. We still stand behind our core value, but how we handle it has had to evolve. We started off trying to strip back services to a very basic level. We quickly learned that a client who wanted to spend $200 on design services had the same expectations as the client who would spend $10,000. It was obvious to us that the value of those two service types would be different, but we learned that it wasn’t always obvious to the clients. We have lived through some very entitled people who demanded the world for $150.
We needed to find a way to make sure we could provide an accessible service, while still being appropriately compensated for the amount of work required. Through an ever evolving process, we launched our 5 service types last year so that we are still able to accommodate clients who don’t need full service design. We are happy to report that so far, so good! It has allowed us to provide the right service type for different levels of projects so we are still able to help a range of projects scales and clients are able to choose a service type they find the appropriate value in!
5. Know When To Walk Away
Not all clients and projects are a fit for us, just like we might not be a fit for some clients. This was likely the hardest, but most impactful lesson. When we started out, we would take on everything and anything. We were also very accommodating in how we worked and would adapt our process to suit others. All this led to was confusion and inefficiencies. We have learned to really assess a project when it comes in to make sure that it’s something that will work for us. We preach that it’s critical for clients to put together a team of professionals that are a good fit for them for a successful project - the same goes for us. If we don’t “click” with a client/builder or feel the project is not best suited for us, we will communicate that so no one wastes any time! It was a big milestone in our careers to get to the point where we could also pick and choose the projects we work on. Our whole process started to work a lot better when we also enjoyed being a part of the team!
