Dear Sean,
This is the time of year when everyone around me is buzzing about their resolutions and goals, and I always feel a little left out. There are so many things I could try to achieve that it’s hard to know what matters most. I get overwhelmed by the idea of picking resolutions and sticking to them. As a result, I don’t set goals. I spend most of the year putting out fires, and come January, I’m in more or less the same place I was the year before. How can I break the cycle?
Going for Goals
Dear Going for Goals,
I could offer all the usual tropes about New Year’s goals—do bigger and better projects, make more money (raise your rates, expand your business)—but I will not, mostly because I loathe all of them. Instead, I’d like to propose that you start 2025 with a boot camp book club that will inspire you to reframe how you think about your business. First, let us have a look at the big picture, which will help inform what matters to you.
On January 22, financial expert Julia Nikishina, who specializes in interior design accounting, will share insider tips and proven strategies to maximize your tax deductions, so that you can keep more of what is rightfully yours. Click here to learn more and remember, workshops are free for BOH Insiders.
In the United States, things are actually looking up in the business realm. Inflation is less of an issue than it was this time last year. Financial firms are about to announce (or have already announced) some very significant bonuses, as Wall Street had a terrific 2024, and some of that capital will flow to interior designers. And regardless of which side of the aisle you occupy, U.S. politics will be settled for at least the next two years. As with all things, clarity about where we are now is crucial to reflecting on what the future will ultimately become. Of course, all of that is anecdotal, but it feels like opportunity is poised to flow for interior designers in 2025.
With that in mind, here’s your reading (or listening) list to kick off the year: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, Think Again by Adam Grant, and Loonshots by Safi Bahcall.
The Goal is ostensibly a business book, but one of its most powerful analogies is a story about a super-slow-moving Boy Scout named Herbie who has to hike a hill to eat lunch with his troop. No one eats until everyone is at the top. Everyone carries a 50-pound pack. Where do you put Herbie? In the front, and everyone grumbles. In the middle, and half are at the top waiting, the other half behind him grumbling. Bringing up the rear, and everyone is yelling at Herbie to hurry up. What do you do? You could take his backpack, but if you give it to the Scout in front, they become Herbie. The answer: Distribute the contents of Herbie’s pack so everyone moves as fast as possible—together. Herbie will be exhausted but will keep up. For 2025, know you are Herbie, and ask yourself how you will not only take weight off your pack, but make sure the weight never comes back. All so you can focus on doing what you do best: creating amazing, life-changing designs and manifesting new projects.
Enter Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, a book that will help you change your own mind (for the better). We are taught many platitudes about business—the client is always right, make as much as you can, always upsell. The history of interior design is filled with these assumptions. Allow yourself to reconsider all of them. Perhaps the client is always wrong, since they are not the expert, you are. Making money is good, but making as much as you can without considering risk is a fool’s errand—ask any designer charging by the hour plus markup what happens when the project gets delayed for six months. Oh, and tying your value to the ultimate spend gets harder and harder in our AI-powered world of instant knowledge about what things cost. Maybe, just maybe, it is time to rewrite your business story in a way that represents the designer you are instead of what the world tells you your firm has to be.
For a cherry on top, there’s Loonshots, a book about trying things that might seem a little crazy. You will walk away from the read with a permission slip to see what might work to improve your business, and a blueprint for testing and failing until you fail no more. New is hard. No matter what, you will stink the first time you try out something that will ultimately make you better. How long you give yourself is the practice, not avoiding trying in the first place. Integrating the spirit of what might be into the fabric of your business (without abandoning all that is solid) will bring you a new awareness of what you most hope to become, both as a designer and as a business. This is where faith lives.
Perhaps you need to rewrite your entire business story, though I suspect it is more about making different choices and owning your voice than anything else. My advice for 2025: Use The Goal, Think Again and Loonshots (and whatever other tools you know of to activate “beginner’s mind”) to help you dare to tell your business’s story as only you can. Without apology and definitely without compromise. Don’t wait to see where the courage to leap into the unknown can take you—just take it. The leap is what makes you the designer you are; now let it be so for your business. Good luck.
____________
Sean Low is the go-to business coach for interior designers. His clients have included Nate Berkus, Sawyer Berson, Vicente Wolf, Barry Dixon, Kevin Isbell and McGrath II. Low earned his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and as founder-president of The Business of Being Creative, he has long consulted for design businesses. In his Business Advice column for BOH, he answers designers’ most pressing questions. Have a dilemma? Send us an email—and don’t worry, we can keep your details anonymous.