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Designing Success
Designing Success from School to Studio by Rhiannon Lee is dedicated to filling in the gaps in your design course to encourage you to build a sustainable business that supports your dream lifestyle.
Are you searching for strategy, systems and support? Looking for a community to bounce industry issues around in? In this podcast, we will cover the interior design business infrastructure you need to supplement your design school curriculum with practical insights and actionable advice. We also cover all things marketing, product innovation, client acquisition, and more. Go beyond the theory, filter through the stuff that doesn’t serve you and get on with creating.
You will find real talk with industry professionals, practical tactics from business realists that leave you reenergised and focused on exactly how to improve the current landscape of your own business. For more behind the scenes of the interior design industry, check out oleander and finch in Instagram https://instagram.com/oleander_and_finch
or head to www.oleanderandfinch.com
Designing Success
Here’s exactly how I cut proposals down to 15 minutes.
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Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander and 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 could 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. Before we get started with today's podcast, I wanted to share with you a testimonial from a experienced designer I've been working with and I have been working together. We've done probably, yeah, we've done five days so far, and we have another five up our sleeve. I have a two week program and lots of people opt to do. Like a full intensive week and then take a break for a little bit. And then the other week after they've had time to implement some things. I'm very flexible with that two weeks. So you may have seen the two week intensive and thought, oh gosh, I'm never gonna have two weeks to work on my business. Certainly worth reaching out to me to find out what might be suitable to you.'cause we don't always do it back to back. Anyway, these are the lovely things that Anna messaged me this morning. Working with Rihanna and from Oleander and Finch has been a total game changer. We're only five days in, and she's already transformed the way I run my business. I'm currently testing her incredible GPT workforce and starting to integrate them into my workflows. The time I've saved on admin and marketing already has been massive for the first time. I've got a proper marketing strategy in place and I can already see the difference. Um, I'm, I'm. We've got another five days coming up, so I'm sort of road testing everything and trialing everything and trying to get myself a little bit more streamlined. But the most exciting part is this is just the beginning and I can already see real change. Thank you so much Rhiannon, and thank you so much for that. Anna. I love working with experienced designers to show them what could be possible when we restructure their systems and processes. Being such a AI nerd, it makes me so happy being able to introduce people to my imaginary friends and being like, this is how they can help you. This is how many hours a week that they can save you. Just watching you get involved is amazing, and that is exactly what today is all about. Today's episode I want to talk to about Penelope, who is appraisal generator that I've spent the last nine months perfecting. And when I say perfecting. I will keep on upgrading her and changing her I'm sure, but just to be able to feed all of the knowledge base that she needs and to create this end-to-end system that I am just about to launch on the 16th of September. I will put a link to the wait list in the show notes in case you wanna be the first to find out. In all honesty, all of the people I have already shared Penelope with who are inside of my private coaching groups. Blown away and so am I. I'm just gonna say it. You're not supposed to say like, I'm so proud of myself. It's not that I'm proud of myself, it's that when I originally wanted a solution that was a one click ff and e, I spent literally a couple of months working out how to create it in Notion. So I built a CRM where you could. Press a button, export the entire thing into an Excel spreadsheet in one click, and I was super proud of that. And then along came a much better platform, which is Project Studio, which I'll talk to you about in a little while. So that's fine. They were able to obviously have an entire tech department. It wasn't just one nerd me up late at night, frustrated, trying to work out away. But now I have this end-to-end system that I have wanted to share with the design community for such a long time. I know for a fact that. You go home, myself included, from an in-home consultation and you fiddle around and you find some Pinterest images, you're really excited about the project, a project that you don't know you're going to be hired to do. Mind you, and it can take, I poll my audience this week, and the majority was two to three hours, and then the second was three to four hours. So there was very few people that said it took them sort of zero to two hours. It was pretty much two to three or three to four hours. After an in-home consultation that we charge for 90 minutes. The numbers are made up here, but say you have a$395 consultation and then you go and work for another four hours, that's 90 minutes for the consultation as well. That's a full day's work. Whilst I love creating AI solutions and tools that help with calculating your pricing and thinking about your unique value proposition or. Sales skills in your copywriting. And Otis, who is my copywriting, or he's at Instagram captions, he's probably got the most conversations with interior designers than any of my AI assistants. And you know, we're spending all this time on things like Instagram captions, which is great for marketing. I definitely will never PPE marketing. I love marketing, but the proposal is a very practical place to save time because they might ghost you and you've spent three hours on them, or for whatever reason, you might not have been a mu, a good mutual fit inside of that in-home consultation, and you just didn't know. I have managed to create Penelope, and she will extract all the information that you need out of your transcript. So when you go to an in-home consult, you'll record the meeting in the home, and then you will upload that transcript into Penelope and she. Extracts the full scope of work. Everything that you've agreed to do. She will extract a CL full client, you know, 300 to 500 word brief about the style outcomes that you're looking for. She pulls out terms and conditions. She has information about you as a designer, phases and timelines. She basically just pulls out all the raw data or the text that you're gonna need to prepare a beautiful proposal. She also gives you a direct. Link. Link to a Canva template that I have made. And yes, it links to Canva. It isn't a false promise. When you click on it, you will go to the Canva template and is it the best template in the world? No, not really. It's a perfectly fine, very professional looking template, but you can make edits to it. You can change it into your branding. You can use a completely different proposal template. I. I'm not trying to create a little army of oleander and fin's. I'm very fine. If you look at it and go, I think I'll do something else. The intention is that she, if you do something else, you would share that proposal with her and she would extract all the right subheadings and core information based on the proposal that you give her. So we run the transcript with Penelope. She drafts the proposal details and all the data that you're going to need, and then we quickly copy and paste, drop that into the Canva document. You export the IM as images. From Canberra, so save all nine pages to my camera Roll Go and open project studio. You upload each image into the different tabs, and you have a master template, which I teach you how to build. So you build it once and use it forever. You duplicate it when you have a new client and you're just like, yep, I've got a new proposal I need to send out. Duplicate my template. Name it, name it and then you name it. Puzzle Street Project. And then in you go to the Puzzle Street project and you upload into the nine tabs, the nine different images from the Canva document. You can apply your own pricing. Penelope will not do your pricing for you. She's here to get you all of that text so you don't have to write out the scope of work. And you can actually spend a little bit more time thinking about modeling pricing and thinking about the hours that it takes and doing. Adding additional details. If you wanna add in preliminary mood board images or drawings, I teach you how to build the template of your dreams in this system. So on the 16th of September, when I launch her, when you buy her, you buy. The link that allows her to live inside your chat, GPT. She'll come and live in the sidebar and every time you do a proposal, you just click on the name Penelope and upload your transcript and she will extract and she will extract all of that information, like scope of work, et cetera, for you. And then you also get the template in Canva, and then you get Project Studio access, provided you have an Australian business number or a BN, because you must be a designer with an A BN to actually get Project Studio. But Project Studio is free. It's a free tool that is along the lines of Programmer In my mind, one of the biggest differences between Style, source, book and Programmer is that Style Source book doesn't have the clipper. So when you're on a website, you can't just clip it and get all the information uploaded, but I will teach you, it's like five little things that you need to fill out one time and then whatever product you wanted to upload will live in your forever library. So there's a lot of potential here with Project Studio. There's a lot of things that I don't think. As many designers are using it to its capabilities at all, and even if you just use it for proposals and keep your program or keep your other program that you pay for for your final deliverables, it would be the difference between what you receive onboarding and what you receive in your deliverables. But Project Studio allows you to do it all in one web portal. So one of the things I love is when I present it to clients, they get an email from me saying, thank you so much for inviting me into your home today. Please see your, and it's hyperlinked, oleander, and Finch client web portal or client portal. They click on it and it opens up. It's got their property name, their address, and the scope of work about me, phases and timelines. The investment and terms, the agreements, and next step, it's all outlay. They can communicate with me through this tool so they can approve, deny, write feedback, give comments, send me an email. We are now living in a. Dynamic web portal between myself and the client, and I don't need to publish anything. If I don't publish something, the client can't see me working on it. So there's like all this cool stuff about the privacy. I will teach you inside of the modules that you get when you purchase Penelope, how to edit your profile, edit your privacy, everything that you need to. Don't worry, this is not another course. Some of them are, there's only six lessons or six modules, and one is four minutes long, one is eight minutes long. The project studio tutorial is about 20 minutes. That's probably the longest. And then I wanted to show you end to end from me uploading my transcript from an in-home consult all the way to sending the email to the client, and I actually decided to race the clock. So I was like, okay, I'll put my Pomodoro timer on, I'll give myself 30 minutes. I did that and I was finished in 15. And I'm not joking. I would like, you can see it in the video. I copy and paste, and then I'm like, well, we're kind of done. I patted it out to 23 minutes and eight seconds purely because I was allowing for the fact that I'm very familiar with Project Studio. I did. You know, I have a lot of practice with these things, so I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the first time you do it, it would take you half an hour. If you are someone who's out there listening to this and you're like, what? Half an hour? It is absolutely possible. If I'm doing it in 15, then it won't be long until you are also doing it in 15. And for me, one of the hugest benefits there is same day proposals. Being able to leave a property and say, no problems. I'll get that over to you this afternoon and we'll take it from there. I can follow up sort of three days later it strike while the iron's hot. People aren't doubting things that some of the designers that I'm speaking to are saying to me like. I'm pretty much like, I often will go home after the in-home consult and sort of put it off a day or two to even start writing it because I'm nervous about the number or like the pricing, the size of the job. I'm not sure if I want the job. Like there's all sorts of mindset stuff that's coming up for them and then they finally sit down to do it and it's three, four hours and they get it done and then they doubt it for another day. Just randomly swipe$1,500 off the title'cause they're nervous. Like there's all this stuff that I hear time and time again, and Penelope is here to prevent that happening. So a quick decision is a good decision. If people are excited, you've just been in their home, you send the proposal two hours later, you know they get it on their email, then you follow. 48 hours after that, they're still thinking about what you told them in the in-home. It's not this whole delayed dead space of two weeks in between where they've, their sister-in-laws, put some doubt in their mind. They've started thinking, oh, did she say sea grass wallpaper? Oh my God. She might not know what would mean even though you just said it in passing, and it's not actually what you would do in the concept. The proposal template that I teach you to make, I think this is where you have a real opportunity. Fully customizable. You put it all in your own branding, but if you are someone who's incredibly detailed, then your template would have like links to a full service agreement. You'd have links to a Dropbox with initial drawings, like whatever it is that you wanna share. You can have notes from the in-home consultation that are saved, or all the measurements can be uploaded using touch JBT and just looks so professional. The first person in my business that laid eyes on this proposal picked up the phone immediately, came directly to me and said, oh my God, are you serious? The last designer that we used or engaged stuff was everywhere. We had Google Drive, we had Dropbox. She had a we transfer of some documents'cause they were too big. I could never find the first concept knowing that this all lives live in one dynamic portal that is shared between you and the client. They love it. They could find, I've got an entire tab. For documents and details. There are floor plans there. The, the link to the CAD drawings is there. Everything lives in the one place and it's all mobile friendly, so I can be on site going through the tabs, showing things. This is not a verbal tutorial or one of the modules. I do teach it. I spent the whole weekend sitting down after planning out the lessons. Making sure that you feel really supported. So if you buy this end to end process, you don't just get me teaching Penelope, and then you've gotta work the rest out. I will take you step one, record your meeting, upload the transcript, get all of the raw data that Penelope gives you. Step two, move that raw data into the Canva proposal, one of which I have given you the full template. Once you're happy with that, export the images and upload them into your master template in Project Studio, which I also teach you to make. So if you're a new designer and you don't have a process like this, you definitely need to be on the wait list. If you're an existing designer who just thinks, I don't wanna spend three or four hours on a proposal when I can give a highly professional result in a web portal to a client who's home I've just been to in under 30 minutes, then you also need to be on the wait list for the. So if you're listening to this, when it first drops on Thursday, there's about 12 days until Penelope's released. Jump on the wait list so that you get all of the emails. There will be a wait list offer. As I mentioned at the top of the call, I spent nine months creating this. I've gone in to try to break it. I've gone into test it. It has access to thousands of hours of transcripts. I have. I'm very, very. Confident in the accuracy of what she pulls out of those transcripts. And she has, yeah, so much coding and so much cool stuff in the background. At one point I had her working so that she would just email the proposal, but then I feel the designers that I speak to and myself included. I really feel it's more important that we have the conversation in chat. Bt she asks you questions, it's really easy to talk to her, and then I copy and paste it and review it, and then nothing goes out without my kind of founder or CEO stamp of approval. And that's still really important to me as a business owner. I'm not looking for shortcuts that eliminate my involvement. I want faster, I want easier, I want accurate, and I want final say. So I wanna look over it as I build it. And go, do you know what? I wouldn't say it like that, or I wanna feedback to Penelope that that particular thing that she described in the scope of work, I would say it this other way. So I want complete control. And the way to do that was to make sure that she wasn't automated and she wasn't just sending proposals off to your clients or anything like that. I cannot wait to. I cannot wait to share her with you. I think I know because there's already girls who have her. Just how life changing, you're always hearing every AI all is game changer. Everything's a game changer. This is a life changer because this is all about pulling back and returning hours to my lifestyle. This, these are hours for my kids. I'm not writing proposals for someone who's gonna ghost me. And I'm not saying they're of course, but there is a percentage. That's what a conversion rate is. So there are some that I've made. That I've given three hours of my time to that have gone nowhere, and I don't want that for us anymore. If you can honestly hand on heart, say, you know what? I pulled the proposal together in 15, 30 minutes. That doesn't mean you don't want it any less. That doesn't mean it's not a good proposal. It's not professional. It just means you've found a tool that helps you and supports you to live the lifestyle that balances work and life. And it's not just all about admin, admin forever and ever. So that's a little bit of the background of what Penelope does. I have so much more information to share with you about her. I'm so open to answering any questions if you have them. If you're curious, hand me over on Instagram at Oleander and binge. Ask me about her. Get interested, get involved, get on the wait list. I will leave you with this with another verbal testimonial from somebody who's inside of my framework Express right now, and has had Penelope for a few weeks and she sends out quite a few proposals in that time and has used my end-to-end system, including Canva and Project Studio, and this is what she had to say about it. I have been using Penelope for a few weeks now and. She has completely changed the way I do business as a designer. Um, I can now upload a transcript from a client briefing or just do a really quick voice dump about the project and she will deny a proposal that is insanely good. I would say her baseline is such high quality and only needs minor amendments. Which means I'm getting back to clients within hours instead of days, and this just means that it keeps the momentum going. Already I'm getting clients to sign off a lot quicker. Um, I'm showing up in a super professional way and be more time to be creative, more time to spend with my family. More time for Bill four hours. Honestly, she would have to be the most valuable tool I've purchased for my business as a designer. I'm never letting her go. I have an amazing interview for you next week with a Feng Shui specialist, so join me for that. I can't wait. Fact then, bye for now. 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've 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 designer. Just like you for your daily dose of design business tips, and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at Oleander and 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.