What to consider when it's time to outsource...

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.

Grab more insights and updates:

Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oleander_and_finch
Like Oleander & Finch on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/oleanderandfinch

For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/

Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success
THE FRAMEWORK ( now open) https://www.oleanderandfinch.com/the-framework-for-emerging-designers/

Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.
...

Transcript

Speaker 3: 0:12

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleandra Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you can expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success.

Speaker: 0:37

Today's podcast episode is probably a little bit more for our established designers, but I find, or I used to find certainly when I was an emerging designer, it actually really helped me to hear the concerns and pain points of the next level. So I could look for ways, gaps, and opportunities to avoid those pain points. So let's get started. Today, I wanted to talk to you about how to delegate in your business and avoid becoming a bottleneck which is something that is very common. It's something that we do when the only person who knows how to do anything is yourself. There are no standard operating procedures or, it's an organized chaos in here. I know where the samples are. I know where things go. It is absolutely a blocker for business growth and for feeling like, okay, I've got room to take on more projects now that I'm taking on bigger projects or I can phase my projects better. You can't do all of that when you have to do all of the things. Today, we're just going to break down how to stop being that bottleneck and start delegating in smart ways that actually drive your business forward. So one of the smartest delegations that I made this year was my heat pump dryer. I cannot tell you how long it was taking me to hang out multiple loads of washing or at least one load of washing a day whilst I had a baby and baby clothes are so small, I forgot. And I didn't forget, but It's when I had Marley, it had been three years since I had a newborn. And just all of this time that I've had my business, I've also been hanging out teeny tiny singlets, teeny tiny socks. Oh my gosh. Every day, all the little things and buying that dryer. I cannot tell you. It was like the simplest fix for me to be like, I can go into my business. From my home studio into the house, pop a load into the dryer, bring it out, fold it at the end of the day as I come in after work. And it's just made that whole thing so much simpler. And I'm not spending a half an hour each day standing outside hanging up. Before I get into all of my tips, I just want to talk about why designers struggle with delegation. I don't know if it's a control freak thing. I don't know what it is about us creatives, especially, or women entrepreneurs, maybe. We've worked so hard to get where we are. We do so much. We put so much love into our business. It can be quite hard to share that because you recognize that no one will love your business the way that you do. So you're like, Oh, I'm not really sure. Or you want creative, you want to creatively oversee. everything. I know that a lot of people do worry hang on, what if the standards drop with my client experience? Or what if something is being done by somebody else and I'm not across it and it represents my branding poorly? There are lots of worries in that space. If you organize yourself really well, if you create standard operating procedures and HR focused processes with the team that you onboard or with whoever it is that you delegate to, you can prevent. Everything that you're worried about. So legitimately, if you were to write down your worries and go really deep and think about them and go, no, come on, what is really going on for me? You can tell them privately to chat GPT and just say what sort of measures could I put in place to avoid anything going wrong in these areas of concern for me around my business? I'm looking to Delegate in the future and I want to workshop some ways that I can make sure that I'm doing that in the best way for my staff member and for myself. So I think that's really important as well. You don't have to use chat JPT. You could brainstorm all the concerns and then you could brainstorm all the solutions to those concerns. You don't, we don't always need the robots. If you think that you've got it under control, go nuts. But I think it can be a good like sanity check to go, Oh yeah, I didn't think of that. Or yeah, that's not really going to be an issue. Another thing that I often hear from designers is it's just faster if I do it myself. And we all feel that because of course it is, but you are only one person and there's only so much you can do it all yourself inside of your business. It is a one way ticket to burn out. It is something that does nobody any good when you take on absolutely everything because the next point that I'm going to talk about is probably the most important thing and that is recognizing all What to delegate. So we need to identify your low value tasks. What is something that's just you're the CEO of this business. What is something that you do on a day to day basis? That's just really could be managed by somebody else. Everyone's going to choose their own journey to delegation. So for some, it'll be a VA for some will take on a junior designer. Some will look to expand quickly and bring on a whole dream team of, people. Digital marketing social media manager, maybe like all sorts of different roles in your business that you might want to outsource. Others will look into AI. My AI support crew does everything for me now. I've just created a different AI assistant for everything that I need. I have saved myself. So much money. I used to have a VA and when I look at what my AI assistants do with like input from me, so I'm across it, but I'm saving like in my workshop, I was like, save up to 10 hours when you do this AI workshop and you, or if you buy the replay and you want to watch it and learn about these assistants, but realistically in my business year on year for where I am this November to where I was last November, I'm saving over 25 hours a week. Easily on tasks and I'm just not doing that much over time. I am working. I work hard. I've always worked hard. I actually love to work hard. I am just by nature. I'm a Virgo. I'm a hard worker. I really, I am really passionate about what I do and what I do with other designers and how I help them. And I don't want to work less. Necessarily, but I wanna do less of the stuff that does not light me up. Like I don't want to be stark creating standard operating procedures when Eden, the AI assistant can just write them for me and I can check them, crosscheck them, make sure they're what I would wanna teach a staff member and implement them into my business. So things like that. Also, there's a saying that I've heard and it's around, Oh, what is it? Your zone of genius. It's something you hear coaches talk about all the time, but it's really true when you can speak. Stay in that area of expertise, which is designing and, possibly being on SketchUp or looking at mood boards, doing all the things that you're doing. When you are doing more of that and other people are doing more of the other people things that you don't want to do, the business just starts to run like clockwork. It's something that I am setting up all of my girls in my small group course. I have a course called the Framework Collective. There is just six girls in that course and it is great. Full. It is not opening up again soon, but we are working really hard to get all of them into this practice of growing their teams, building their businesses and getting amazing results. And it's working really well. I'm loving seeing them move forward and we've had, and we've been having lots of conversations about this stuff, how to delegate without compromising quality. What are the strategies that we need to employ to maintain high standards when we hand off tasks? You can have high expectations. You can maintain high standards. You can quality check everything that comes back through you. If you want to be, still having your control freak hat on, go for it. I am the same. There are lots of strategies that you can put in place to get people, you can have, All sorts of virtual assistants, AI assistants, all sorts of things. So there's a lot on the table for you here. It's just understanding what's open and available to you in the industry and what is actually a good fit for your brand and your future goals, because not everything is yeah, that's going to be great for some people. It just won't be. So you can start small with this. You don't have to expand massively all at once. And when I say, you can hire a virtual assistant for a couple of hours to do basic admin tasks, freelancers, a lot of designers I speak to are really terrified of. Having someone else do their 3D renders, for example. I have someone who does that in my business because that's not a part of interior design that I particularly enjoy. And it's never been a part that I particularly offer either. Don't take too much of what I do to heart because I only take one client on at a time by application and they're all repeats and referrals. My business just runs. I'm so I'm really grateful for the five years that I put into my business, working with clients and marketing what I can do and showcasing what I can do, because now I don't have to do that. I'm really grateful and hashtag blessed to just have people pop in and say, Oh my gosh, we've got this thing. I. Deal designing and I'm able to say yes. And when the projects are larger scale, I outsource my 3D renders. I use a designer, Carly Thorson, interior Design. Shout out to you. I use her to do my renders. And I, she's a former framework for disclosure. Like I want her see her business go, but I also see her work and I think it's incredible. And so I'm very happy again with that quality thing. If you know that designer's work, then you can feel, and if you have trust. That you have built with them, then, that's a big delegation and pressure off to not have to do that part of the bigger projects. And I need to delegate that out because I, the majority of my business focuses on helping emerging and established designers. Lots of, oh my gosh, quarter four, I'm completely overwhelmed with inquiry around private coaching and getting people set up for 2025 there is a lot of interest in the AI assistance and actually having custom ones built because when I have private sessions, if there's something that I know I can build you a robot for that will fix it. It might not be a robot that's in my course, but I just build them on the side to be like, do you know what? Here's you've got this problem. I've got this solution. There it is as a bonus or a part of your, what you're doing. mentor session that you had. So things are really busy around here and all sorts of ways. The delegation is super important. And I did mention early the heat pump dryer, but delegation doesn't always look like hiring someone. Sometimes it's as simple as going. Is there something out there that I could invest a little bit of money in that would just make my life simpler? Is there an easier way? What does it look like if this is easy? Women have particular difficulty asking for help, but maybe that help doesn't look traditionally like you thought it would. Maybe that help is just in a couple of hours a week of afterschool care that you can do so that you've got a couple of long days of work and you're not finishing your day at three o'clock each day. There. All sorts of ways that you can look at doing it. The return on investment is really important to track. Is this person able to help support a balance in your business and lifestyle? Please give your VAs a chance. They're not going to know everything about your business in three weeks. And the general rule of thumb is you should hire them three months before you need them. If it's the AI assistants, the good news is you can be pretty brutal in your feedback because they are robots and they keep on smiling and thanking you for that feedback and getting better and better. Okay, so I'm going to close out today just letting you know if you are interested in any of those AI support assistants, they come in packs now. I'm just selling them in mini packs of the social media made easy or operational excellence. So you can just get the ones that maybe are cool. For your level at your business because a lot of them are for emerging designers and a lot of the people that I support are not emerging designers. So you need packs of the more advanced ones that deal with more advanced problems and more advanced business solutions. So just come and DM me over at oleander underscore and underscore finch because I love to have a chat about them or show you how they work or even just talk to you about what they do. What they actually are as a solution. And if they're a right fit for you, I'm yet to come across a business that wouldn't benefit from an extra 25 hours a week, but will leave you with that. I just want to make sure that you are considering like, is there a way. That everything doesn't fall on my to do list and you are not becoming the bottleneck in your business. You're actually opening up that funnel of your business so that more people are involved in supporting you so that you can bring on more clients and you are able to capture them and consistently. onboard them and work with them and deliver excellent results for them because you have the space and capacity to do so. okay, that's it for me for this Thursday. I look forward to chatting to you again next Tuesday. Bye for now.

Speaker 2: 12:21

That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.