Three things you need to know deep in your soul - before you start

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:11

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 3: 0:36

On today's episode, I wanted to talk to you about the three things I wish every designer came prepared for or arrived into the framework already knowing or doing. They're just three things. It's good to do a little health check every now and again and kind of go Hmm, have I really thought about this before I dive in and open my own business? So without further ado, three things I wish every designer Okay, thing one. Despite all of my army of AI assistants, you have to do the work. There are no shortcuts. There The framework is exactly that. It is a framework. It is a roadmap. It is a bunch of steps which, when taken one after the other, will deliver you a sustainable business that you understand and that you can run. But you will still have to be involved. Tools are just that. Tools. AI is amazing and I just cannot believe how many of you now are starting in this world where nothing is actually that hard. You don't have to brainstorm things and come up with them. You can work in conjunction with these amazing tools. The GPTs that I've built inside of my Framework course are different to open AI. So chat GPT is a GPT and it just accesses the entire internet and does whatever you want it to do as long as you know how to ask it correctly. My GPTs are custom built, so they are built to complete one task. Let's talk about Clancy for example. Clancy is client comms. The only thing Clancy knows how to do is deliver bad news, write beautiful, warm, relatable Professional emails to your client to let them know there's been a delay or to have the project update or a beautiful email that accompanies deliverables that just talks about the one or two different things that are truly unique to that project. And he's so great. He gets your tone of voice. He writes all the emails and then you don't have to, you know how, even when you have a template, sometimes you find Oh obviously the template says one thing, like Please see attached final documentation la, la, la, but you still want to say certain individual things about that project, such as you might notice that the custom upholstery bedhead is on sale or, the custom upholstery bedhead is on 10 week back order. I have chosen the fabric. Like you've got like little intricacies that you want to say, you just tell Clancy all of those things and he makes sure that it's all in the body of the email. It's really magical, really amazing. However, you wouldn't go to Clancy and say, Clancy, I'd really like to work on my pricing with you today. He'd be like, okay, sure. I'd just write you an email about whatever you asked him. You would go to Percy, who is a pricing calculator, who would want to be saying, great, so what sort of billable hours and non billable hours and what are your services and how can we add. additional revenue streams and he will brainstorm stuff with you that's really clever and he's been designed to do that. So I have built, there are 13 right now in practice that help people step through the framework. Mary will talk to them like a conversation and actually help them set their services up. So when I first wrote the framework, you just Got the video lesson from me and then all of the templates and things to go and set your services, but you still had to sort of make them up. But now you have this AI assistant, Mary, who will say to you, okay, no problems. What sort of things did you really enjoy when you studied design? Is that the sort of thing that you could see yourself offering and we'll help workshop it with you and shake it out and make sure it feels really good. But even though we have this army of assistants and we have all of this support and you can have conversations with them 24 seven, there's so much to that, that you're still doing the work. You are still the brain leading the team. You are the one going, no, I don't want to offer color consults. And that you've got to give feedback and you've got to really have a working understanding about what it is that you want to do. The same is to be said for the entire course because there are so many templates and so many things, but you still have to apply your branding, apply your tone of voice, make sure they really do reflect your business. It just gives you a starting point because I do remember when I first, making some reusable templates in my business. I was like what do other designers put in their welcome pack? For example, or Oh, I wonder, I never see anyone else's business and I never hire an interior designer. So I have no clue if this is right, or if I've just built this. I just kept iterating based on feedback from clients until now. They're the clients are obsessed with the documents. I'm obsessed with the documents. I feel really good about it. But for anyone coming in, you get all of what I run in my fully operational business, I'm still taking clients. It is the same. Documents that I delivered to my clients and the same process. However, you still have to do the work and I'm there to support you, but I'm, there's no answers. I want you to show up and work and you can't really love anything. It's if somebody, I don't know maybe actually it is really good. If someone just buys you your first car. I don't know. That wasn't my experience, but I felt like I loved my first car so much more because I worked for it and I saved for it. And when I got it, I took care of it and it wasn't just under a, red ribbon on my 18th birthday in the driveway and yay for those of you who did get that. I think that's fantastic but there's something to be said for how much you appreciate something or value something when you work for it. So sadly, point one. I'm not doing the work for you. You still have to show up and do the work. It's just all, there's lots of guidelines and guidance to get you there. Okay, point number two. The designers who showcase who they are, who can stand out from the pack and who don't show up as a slightly less famous version of Shea McGee, go the furthest, the fastest. And what I mean by that is not necessarily that you have to have a niche before you get into the framework, or you have to know your aesthetic really strongly, and it has to be very different. All I mean by that is that designers who are willing to find their uniqueness and share. That you in unique online, show up in their socials and talk about what they're passionate about, what part of design they specifically like when they show up authentically, they attract clients faster and they attract perfect fit clients faster. So the more you can talk to your audience, the more you can show your point of view, the more you can talk about the things in design that do and don't light you up, the faster the people who are attracted to those same things will find you. It's really tempting in the beginning to emulate popular designers and that approach I feel like stalls people for an extra, sometimes 12, 18 months until they learn to stand out in, it's a pretty crowded industry and you don't have to have anything wildly crazy different about you, but just knowing who you're for and what you're about and standing up for that and never ever. Trying to move forward on the shoulders of other people's work. So no copying, no a bit of that. No sort of looking both ways to see what everyone else has got. You're running your own race. We always say that, but it's so important just to go, do you know what? I came in and I was like this and I'm in this industry and I'm staying like this and I'm going to show you what I'm about and what I love to do. And you'll either hire me or you won't hire me and that's okay too. And super easy for me to say in the seventh year of my business, I appreciate that. I know this was not my resolve in my first year. There is no way that I stood up and was like, do you know what? I love modern organic and this is everything has to be textual. It has to be this. This is what I love. No way. I'd just be like, no problems. Tell me more about your project. And when can you pay the deposit? And I'll do basically anything. So not throwing any shade. I'm just saying, I have now noticed having hundreds of people through the framework, the girls who know exactly who they're targeting, what is their target market, what they're about, what they stand for, and what their visual aesthetic is, seem to move forward faster. They also seem to be the girls that draw the least amount of inspiration from inside the design industry. So they're not really looking at what other people offer. These are people that come up with like really cool reels and that come up with really interesting ways to showcase furniture pieces and talk about trade account accessibility and they show up and they mix and match different patterns and they're just really, they're the cool girls. I want to hang out with them. It does always really make it evident to me that the quickest path to success is being unapologetically you, whatever that looks like. Clients will sense. That it's your own passion. It's your uniqueness and it's you all the way through. Like it hasn't been borrowed from anyone else. All right. And the third most important thing I wish all designers knew before they started the framework is to be prepared for the business and marketing side of design. Being a designer is a very small part of being a designer. If you know, you know, design is the fun part. It's the part that we're all here for. It's why we got in. But I think we all. I don't know. I highly underestimated how much time I would have to spend upskilling in the world of finance and marketing and business skills and leadership and personal development and understanding even contracts and how to communicate things to my clients. Thank God for Clancy, the client comms AI assistant, because even just trying to talk about what sort of model of trade account discount I pass on, what do I keep? What do I pass on clients? He can do that in seconds. He'll just whip up something that sounds really fair, really firm, really put together and you're like, wow, why didn't I ever phrase it like that? For a successful career in design, you have to be obsessed with business as well, because. You are running the business of design. If you're not obsessed with business and marketing, that's totally fine. Go work for someone who is. Don't bother running a business if you don't want to be in business because you won't be able to sustain it for very long. Running a design business requires organization, clear communication, solid processes and systems in order to not become a bottleneck in your business. Further down, you have to set it up right. And you have to understand that these skills are critical to set expectations, to manage budgets and ensure a beautiful balance between flexibility, freedom, lifestyle, and, and the hustle and the passion for what you do and the business side of things. My business really feeds me it keeps the ambition side of me rolling. It keeps me really creative. I can do so many things with my marketing. I love to be able to support so many other businesses.And hear about their business. It's like an amazing ecosystem of designers where I can just get stuck in and I'm really passionate about it and I really love it, but I can see from space when somebody joins the framework and they probably should have. just waited for an opportunity to come up inside of the industry where they could work alongside or for or learn from someone for maybe another three to five years because they're just not ready to upskill around the business commerce side of running a business. Because ultimately design is both an art and a business, it's an art and a science, it's creativity and business. It's people who love to pull color schemes together and to nerd out on the data in a spreadsheet. You have to have a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. You need to be prepared for client meetings, for tough conversations. You need to know your pricing inside and out. You need to know how to set boundaries. These are all skills that you're not expected to have when you come inside the framework, but they are skills that we will hone across the 12 months. So we have weekly coaching and every single time, whether you know it or not, with all the conversations that we're having with all the different girls and different things that are going on, we are working on All of these individual skills. So there will come a time where you leave the framework and I feel really confident that you can run a business. It's well set up. You know how to market it. You know who you're for, what you're about, what you charge, what you include, what the plan is to grow the business in the next three to five years. It's all wrapped up. Okay, speaking of wrapping things up, I don't want to be all doom and gloom. Please do not ever let anybody else talk you out of your own success or talk you out of your ideas. If you want to do this, you do it and you'll bloody do it well. If you're committed, if you're tenacious, determined, if you actually are like, Hey, this could be a thing. This is something I've always wanted to do. This is something I have a passion for. You will have the greatest design chance. business. I have no doubt. I am there every step of the way. I'm totally here for it. I'm always here to help. Drop into my DMs at oleander underscore and underscore finch. I'll always help if I have a tool, a template, an idea. I want every designer who's starting out in the industry to succeed, but there's also no shame in saying, Hey, I really had to think about this. And whilst I love designing, maybe I love SketchUp. Maybe I love Maybe I love full service design or whole house renovations. I have absolutely no interest in the marketing side of things in social media. I have no interest in tracking the finances or running a profitable business. The business side of things just freaks me out, not into it. I think I'll just go and work for someone else. Super fine. There's room for all of us, whatever it looks like, design your own success, do whatever you need to do in order to just fuel that passion to be able to do the designing. Because as I mentioned in point three, the business side of design is, yeah, it's more than half of what you do. So you do have to have some inkling, towards it and you have to get something out of it or else you're spending more than half of your life doing something that you're just not interested in. Okay, so let's wrap it up. Recap. Thing one, if you are joining the framework or the industry as a whole, you do have to do the work. There are no shortcuts in life. All online courses, the online courses are a curation of everything that you need to be a wild success in this industry, but you will still have to show up. And that is simply so that you just don't pocket somebody else's templates and pass them off, just, You can't just start handing them out willy nilly, they don't reflect your brand, there's no rhyme or reason behind them. You have to do the work so that you can understand what it is that you're building and what kind of business you have. The AI tools are exactly that, just tools. They're there to move you through the framework fast. I can't believe, I actually think that I am the only course that currently has pseudo staff members. in the staff room or AI assistants, moving people through those steps really fast. So by building them as custom solutions to the parts inside the framework that I've previously seen students pause or, it's taken a couple of weeks by creating someone that's a support system to get them through that, the girls are moving really fast. So the faster you get through the foundations, the faster you get into working with clients. Point number two, be you. Be the you est you that you can be. Don't be someone else. I almost just said, be the you est you that you can be. Don't be Shea McGee. And I just mean it like that. And I use her as an example, but that's because that's the one that I see come through really strongly. That sort of Amber Lewis, that sort of American thing. It's, we're moving beyond that, but I just see so much influence coming in. And when you're new, that's totally understandable. It's something that we do see, the quicker that you can start to show up authentically, the quicker clients who are a perfect fit for you will be attracted to you and will want to work with you. And point number three, we just went through it. Be prepared for the business side of design. That's it from me today. I will be back in your ears on Tuesday. I hope you have a lovely weekend. Bye for now.

Speaker 2: 15:57

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.