Featured on the Show:

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

What you will learn in this episode: 

• How to write contracts that protect your boundaries and your designs

• How to use your mistakes as a learning opportunity

• How the new VIP Group Coaching Progam can benefit you and your business

In our last VIP coaching call, a designer shared that she was working on a project and had written the contract in two phases. One was the design and development phase, and the other was the renovation management phase. 

And her client chose only to hire her for the design and development phase. And while she went to great lengths explaining the value an interior designer can bring to managing these projects alongside the hired GC, the client felt they could do this on their own. 

So…. spoiler alert, the project is going along, and problems are already coming up, surprises are being found, and the designer is being dragged into resolving each issue as it comes up. 

She is covered as far as her time, but the frustration is, ‘What’s next?’ She is only getting bits and pieces of what is really going on, and important pieces are getting lost. This way of doing things wastes time and is inefficient in quickly reaching a solution. And on a job site, time is critical. 

So we had to discuss how this designer could set boundaries to protect herself because the client did not hire her to manage this project. And also boundaries to project her design. 

So what is a designer to do in a situation like this?

It’s really quite simple – you don’t split up your contracts. If you want to manage the renovation, if you want to usher your design into reality, you don’t give an opportunity for a client to say, “No, thank you.” 

You want to be able to photograph something that reflects the designs YOU created, which, of course, is what the client has asked you to do for them. So the best way, and the only way to assure you get to design and manage a project, is to have that in your contract. 

Can you break it into two sections and show the cost to do each? Sure, that’s a good way to break down a big number so that it’s a bit more manageable for a client to feel more comfortable signing on for this. 

But you don’t give them the opportunity to say, “No, thank you,” because, more often than not, they will say that. Right? We all know homeowners think they can handle a project on their own. If homeowners are going to invest, why will they not invest in seeing it through to fruition? 

So after listening to today’s episode, please consider rewriting your contracts so that include everything from design to move-in. Break the description, the copy and fee structure out however you think it will be more palatable for people to understand and see the value that you will bring to a project. 

Moving forward, commit to only working with clients who will hire you for both the design and management process. Until you realize that managing your designs through to the end is truly the only way to protect your ultimate design, you will be left feeling like the designer on our call – frustrated and worried that the end product won’t reflect what she had designed and had counted on for her portfolio to market herself for more work.

After that conversation, I answered a question from a designer who couldn’t make the call live so emailed me to explain an unfortunate situation that happened on her project, and it wasn’t necessarily just her fault. Many people were involved, of course, and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. 

I am so thankful to have these calls as an opportunity to help her through this situation. While the course is robust, thorough, and comprehensive, it can’t know all the individual details of every project a designer is working on, especially with the issues. 

This didn’t just help the designers asking the questions, though. What I also love about these calls is that all the designers listening are learning as well!

You can learn more about joining my course, Renovation Management for Interior Designers, and the VIP Group Coaching here.

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