Why your design business feels heavier this year, and what to fix first.

This episode is a reset.

I’m talking honestly about why business feels heavier this year, why motivation is harder to access, and what I actually saw work across 2025 inside real interior design businesses.

I walk through the three business decisions that reduced pressure, improved delivery, and stopped everything feeling so hard. These are the same foundations I teach inside Framework Express.

If you’re listening on release day, Framework Express is open with two places available. Details are below.

This episode is for designers who want traction, not hype.

watch this ep on YouTube >> https://youtu.be/Wsagx-vkDwM

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_01 0:29

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rihanna 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.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Now let's get designing your own success.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Before we start, I wanted to share a gorgeous voice note I received recently from one of my coaching clients. Bradley came to me to help structure his business and implement AI and just get started in the design industry. And here's what he had to say.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

I had the pleasure of being coached privately by Rhiannon in the startup phase of my own interior design studio. What I loved about working with Rhiannon was her energy, and I just felt her enthusiasm for what I was about to embark on. And I couldn't help but feel that that being something a little bit infectious and helped me put my own energy behind my project. I think Rhiannon has some amazing structures in place and really helped me get set up to a really high professional standard to attract the sort of clients that I was after. And the other thing that I'll say about Rihannon is that she just really encouraged me to step into certain parts that seemed a bit scary. But with her encouragement, I felt confident to put myself out on social media and do things that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a little while, but which I just needed a nudge on.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Oh my gosh, thanks, Brad. That's so kind. Just quickly while I'm thinking of it, because it's actually a really good example of what we're talking about today. Brad and I have been workshopping a content series that he is bringing to TikTok as well as Instagram and bravely trying his hands at YouTube as well, which is fantastic. The series is all about flipping a floor plan in two minutes. He's using green screen to break down real real estate listings and show what he'd do with the rooms and how he'd make changes as a qualified designer. He's using AI imagery to support the visuals and the process. It's not replacing his thinking, it's kind of just making everything that he's got planned for these houses bigger and better by visually articulating with AI. They're popping off. They're fantastic. They come out every Friday. I live for them. If you want to follow along, you can find him at Radley Montag on TikTok or Instagram. Before we get into the episode, I actually wanted to acknowledge something and then we're just going to move forward. You may have noticed that I paused the podcast at the end of last year. I haven't been around since November. I paused because real life needed more of me. My husband lost his second close friend to suicide within a six-month period, and we were trying to get our family through that and get the fiber bars packed and overseas, which I spoke about quite a bit last year, for a break that I think we genuinely needed. We were feeling burnt out, all of us. So I made a really deliberate decision. I didn't want to show up in that burnout vibe, and I didn't want to show up flat. I never want to bring you something that's just phoned in, that's done without care, that doesn't have any intention. I put the podcast on hold purposely. Look, it's longer than I actually intended to be on a break, but I just wasn't feeling excited to get into the editing, and I didn't want to show up not ready. That pause helped me protect the quality of what I want to bring to designing success. And now I genuinely feel ready to be back. I'm really excited. Stepping away helped me see things much more clearly, both for my own business and for the industry as a whole. So let's get into it. What's interesting is that while I was gone, I kept noticing the same things showing up everywhere. So I was just doing a bit of observe. Everything just feels so much harder this year. The news feels heavier, the online spaces feel louder if that's even possible, and relationships are feeling more fragmented than ever. I actually noticed people responding to this by pushing more and more content out, more clickbait style or outrageous controversial style content, more opinions, more urgency, more shouting from the rooftops. And I chose a completely different approach. And it's one that we are working with lots of the people inside of my course to do the same. It's about less noise and showing up with content that really serves your audience, whatever your audience needs are. And when I look back at last year across my own business and the designers that I work really closely with, the exhaustion I saw seemed to come from a really deep need to keep up or be inside of that rat race. And I hate that for us. So over the break, I became very intentional about figuring out how we lean into AI without losing ourselves in it. I wanted to guide designers in a way that emphasizes their creativity and not dilute their voice. I think that's everybody's biggest fear with AI. Like I just want it to sound like me, and it isn't like you, you have to put in the effort. Something else showed up very clearly for me last year, and this is what I want to talk about today, and it's around AI, but not in the way that most people are talking about AI. Because what I saw in 2025 wasn't about people using AI too much. It was all about people using AI really badly. And I say that with all the love in my heart, but the word I would use for last year when it comes to AI is laziness. 100%. I don't mean that in a judgmental way. I mean it more descriptively and more in the way where I think what we hate about AI is when people are using it poorly. I saw people just copy and paste things without thinking, posting all those emojis, all those words. I cannot tell you how tired I am of hearing the word chaos, clarity. Honestly, every time I see the word clarity, I take it out of my copy. Like if I'm working with AI and it comes up. And also looking at the formulatic way that AI presents things, so you'll see. But honestly, question mark, here's the kick up, here's the thing. These are all common phrases that we should know better than to use in our copy. So once you are working with AI for a little bit of time, you can recognize patterns as well as a pattern recognition software like AI. And I think that some of the worst examples of misuse of AI that I saw was 100% just posting things. It doesn't sound like you at all. It's just you're like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Or I couldn't, I I'm not a really strong copywriter and I don't write that well, so I'll just copy and paste. And it is lazy. It's letting the tool lead instead of being the leader. The worst outcome from all of that is you end up becoming really disconnected from your own work. So even though the origin idea was yours to begin with, you workshop back and forth. And by the time you just go and copy and paste whatever version of that content you're up to with AI, it still sounds really heavily AI. So you end up being like not loving your own content, which makes total sense because your voice has disappeared, your energy goes with everybody's board, you're hating it, your audience is hating it. And it's actually not really an AI problem. It exposes a problem within AI, but it's not really AI's fault or whatever large language model's fault that your content sucks. The thing with AI that I go on about over and over and over is it will dilute your brand if you ask it to replace you. If the prompts are about it doing the work, it can radically expand your capacity if you ask it to support you. So if it understands with real, I was almost going to say clarity then, I totally am not going to. But if it really deeply understands what the goal is, who you're working to serve, what you do really well, what you do differently to other people, what your voice is. So for example, me having thousands of hours of the podcast transcripts and my coaching transcripts loaded into my Chat GPT or connected to Google Drives full of these examples. I can sometimes see that it's gone a-wall, and I can say, hey, can it go over to the coaching transcripts folder in my Google? Spend a bit of time listening to my voice, and let's try that again, but make it sound like an episode of my podcast that I spoke, or a voice mo or a voice memo to my friend in my voice. And I keep going back and asking it to practice its language based solely around how I speak and what I do. And the difference is chalk and cheese. It's incredible. The mistake people made in 2025 was treating AI like a shortcut instead of a collaborator. Trying to just get to the end result quickly. Shortcut always costs you later. We know this. I think, you know, is it all teachers when you're in about grade two that say do you things like, well, you can cheat, but you're only cheating yourself. And it's kind of the same thing. You're trying to get to the end result really quickly. You're going to get a far worse result doing it that way than working back and forth and teaching it, feed, giving it feedback, teaching it how you met it, teaching it how you think, how you respond, and then it knows what to do and can do a better job next time. I heard from so many designers in 2025 that they were exhausted. And it's not usually because they're doing too much design work, sadly. It's usually because the work that they are doing just requires way too much of them. It's all of their brain, all of their memory, all of their emotional energy, all of that decision making. We already make, I think I read the other day that we already make between seven and a half and fifteen thousand decisions per design job. I think I need to say that again. Seven and a half to fifteen thousand individual decisions are made in a full service design job. So that is incredible. But it is a lot of decision making. And I think that we need to think about how do we bring AI in as an assistant and use it properly and give yourself some capacity back. And we don't want AI to be doing the creative thinking for you, and we don't want it to be doing all the fun stuff that we love doing inside of the design industry. Because that's what you really want to show up for. That's the stuff that you really want to keep doing. What I want to see is us get better and better at using AI for the heavy admin things that actually mean you have to block out full days in your business and you can't be out seeing new clients and doing new consults, seeing new clients, because you just know that you have to do so much admin things. And I think if we could triage really well this year and kind of go, okay, these are the administration tasks that I have to be present for. Like I'm gonna reconcile my own invoices, I'm going to do things where I think it's a really good use of my time. You know, I'm gonna record this podcast. Yes, the technology is there for me to have to have written this up and just get AI to do it. No. I'm also leaning into big scary things this year. I'm gonna pop this on YouTube. I'm going to, even though I'm just sitting here in my thrifted Michael Jackson thriller t-shirt and in my studio, Luna's asleep in the corner. It's like super relaxed. To me, that's horrifying to show up on YouTube in that way. I figure if my students just starting out like Bradley can do it, I can do it. It's been on my to-do list for so long. And just like the podcast, you know, I've put it off for years longer than it needed to be put up. So I'm going to commit to getting this up onto YouTube because I've said it out loud now. But what we really want to do is be using AI, not to do that creative thinking, but to just clear some space around and take up some of the jobs that it's really easy for it to support you in. So lately I've been experimenting with something that has genuinely shifted how much capacity I have in my own business. Instead of using AI as a one-off tool, you know, just to write it, edit it, I've been building four little mini ecosystems inside of the project area of Chat GPT. And when I say ecosystems, what I mean is I've uploaded my actual knowledge base. So my connected drives have all of my framework, my brand language, past coaching call transcripts, like I was talking about, things I say over and over to designers, patterns that I see, decisions I make. There's four playbooks of things that I want it to understand. Like I'll have a playbook of what the algorithm's looking for across all the social media platforms for my content writing ecosystem, or I will have a playbook of the entire Framework Express 12-week business course that I've written. I've already delivered that multiple times over. So all of the recordings of the deliverables are there. All of the things, all of the learning outcomes, all of the lesson plans, the facilitator notes, all of that lives in the back end of that particular ecosystem. And it really helps me whenever I go to that project and I'm talking about how I can better support girls inside of this 12-week business sprint. It knows exactly what I'm talking about from the beginning. And it's really changed everything so far in my business for this year. There's hundreds of hours of context, and I think that's what matters the most. When I work inside the project, I'm not starting from zero every time. I'm working inside an environment that understands my business almost as well as I do. That's how much context I've given it. But what that means in practice is that when I'm coaching, I can bounce ideas around. It could pull out actual language I've used with clients before so we can make some really targeted content. When I'm creating social media content, for example, it's not just guessing my voice, it's drawing from years of listening to it. So again, if I wanted to write a podcast, if I'm thinking strategically, it's referencing patterns I've already named, not just generic advice. I can sort of say, based on what I tried last year, what should we be doing? These are my ideas, this is where, what strategy I've come up with, how could I improve it? Uh, the other day I did a 90-minute coaching call on my return from Canada. It was my first one of the year. And I uploaded inside of one of these coaching ecosystems. And I said, you know, let's roast this. Let's show me what are my biggest opportunities for personal development as a coach. Where am I really strong and where am I falling down completely? Or give me a full analysis. Let's work through this. And with such an eye-opener because it's very hard to be objective about these things when you're running the coaching call and you're busy thinking about the client's needs and you're not always coming back and going, you know, how was that handled? Was that the very best version of me as a coach? What can I learn? How can I improve? I love seeing the results of that and implementing it into the next call and seeing how I can show up and support you better and better throughout the years. That's not laziness. That's the opposite of that word that I saw so often in 2025. That's the leadership, that thinking in a totally different way and saying, you know, I know how to use AI really well, but how do I create these systems that I can then go on to share with other designers in the industry so that I know that they will then be able to have their own ecosystems and show up and talk in these private spaces with something that understands their business as richly as they do. I'm never asking it to think for me. I'm asking it to hold on to all that context so I don't have to carry everything in my head and re-explain myself every single time I show up with AI.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

I feel like it's the bit that most people miss.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

People are still side-eyeing AI. I cannot believe I was having conversations with you in, you know, in 2023 about how AI supports business owners. I was having these conversations in 2023 about how AI will support the industry and what we can look to immediately implement into our business. And I have gone on in that time to create so many solutions for designers, an automated proposal generator that just writes the client proposal. That exists right now. You can buy it on my website, you get it for free inside of my Framework Express course. Um, I uh also give it to you when you private coach with me. So all of these things exist and they just get better and better. And I still have conversations with women who are like, not sure it's for me. I'd like to do things the old way. And I just think there's such a great opportunity to have a hybrid approach. You don't have to revolutionalize, you don't have to get a computer science degree, you don't have to only use AI. But I think you are doing yourself a disservice if you flat out refuse to learn any of it. And I agree so much of AI is really generic, and that is because people are not using it in this way. They give service level prompts and they get service level outputs. And when we slow down and teach it how you think, what you care about, how you make decisions, what good actually looks like in your business, what you, you know, what kind of qualifications you have, what you do differently to other people, it just stops being a robot spitting out large language pattern material and words. And it behaves way more like a well-briefed assistant or somebody that you've just hired into your business. It's some and somebody that you expect not to forget things because now it has the context, it doesn't forget. So this was something I'm going to be teaching inside the very next cohort of the Framework Express. Which, by the way, just side note, dun-doo. I don't have a little side note sound effect, but I am desperately thinking of changing the name of this course. When I named the framework, it was 2022, and no one was using that terminology really. And now it is such a buzzword. Everywhere I go online, it's like, download my framework for this and my framework for that, and that's fine, but I'm just so over it when what the framework express delivers, the name doesn't deliver. Do you ever feel like that in your business? Because I'm sort of like, it's a 12-week business boot camp. We go through 12 separate topics. We absolutely break them apart, restructure them, nail them, make them work for you and where you're at in your business. And we really assess that feeling of my business took off organically and everything's been working okay and it's fine. Like I can do the thing, even if I am working late nights and weekends and whatnot. But I've never sort of changed my approach. I still work like an employee, like because I've just never really thought about how a CEO shows up and what the differences are. And I haven't really learned AI the way that I should. And I really want to get clear on my services and understand my position in the market and learn to pitch to PR more, send out pitch packs, get brave, understand my local area marketing isn't just about these are the postcodes that I work in. Like I've got some amazing tips on local area marketing specifically. And for most interior designers, the opportunity really is in the local area marketing. Digital Digital marketing is very important, but it is a secondary piece to your local area marketing. Because what is the point of getting somebody in Darwin to fall in love with you if you are a full service designer who works in a suburb of New South Wales? It just doesn't make sense to me. And that is kind of an approach from 2019. Instagram's changed, everything's changed. It's time for us to now go, okay, let's build a little portfolio. So anyone checking out if I'm a bot or a real person is going to find a really beautiful Instagram and get to see a bit of what I do. But the opportunity is in the local area marketing. I'm just all about it. I can't wait to get stuck into the next cohort's different areas. I already know where they operate out of, and I know that there is so much opportunity. And this is where I see, you know, when I talk about capacity opening up, it means that I'm talking about implementing better tools like the use of AI, automation, systems, SOPs, like just understanding how to pull everything together. And when I say it opens capacity, you get to choose what you do with that capacity. I'm not like, yep, that's scale, scale, scale, grow, grow, grow, fill more clients, take more clients. Not really. If you want to just say to me, oh, that opened up capacity that allowed me to have a work lifestyle balance, or it allowed me to close my laptop at three o'clock and uh be present with my kids without pretending that's what I do and then going and working another six hours at night just to keep up with what everyone else looks like they're doing on Instagram. All designers are already really busy. This isn't suitable for startups. You have to have had like a solid pipeline of clients before. The Framework Express kicks off on Friday. And if you're listening to this in real time, there are two places left. At time of recording, and I'm recording this on Tuesday, the 3rd of February. So definitely get in touch with me. You can DM me on Instagram at Oleander underscore and underscore finch. Oh my gosh, it's been so long. Come and chat to me about it. Or better yet, chat to anybody that's been inside of the Framework Express. I never hide it. Scroll through, you'll find testimonials. Go to that person's Instagram, message them privately, and ask them what their experience is, because I guarantee you every single one of them raves about, oh my God, that time I took 12 weeks to work on my business. And it's not a lot. It's 90 minute calls on a Friday. We're gonna do Friday calls, bit of homework on the weekend, never more than an hour's homework, and complete transformation. I know that everyone, even the really, really busy designers out there listening to this, know that. If they can commit that two and a half hours a week over 12 weeks, what working on their business at that level would actually do to their business, instantly save them 15 hours a week. So it's the return on that investment is like the math is 100% mathing. It's this is not the year to keep complaining about AI, about AI taking your job. It's not gonna, it's not details oriented. It doesn't have the precedence that you have, it hasn't been on the job sites that you do, it can't communicate with trades the way that you do. It's actually kind of a shit designer, if I'm honest. So I'm not worried about that at all. It doesn't think like you, it just isn't coming for your job. But what it can do is stop you from doing absolutely everything alone, especially when so many things already exist that it can just do automatically for you. And that is the upgrade that all interior designers actually need. I'm so glad to be back. Thanks for having me in your ears. Thanks for spending time. I saw the downloads when I was away. Thanks for catching up on all the episodes. I would love to hear if there's anyone you'd like me to reach out to and interview this year. Again, just come and DM me over on Instagram, send me an email, whatever. If you're not on my email list, I send out some really highly targeted business tips and lots of AI tips and other things every single Friday. So if you're not on the email list, please head to my website www.oliandrovinch.com, subscribe. Um I'd love to have you there. I work really hard on trying to bring valuable tips to you. Just look, and they're different to the podcast and they're different to Instagram. It's its own channel. And I get some really lovely feedback from designers and some beautiful conversations started in my inbox. So thank you for that. Uh welcome to 2026. I know it's been a hard start in terms of motivation. I'm definitely feeling that alongside you. And I'm really excited to see what the next 12 weeks brings this new cohort of Express and how different their businesses will look by Easter and mine as well. And hopefully yours if you're implementing anything you're hearing on the podcast. All right, I'll chat to you next week. Bye for now. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success. 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 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 underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www.olleanderandfinch.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.