Dear Sean,

With the holidays approaching, I’m realizing that my team needs a break—and so do I! With so many looming deadlines this time of year, I know I’ve probably come to this conclusion too late to implement something now. But how can I plan ahead for next year to get it right?

Holiday Ready

Dear Holiday Ready,

The single-biggest asset any design firm has is its creativity. It does not matter whether you and your team use your downtime to rest and restore so you can be inspired, to explore artistic pursuits that contribute to your unique creative vision or to discover and be nourished by new environments. Taking a break from work makes you and your team better at doing all that you do to change people’s lives. It should be axiomatic—as in, built into your system, pricing and project management—that the firm will shut down for the holidays.

Unless you have specifically agreed to a deadline during the holidays (and why would you ever do that?), there should be no reason you cannot simply be away without expectations from anyone. That said, if your metric of success is that of a factory—how much you can get done in the shortest amount of time—good luck with just shutting down. If you find that you and your team are meeting unreasonable and unnecessary deadlines during what should be a holiday break, let this be an opportunity to change.

After all, as I cannot say enough, your firm only makes two promises—to do your very best work as only you and your firm can, and to stake your entire reputation on every project you take on. If either or both of these two promises are jeopardized, you put your entire business at risk. Unnecessarily overworking is a sure way to ensure resentment, myopia and, ultimately, stagnation—literally, cancer for your design business. A sacrosanct holiday break should be well justified so as to keep those promises and be delivered as such to clients. You might think working over the holidays is what the client needs to feel taken care of; then again, martyrs are martyrs only when they are dead.

As with all things, the way to deliver the understanding that nothing will be undertaken during the holidays is with effective communication both to clients and employees alike. Making sure all understand the power of the break as an integral element to the firm is the irrational humanness we all seek—irrational in that you, of course, do not need to shut down but do so because you see it as a key investment in the future and nourishment to the ultimate success of the firm. Most importantly, such a policy demonstrates the emotional intelligence required of all interior designers today, especially those focused on residential work. AI can improve the middle-grade design business and will push the great ever higher. If you cannot learn the emotional mechanics underneath the operational ones, you will be left with average, expected results.

A break is not a time-out; it is fueling what comes next. If your ultimate vision is to be better tomorrow than you are today, then defining the value of the break to clients, employees and colleagues is its own reward.

All of the above said, 2025 has the makings of a remarkable time for interior designers. Home is a sanctuary and celebration all at once. The desire for change is a responsibility for interior designers, and a break helps make that opportunity manifest.

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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.