Featured on the Show:

Renovation Management for Interior Designers – Expanding your business with a lucrative service

What you will learn in this episode: 

• Work for another firm to gain renovation management experience

• Do your own home projects

• Take advantage of your realtor community

I have been hearing from a lot of designers at all points in their careers, looking for advice on how to add renovation management services to their firm. 

It is another avenue designers can take on to complement their decorating work and one I highly recommend because it is a stable and lucrative income stream for a designer to add to her business – and who doesn’t want to do that??

How do you learn the skills you need to implement this service into your business? There are things that each and every one of you at any stage of your career can be doing now to build that report with referral companies, to build that experience and confidence that you will need in order to take on bigger and bigger projects.

In today’s episode, I am sharing with you some tips you can start doing right now. The first of which is to go work for another firm. That would be my number one suggestion!

In doing this, you will learn vast amounts of information and have zero responsibility if the sh*t hits the fan!

Also, a lot of these firms have multiple designers or senior designers running projects, so you can be learning and seeing multiple projects run by different people. And trust me, jobs are run differently depending on the person running the job. And you can learn so much by observing from up close but yet not full responsibility level. So if you’re young or new to the industry, that’s what I encourage you to do!

But this is not a reality for everyone, and I get that. So what do you do if you’re sitting there going, “Well, Renee, that’s not me. I can’t do it. I can’t afford to take those jobs”, or you don’t live in a big city where there are big firms…..

There are other solutions.

Of course, you can do your own projects. I share in today’s episode how I renovated a home which gave me LOTS of experience, and got to know many contractors in the area.

Sometimes friends ask you to do their project, and yes, most of the time, it is very well-intentioned, but I just don’t recommend doing that. I don’t think the learning curve should be learned by someone that is in your personal orbit. I try to keep my personal life personal and my business life business!

Lastly, there is a community of realtors that I highly recommend you take advantage of. What does that end up looking like? Well, a realtor deals solely and specifically with people buying a home. And YOU want to work in homes. They probably are the most parallel professional to what you do outside of an architect or a contractor. So every single one of their clients IS your demographic, IS a potential client for you. 

Realtors pride themselves on having a personal list of referrals in all of the trades that go into a home. If you can become one of those referrals, THAT is gold. 

In this episode, I am sharing lots of things that you can be doing to build renovation management skills and your confidence so that when you do do projects for clients, you will feel successful in the end. 

Also, my hope for designers listening is that they won’t fear the unknowns on a job site. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are opportunities discussed in this episode for you to build that knowledge, as well as my course that takes you from start to finish utilizing actionable steps and following the roadmap that I use on every project I manage.

Like this Episode?

• Be sure to check out Episode #83: The Value Interior Designers Bring to Every Renovation Project

• Don’t miss an episode, listen on Spotify, and follow via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or RSS.

• Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.