Pretty branding won’t save a boring offer // The mini audit edit.

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Transcript

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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. Oh my gosh. Don't you just love recording a number, a number more than one of podcast episodes and, zero audio to a company that, I dunno what has happened. We are not gonna look backwards. We're only gonna look forwards. It's actually made me wanna change the topic of today's podcast episode to a conversation that I had with banjo, my middle child this morning when I dropped him off and he saw a, what are they called? He saw a CRT teacher going into his classroom and he's like, oh, I'm gonna have a terrible day. I hate it when Miss Jade's away. I miss my teacher. He was being really hard on himself, and I said to him, our outcomes are based on our attitudes. So if you go in and you're sort of like, okay, well let's make the most of the CRT, maybe this CRT can bring something to the table that Miss Jade can't, maybe I'll learn something from them that I couldn't have learned if they weren't in the classroom. If we go in with this like positive attitude, you can turn the whole. Approach to your day around. And, then Ms. Jade walked through the courtyard and it turned out CRT was for the other class and not his, and everything was okay. losing the couple of podcast episodes this morning when I really don't have time to lose podcast episodes. Sometimes it's just a matter of, you know what, maybe they weren't supposed to go out into the universe. I'll go with the same topic. but maybe that version was not the one you're supposed to hear. And maybe this one is. So today I am gonna share a behind the scenes or almost a micro activity for a bigger piece that we do in the Framework Express, which is my small group cohort, where I do a 12 week business sprint. every week has a different topic, and week three is offers and services. And we do full offer audit and we restructure the messaging, the way that we deliver, what is included in the services, as well as how we speak about them I am gonna give you a mini framework, or even just four checkpoints that I use when I'm coaching to help crack into your offers and make sure that you still love them. Still want to offer them that your ideal client understands why they're the offer for them and that everything is sort of feeling aligned, feeling good. We're coming up to the end of the year now, or certainly for me, because my year ends at the end of November because I'm headed abroad for two months, the mic's coming with me. It's super easy to pack and we've got things that we need it for over there anyway, so, watch this space. when I get to this time of year and also across November, December, January specifically, I really start thinking about refining what I'm selling and how I'm selling it and making sure those offers still light me up and I still want to offer them, Today's episode is for anyone feeling like your offers are a bit meh. Maybe you haven't touched them since you launched your business. Maybe you set them up when you were still not very confident, so you packed them full of deliverables. You packed them full of value, but the math ain't nothing anymore because the profitability, like how long it takes you to deliver something like that might not be quite right. Or maybe they're still called gold, silver, and bronze package, or something that was almost like a placeholder and you really need to start thinking about elevating the way that you present things. It is a perfect time to review your office suite as we get to the end of the year because it allows you, if you do it early enough, like around now, you've got a bit of time to perfect them, to get confident, delivering them to start practicing selling and talking about them before you hit the new year. So this is a process, I guide designers through in week three of the Framework Express. today I am just gonna give you a taste. grab your phone or notebook because we are gonna do the mini audit. it's something that you can revisit a couple of times a year or if you're ever feeling like my office feels. Off. I'm going to talk you through how to assess and refine your office suite. So we break it into the four checkpoints that I mentioned. Checkpoint one. Is it still relevant? you can ask yourself, is the office still aligned with the clients that I want to work with? has my process evolved? Have I evolved? Have I outgrown it? am I forcing this to work? Maybe I don't really actually like it. This is really important. I've outgrown so many things in my business. I closed the framework for emerging designers midyear. I stopped mood boarding when the time was done. I pivoted into working. with design clients and a few designers, and then a lot of designers and a few design clients, and then AI entered the chat and I resisted for ages stepping into my AI shoes. I felt very much like, ugh. There's other people who've obviously pulled together a strategy. I watched one particular person go from zero, never heard of you on the internet, to a hundred thousand followers just using ai. this is at a time where you could just copy and paste the captions that we were getting from AI that other people didn't recognize because they weren't using ai now you can't do it anymore. But, you know, I watched a get a girl like, that's great. A hundred thousand followers a business that you didn't have before. Now people come to you for AI advice, but you get your AI advice from your ai. it's one of those very interesting things to watch. I was quite resistant. I don't want to. capitalize maybe, is that the word? Or make money out of, or be like, I, I always wanna share, but I also need to run a business. And AI also really interests me. It really lights me up. I've been developing a lot of GPTs for private corporations and for companies, not even in the design industry. I do a lot of stuff like that. So that I can fund the fun stuff, you know, so that I can keep my group coaching pricing relevant to what designers can afford and what designers should be investing in the growth of their business repeatedly, throughout a 12 month period. my business has evolved and I have outgrown things, and I have had to step up and say, even if it feels. Even if you have resistance, your offer isn't aligning with where you need to be or where you want to be. Now, I was talking the other day, I'll use this analogy for you, just around that AI thing, like when I started using AI in 2022 and then when CHA g PT stormed the world in 2023, I came running to meet that robot with open arms. I was like, yes, everyone's gonna get it now. But still, here we are two and a half years later from, the average person using chat GBT almost on a daily basis. And I still feel like I am in a giant pool and I am in the deep end and I'm like, guys, the water's fine. I've been in here now for years, I'm having a really good time and everyone's sitting around the pool. Some people have dipped their toes in, some people are sort of dangling their legs over the side of the pool. Nobody's in the water with me. And everybody's looking at me a bit like, oh, I don't know. I can't swim. I dunno how, I don't think I'll get in. Oh, I washed my hair yesterday. just excuses. Just everyone's sitting around the pool going, mm. I don't think it's gonna, like no one's saying anymore. I don't think it's gonna take off. I think we all know it's here to stay, but I feel like the only person with scraggly wet hair who's been. Trading water for a long time, going, you can get in it's safe. I was shocked to recently see in an article that the statistic cited was 37% of small businesses are using AI to benefit them for productivity process and system support, or even using AI on a daily basis. And that is wild to me that there is still 70% of businesses that are still doing things the hard way. And I'm not always all about ai. There's a lot of critical thinking that AI needs to be a partner and you need to be incredibly intelligent to be able to. Prompt it, the right way to challenge it, the right way and to control it. So there's a lot that we can learn in that space Anyway, needless to say, I outgrew a few things and I wasn't gonna stick around and force them to work, and that was because of this part one of this four part framework and checkpoint that, is it still relevant? So get out your pen and paper, look at the offers that you have. Are they still relevant to you? Do you still wanna offer them? That is checkpoint one, checkpoint two is the transformation clear. Can a potential client look at your offer and instantly understand what their before and after would look like. Now what I mean by that is often we just completely over complicate the message. You know, when we confuse, we lose people get to your website and it's just literally, a hodgepodge of. It could be this, it could be that we, I can do this, I can do that. But nothing really about them. How simple it would be if they could just get there and it would say, you would go from feeling like this to walking into a fully professionally installed all new furniture home and flopping down on the couch with no stress or worry. Get it perfect. That's me. I would go to that website and go, oh, please do that. I've been. Talking a lot recently to some clients about that particular client that is stuck making all of the selections. every time she overthinks things or gets worked up about the undertones or stresses out or gets all the samples out and wants her husband's opinion, and then he's like, I don't know, you just pick, like that person needs you to pick for them, right? Like if you can find a way to harness that messaging onto your website to be like. You know, your husband might roll his eyes, but I'll roll up my sleeves. Like, great. That's funny. That makes sense. That brings my personality into it and be like, you know what? let's work together and just don't worry about him. It's a bit, probably making some wild assumptions there and we wanna take the gender out of all of that and really think about it. But I love he'll roll's eyes. I'll roll up my sleeves because it tells me exactly what I'm gonna get. A partner who's professionally trained to help me lock in these selections. So in checkpoint two, it's really important. In fact, it's essential that we almost reverse engineer all the thoughts and pain points of the ideal client and then make a sentence that helps them instantly understand. How you are the solution to that problem. Checkpoint three are the inclusions practical for both of us, for the client and for myself. I think in this instance, I'm often coaching designers who are undercharging and or over-delivering A lot of the times they've set their offers up when they were not very confident or when they were starting. So they're like, put that in, put that in. I'll do renders, I'll do two concepts, and then I'll do, a full round of edits and then I'll do this. And then, I'll do a full color palette. There'll be materials, but not all of this is necessarily needed. As you get more confident, you get more skilled, you've got more experience, you can deliver a far superior. Deliverable and product with less work. we don't always need all these different concepts'cause we've got more understanding of our aesthetic and what is needed for the space. And it's more of a case of like, this is what I'm proposing for the project, not, here's 12 different options. So we wanna look at how long things take as well. What are you actually doing behind the scenes and are you accurately aware of those numbers? a lot of the time people assume something takes a certain amount of time, it takes a lot longer than that, and they don't know till they do the time tracking. So you're probably not ready for part three or checkpoint three. Of an office suite audit. If you do not track your time or if you guess your time, in the framework express, I'm dealing with experience, design and ready to scale and grow their businesses. first we have to make sure that they are incredibly desirable offers. what they've got on their website is like, yes, give it to me girl. I want all of this. As soon as I get there a little cheat for this one is I will often list out everything included in the offer and then get a highlighter and just highlight what feels sticky in the delivery. is there a particular point that often gets a lot of questions? Is there one part where things. Sometimes go rogue, like, you know, it becomes difficult to work with the clients. Is there something that the, every time it happens, the clients, for example, the clients say, yep, no problems. that's all signed off, the design's signed off. Does that make you feel like, brilliant, I can one click an ff and e in Style Source book and get that over to them straight away. Or do they say, yes, it's signed off, and you think, oh my God, I've got to manually import everything into Excel. is there somewhere that feels sticky? Because we can help. If I know where the sticky points are, I can help streamline them. We can help automate them. the bits that are under the highlighter, those are the bits that you either find a faster, better way. Or find someone who's faster and better at it and pay them to do it. if it's under the highlighter and it's sticky and you don't love it and I don't love it, and the client doesn't love it, why is it there? Let's just get rid of it. we don't know until we evaluate. Is there variety in your offers without confusion? I'm all for multiple offers. They need to feel really intentional. an example of a really intentional multiple offer would be everything starts with a 90 minute in-home consult. So that's offer one 90 minute in-home, 5 95 plus DST, you pay me, I come over, I find out more about the project that is non-negotiable. Like step one or even let's go to step zero before that, a lead magnet. I got you into my world because I gave you A free pricing calculator to help you to guesstimate the budget you should spend on a certain room, like maybe that's my lead magnet. I got heaps of email addresses from the lead magnet. They moved intentionally into my 90 minute in-home consults. I came over, then I went to Penelope, my proposal generator after the 90 minute consult, and it extracted the scope of work. We built a beautiful living client portal where the client could log in at their end, see what it would cost to engage me on the full project. see my initial ideas, see a writeup of what we spoke about. All this has been generated by ai. I haven't done anything. It looks beautiful. I've done a little bit of copy and pasting, but I haven't done a lot of the. writing of the proposal. and so that is the next step. And then it guides you intentionally into the third offer, which is full service, interior design at the proposal, five figure price for that. 50% deposit, you know, phases, whatever the payment methods. So very intentionally. Lead magnet bought you in, I nurtured you and nourished you. I watered you your little plant, and you grew and you grew, and then you reached out to me That's what I want you to build that beautiful, seamless. Ecosystem where someone comes into your brand and your business and feels loved on and continues to want to spend money with you and to have you in their home when they have a project, not like an all you could eat buffet where, and this happens all the time. People graduate with so many skills in the design industry, like so many incredible, right? And then you. Put'em all on your website. Color consultations. I do facades, mockups. 3D renders. drone fly-throughs. 2D spatial designing. color palettes, mood boards and concept iteration. I can do, elevations for changes to kitchen joinery. I can do, your wardrobes, why is all of that listed on the website? One clear paragraph. As a professional qualified interior designer, I can assist you with every touchpoint of a refresh in your interior spaces, from a single color consultation, all the way up to a full in-home, professionally installed, la, la, la. Like just whatever, one little sentence at the top. Reach out if you want any further information about any project, and to have a conversation about where you fit in the below services, I definitely would workshop that a little bit more. It was kind of raw and out of my head, but, having that tells the audience or the person that's landed on your website, oh, she can do other things if they don't immediately recognize themselves in your published offers, without having to publish 900 offers. it shouldn't look like a digital ebook store or, resources. It's just, too much. It confuses your client and then you lose your client. Simple, absolutely sells and really clear outcomes and promises and transformations are going to be way more powerful than just a huge list of what's included in the offer. So after going through all those four checkpoints, You can either put your consumer hat on and look at your website as though you are. a stranger who is in their armchair at nine o'clock at night. You've had two glasses of wine. You know, you need help. You've googled interior designers in the local area, and you've landed on this website. think of it from those objective eyes. They're not your eyes, they're the eyes of this person. Two glasses of wine deep, wanting to get help, and can they? And then you wanna think, right, they're on my Instagram page or they're on my website, Can they pick the right service for them without DMing me? Do they recognize themselves in these services? Like, yes, absolutely. That's all I actually need because I feel industry-wide, the messaging is really broken on websites. the way that we speak to people is. very professional to the point of almost being not patronizing, but it feels like you are othering your clients and you are going to absolutely get a lot more of them reach out and book you if you speak their language. their ideal client is very much struggling. So we started talking about what those struggles really look like. she feels like the kind of client who has ordered all the samples. She's got 15 different travertine samples'cause she knows she wants travertine in the bathroom. She's learned about the sealant we have to use and how she's gonna have to service that tile. Gotten all up in the details and she has to just lock one in, and they're all a warm gravy kind. You know, they're all a warm travertine tile, and some have stronger earthy kind of. Some have a more organic pattern. Some are, you know, they're a little bit different, but effectively she's now got 26 tiles. Pretty similar. She looks to her husband and she's like, okay, I haven't even been able to narrow this down. What's your favorite? Let's just try to narrow some of these down so that I can make the choice. And he's like, Hmm, I don't care. You choose. now for her. She feels so much pressure because she's like, I don't wanna get it wrong. It's an expensive choice. I have to live with this choice. It matters to me. I really wanna get this right. And every time she asks him a question, he rolls his eyes He's just not his thing. He doesn't really think there's that much of a difference. He can't see, the undertones just doesn't care. my messaging with her when I was working with her was, and we're gonna work on this because we need to remove like gender and assumptions. he rolls his eyes and I roll up my sleeves. I want the messaging to be to someone that lands on her website. I got you. he's a bit disinterested and I'm obsessed. So why can't I be your design partner? He gets away with only having to agree on the final outcome, but not be involved in the process. I can partner you in the process. I'm obsessed with this stuff, and it matters to me the way it matters to you. So when he rolls his eyes, I roll up my sleeve. And now we are going to work on that. It's only 24 hours fresh. But it kind of gives you the idea of the sorts of things that I work on when I'm coaching. and I love coaching, marketing'cause it's my thing that I really love to do. I think in another life I should have been writing jingles or worked in advertising. Yeah. But I want that to illustrate to you how much painting the picture and identifying with your ideal client can really make them land on your website. Or if you landed on someone's Instagram page and the pinned post at the top was in their branding and it says, he rolls his eyes and I roll up my sleeves, let's get interior design. It would really pique your interest, right? You would sort of think, okay, I think I'm in the right place here, many of you have an elevator pitch or you have something up your sleeve that sort of explains who you're for, what you do. I'm blessed to be invited behind the scenes of so many businesses, literally thousands of designers this year between. Group coaching, private coaching, conversations, keynotes, all the things, all the conversations, all the examples. And I definitely know the difference between what great looks like and what you need to do to level up that positioning. So today I'm gonna give you a quick. This isn't any one specific person's. It's just one I've mocked up based on an elevator pitch. Just to show you what good, clear messaging looks like on your website. We help busy professionals design and furnish their home top to bottom in under 12 weeks without the overwhelm of showroom appointments or 97 mood boards. So in 10 seconds, I already know exactly who it's for, what the timeline is, and what pain point it solves. And now if I was feeling overwhelmed with things it tells me I'm a busy professional, I don't have time to go to all the different tile shops or be in showrooms, and be at these appointments, I'm already gonna have to meet the trade team at the building site. It's too much. this is telling me without that overwhelm, it's also telling me I'm not gonna do 97. Look and feel. Mood boards decision. I'm gonna make a decision for the property and I'm gonna present that decision to you provided it meets the client brief, we're gonna move in that direction. I'm not all wishy-washy, full of flare, but no actual decision. The very last thing I'm gonna speak about, so we've already done the four checkpoints, but whilst I was thinking about showing you what good look like in terms of what or what excellent looks like in terms of messaging, and if you really do struggle with this, go to Chachi t Take your elevator pitch, which is a combination of what you do, who you help. And how it delivers that end result. Pop it into chat, GBT work back and forth, take out the robotic sounding staff, you know, give it feedback. That's a four outta 10. I'm looking for anything, eight or above. I, I wanna bring more personality. I want attach details about your ideal client and say, I want this person to be like, shut up and take my money when they get to my website. I want this person to hear my one sentence about what I do and go, oh my God, I have found the person who is going to help my problem straight away. I have an AI assistant called Sullivan, and he is trained to. Mira your ideal client with sales copy. So Sullivan's great if you're writing website copy, if you, wanna do the odd caption here or there that soft sells instead of, you know, if you wanna practice, if you wanna write a, a sales script for your team or for yourself, you could work with Sullivan. He's 99 US dollars. I'll pop a link to all of my AI assistants in today's show notes. there are so many, I think there's like 22 and each of them have a. Very specific skill. that's why you don't buy just one that does everything.'cause it would dilute how well they do things. Each one of them has. a playbook in the back, which is full of frameworks transcriptions of mine, things that I teach, things that I have learned, research that I've pulled together. It kind of like Sullivan in his playbook. It will all be about sales, psychology, copywriting and all the things he needs to know to give you. Incredible copy that you can start to use on your website. if you wanna cheat, if you don't wanna go back and forth with feedback, if you just wanna work with someone who's already really good at getting excellent messaging for your website, very clear. You could work with Sullivan. I'll pop him in the show notes. the last thing I was gonna talk about is aligned price, scope, and delivery. when we're doing our whole office suite, even though week two is pricing we do process and deliverables and all that sort of stuff with documentation further on inside of the framework express and along the way. It's really important when you're doing an offer audit. If I'm gonna give you this really quick version on a podcast, it would be remiss of me not to talk about literally sitting down and going, does my pricing and what I include and what I deliver makes sense. So an example a designer offering is six and a half thousand dollars furniture package. That includes one in-home consult, a floor plan layout, one revision digital visualization. So 3D renders, direct ordering and styling guide. there's a four week turnaround. It's all communicated in a clean portal like style, source, box, project, studio, and paired with your professional visuals, everything's in Dropbox. Everything's pulled together. It's priced appropriately. There's a cap on scope because we've said, you get one revision, you get one of these, it's delivered this way. The process is. Smooth as hell. Like it's very, very simple. From start to finish, these things align. You're gonna attract few tire kickers, you're gonna attract way less amount of sort of tire kickers and time waste is, and way more when can we start type of clients with the right copy on your website and a very clear process of what it costs, what's delivered, what is the process. Now we can never say that every single in-home consult can be. Priced in a bespoke way or differently, and that is fine. I think where we get really stuck is that we think our offers are rigid. They can also be indicative of the types of work that I do, I can still go over and do that 5 95 plus GST, 90 minute in-home consultation, and after that 90 minutes I can work with Penelope, extract the scope, do all the things, and I can send you a$46,000. Fee proposal and scope of work for a large project that I've just learned about at your house without ever mentioning it on my website, it randomly sort of falls into full service design, but there could be parts of that that aren't included. You could not be having me do any sort of project. management I use the word project management very nervously. Obviously in different places of Australia and globally you can't say that as an interior designer and in some places you can. So I'm not getting into that discussion in this podcast episode. But it may not include your assistance post the initial selections. It may not include procurement, Whereas on your website, under full service, you might've said onsite meetings, advocacy with trade teams. This is my, workaround for project management. It might be that you say, you know, procurement full, full install, turnkey type. Behaviors so that that person can walk in and just flop onto the couch and live their best life. I hope that today has given you somewhere to save this, send this to a friend, know that we're coming up to a time where we need to refresh and review everything. The biggest investment you can make for 2026 in my mind is personal development specifically around technology. if technology is not your strong suit, you are absolutely. missing out. Things are moving so fast. Automations are here, connections are here. Chat, GPT can talk to all the other websites. It can take action on your behalf. There are. Assistance that AI assistance that I work with on a daily basis that can do things with me for me and instead of me. And I want that for you as well. if you are interested, I have some skill sessions that you can do. You can just run a 90 minute custom skill session to what you need to learn. And I will connect with you on Zoom, share my screen, teach you everything. The wait list is now open for the framework express. The next one is not until February because of my time off. I only take a small group. I have quite a few people that are very keen to be in that February cohort because the last one we did in August just didn't work for them, and I'm not doing another one until February. I'll put the link in the show notes to join the wait list. The wait list will get first. Dibs, to sign up. And once it's full, it's full. I will hopefully. Kick off another one soon after in the new year, I know how much you guys will really benefit from participating in that. Of all the things I've ever offered, the transformation in the framework Express is by far the largest. It's my most fun. By the time these girls are leaving, they have serious, solid business connection friends. They're still meeting weekly or biweekly together, and they have a complete roadmap that they can repeatedly visit. You can go back to week three, any week of the year, and you've got a very strong structure on how to do this audit. And you've got the video replay of me coaching it. So It's incredibly beyond its price point, that's for sure, in terms of the value that it delivers and using all of the AI assistance as well. So that's it from me. I hope that you've enjoyed this. I hope that you will re-listen, And be realistic about the offers that you're currently offering. Don't be afraid to evolve. Do not be afraid to say goodbye. It's the hardest thing that you do in business actually, because you work so hard to invent an offer and to deliver an offer, and you love it. it is such a huge growth point, and only good things can come when you clear out the cobwebs and tidy up this isn't serving me anymore. I don't wanna show up in a lackluster way. I actually wanna bring all the energy that I know that I have and all the impact that I could have and put it towards something new, something fresh, I have never woken up a day since I started my business and not been obsessed with running my business. I dunno if I'm just a randomly joyful person, but I really, really, really love what I do. I loved just designing. I loved being invited into people's homes and I love being invited into people's businesses, it is so true what they say. You don't work a day. Of your life if you love what you do. Yes, I work hard, but I wouldn't have it any other way because I can't imagine what life would look like if I had to work for the benefit of somebody else's dream. and not create the best version of life for myself every day. Anyway, I've loved our chat today and in the end, everything worked okay, right? So I lost a 30 minute podcast episode. I've recorded a 35 minute one. Is it better? Only the universe can tell, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. I'll chat to you next week. 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.