Ep 33 Fully Booked Starts Here: Pricing Like a Pro as an Interior Designer with Lisa-marie Elkhadraoui

🎙️ Fully Booked & Highly Paid Podcast

EPISODE 33 The Truth About Pricing for Interior Designers (ft. Lisa-Marie Elkhadraoui)

Struggling to price your services confidently? Feeling like you’re winging it every time you send a quote? You’re not alone, and this episode is the wake-up call every interior designer needs.

You can purchase Fully Booked and Highly Paid, my golden pricing formula every interior designer needs, the same one that has collectively generated £1.3m in 22 months in over 40 women's businesses. ACCESS HERE

In this episode, Lisa-Marie Elkhadraoui, you interior designer turned business coach, pulls back the curtain on the pricing chaos that’s holding so many designers back.

She’s been there: second-guessing every quote, hustling hard, undercharging, and still not feeling profitable.

Now? She teaches creatives how to confidently own their value, package their brilliance, and get fully booked and highly paid without burning out.

This is the pep talk meets pricing strategy session your business has been waiting for.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why pricing feels so overwhelming in the early years (and how to shift that)
• The problem with “flexible” pricing (spoiler: it creates chaos)
• How to structure your pricing to build confidence and attract better clients
• The difference between time-based vs. value-based pricing
• Why your mindset matters more than your math
• How to stop feeling guilty for charging what you’re worth

This episode is perfect for:

→ Interior designers in their first few years of business
 → Creatives who want to stop winging it with pricing
 → Designers ready to step into CEO energy and start charging based on value

📲 If this episode hit home, don’t wait. DM our team on teamdesignbossdiary@gmail.com  and say “I’m ready to be fully booked + highly paid”  and we’ll guide you to the next step.

Tune in now, and let Lisa-Marie help you turn your pricing chaos into clarity and confidence.

And as always if you have loved this episode we would love for you to leave a review and if you screenshot this podcast and share it on your socials, tagging @Design_Boss_Diary in then we have a special gift waiting just for you. 

See you in the next episode you lovely lot! xx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

To all the interior designers listening, tell me if this sounds familiar. You're incredibly talented at transforming spaces and your friends and family adore your work. They rave about your style, your vision, and your ability to bring a room to life. But when it comes to running a business and talking about pricing, you feel like you want to run a mile sometimes. Do you second guess every quote you send, wondering if it's too much or maybe it's not enough? And do you find yourself rewriting your fees for every new client, trying to land on a number that feels right? I can see you're nodding. And do you ever lower your prices just to win the job and end up feeling resentful before the project has even begun? Now, if you've been nodding, I want you to know you are not alone. And more importantly, it doesn't have to be this way. I see and hear this all the time. So today I'm sharing something that no one prepared me for when I started my interior design business. In my early years, I was so desperately close to giving up more than once. I launched the studio in December 2016, and that was off the back of working in an award-winning luxury property development and construction company where I ran a department at the age of 27 and collectively contributed to a portfolio of 55 million. But the first few years in my own business, Mosca Interior Design, were brutal. Absolutely brutal. I had so much passion and reached out to so many people to ask for advice, but doors kept getting slammed left, right, and centre. It was savage. No one wanted to open up and answer my questions about how do you create a profitable interior design business? What way do you price? It got to the point where I was Googling how to write a welcome letter to a client whilst also wondering what the heck I should even be charging, and I was constantly second-guessing myself because there were other designers out there that just seemed to have it all together. I also, and I'm so ashamed to admit it, I used to look at what other interior designers were pricing, charging, and try and scrabble together, how the hell am I going to price my services? And this also came with massive waves of imposter syndrome. Even though I had already achieved so much under the companies in my seven previous years and took three big industry awards, I still felt completely lost. So today we're diving into the truth about pricing, the part that no one prepares you for when you launch your design business. And I'm going to walk you through two of the three powerful shifts that completely transformed how I price, sell, and run my studio, and the exact shifts that's helped me go from undercharging and overwhelmed to fully booked and highly paid. Now, these aren't just fluffy mindset tips. Oh no, these are real practical changes that took my business from 75,000 to 250,000 in just 12 months, and that I've now taught to dozens of other designers who collectively generated over 950,000 in the last 14 months. So if you're tired of feeling unsure every time you send a quote, and if you're ready to finally charge what you're worth with confidence and clarity, then this episode is for you. Because when you learn how to price like a businesswoman, you stop hoping they'll say yes and start knowing your work is worth it. I'm Lise Marie Elkadrawi. I'm an interior design business coach, a mentor and founder of Mosca Design and Style and Design Boss Diary. And five years ago, I was working non-stop, quoting by the hour, and hoping each job would be the one that made things feel easier. But every quote felt like a gamble in my world. Every client negotiation chipped away at my confidence, and my business was stuck at $75,000 a year. Fast forward out of COVID in 2021, I discovered a handful of powerful pricing shifts that changed everything, and more importantly, I stopped dreading pricing, and I started owning my role as a business owner, and that's what we're going to dive into today. So I want to share with you shift one, which is structure creates freedom. Let's start with the number one thing I see holding designers back. And it's more common than you think. They're recreating their pricing every single time. They're opening a blank Word document to build a new proposal from scratch. And they're pulling numbers from gut feelings, Googling what I should charge for interior design and hoping it feels right. Sound familiar? So here's what I want you to hear loud and clear. Freedom doesn't come from flexibility, it comes from structure. Now I know you might be thinking, but Lisa, I want to be flexible with my clients because all of their needs are different. And yes, I hear you. Flexibility in design, it's beautiful. But flexibility in pricing is often chaos, disguised as kindness. And what you actually need is a structured pricing foundation that gives you the flexibility within boundaries. Because structure gives you a sense of calm during your consultations. It gives you a sense of calm when you are quoting for a job profitably. And confidence when you're speaking about money. Now here's what this looks like practically. Step one, your core services. You should never be scrambling to figure out what you offer, whether it's a design only package, a full service transformation, a kitchen and bathroom design. Your offers should be pre-packaged and aligned to your clients' needs. That way, on a discovery call or during an initial consult, you can clearly say, based on what you've shared, this sounds like a great fit for my full home design package. I'm going to walk you through what that includes. Do you see and hear how much more confident that is coming across? Now, step two, know how to map out your clients' needs to your offer suite. So your clients don't always know what they need. They often struggle and they feel completely overwhelmed. But you should know what they need. So you need to be able to listen deeply and translate their wish list into one of your structured service paths. This is going to build massive trust from the beginning. So when you're listening to them on a discovery call, you instantly can say, We can completely take all of that overwhelm away and support you, and this offering is going to be perfect for doing so. Because suddenly you're not guessing or stalling or saying, Um, okay, I'm gonna get back to you with a quote, you're confidently guiding them into a package and service in your business like the businesswoman you should be. And step three, building a simple pricing model that's scalable. And this means consistent base rates, clear scopes, repeatable pricing logic. When you know your packages, your pricing becomes plug-and-play, not panic inducing. Imagine walking out of a consultation knowing exactly what to charge and sending a polished proposal by the end of that working day. That's not just professional, it's profitable. And look, I'm not saying your business needs to be rigid or robotic, quite the opposite. But structure gives you the freedom to flow, to spend more time on design, not the boring admin, to speak to your clients with authority, not anxiety, and to stop wondering, am I charging too much? And start saying, this is what it costs to work with me and here's why. So I want all of that to just land for a few moments and take in how that feels. Because when I started to shift my mindset, understand how to charge and craft my services and what to price, I started showing up completely differently. Now the second shift price from value, not time. Let's talk about a shift that changed everything for me. And for over 35 women I've worked with, I want you to stop pricing like a freelancer and start pricing like the business owner that you are. And here's what I mean: most designers, and maybe you're one of them listening, are stuck in a loop of tracking hours, justifying fees, sending safe quotes to avoid rejection, or even worse, they're discounting their own value before the client even asks. You've told yourself, well, this only took me five hours, or it's a small space, so I probably shouldn't charge that much, or they might say no if I go too high. But let me tell you the truth. I had to learn the hard way. You're not selling ours, you're selling a transformation. Okay? You're not selling ours. You're selling a transformation. No one is paying you to spend eight hours scrolling Pinterest for a dining table. They're paying you for this. A room that reflects their identity, a space that works with their lifestyle, and a home they're proud to live in and share with others. They're paying you for what it feels like to live inside your design. And that feeling is priceless. But here's the thing: if your pricing is tied to time, and if you're constantly tracking and calculating and justifying, you're not owning your value, you're minimizing it. And here's what happens when you price from value instead. You completely show up differently. And when you know your work is transformational, your energy shifts. You, yes, you become the expert in the room, not the interior designer waiting for approval. Your clients trust you more because you're not sheepishly delivering a quote, you hope they're gonna accept. You're presenting a confident fee that reflects what you deliver, and you stop apologizing, you stop shrinking, and you stop overloading your packages just to feel worth it. So let's get really real here. Imagine this: you've just had a brilliant discovery call, the client's really excited, you've uncovered all of their needs, and when they ask you for the price, instead of scrambling to add all the hours up in your head, this is a high-touch design experience, and for me to deliver you a bespoke quotation, you can book one of my design consultations in at and name your price, and I'll be able to walk you through exactly what you need, and then we can send a comprehensive bespoke design proposal over that encompasses all of your requirements. Let me check my availability and we can get you booked in. Now that's what pricing like a businesswoman sounds like. And this isn't theory, it's working in real design businesses right now. One of my clients messaged me recently and said, After purchasing fully booked and highly paid, I've successfully landed my first project that's been properly priced and it's £10,000. I would have never charged that before. Your guidance has made such a difference. I just want to let you sink in. That is a £10,000 project. That's not just a pay rise, that's a mindset shift. That is the power of pricing from transformation, not time. And when you stop undercharging to feel affordable and start charging based on the real value that you bring, not only do you attract better clients, but you finally feel aligned with your pricing and your business. And another designer that recently joined my live fully booked and highly paid Zoom call and shared this right after said, Lisa's guidance is next level. Her energy is contagious, and her steps are so clear and practical. I'm so excited to dive in, no fluff, just real strategies that work. Now, these are women just like you, talented, passionate designers who are done playing small, and once they made the value-based pricing shift, their businesses started working for them, not against them. I've helped 35 other women do the same, collectively generating over 950,000 using the exact system I now teach in my course, fully booked and highly paid. So if you've been stuck in how many hours will this take me mode, it's time to start asking better questions. What is the transformation I create and what is that really worth? Because when you start pricing from that place, everything changes. And this is only shift two. Shift three is where we tackle profit guilt and we unlock the mindset shifts that most women never see coming, and we do that inside Fully Booked and Highly Paid, which is my three-part course: a step-by-step pricing and profitability framework made just for interior designers. And in this program, you'll receive the profitable pricing method, mapping out service tiers, pricing with clarity, and protecting your time with a structured, profitable offer suite that's easy to quote from. I give you the CEO Mindset Toolkit to break free from money fears, raise your rates, and feel worthy of success when you set confident minimum project rates that protect your time and energy. And a full set of templates and tools, example contracts, onboarding forms, proposal documents, and more to sell like a pro. So building a quoting process that takes you from how much should I charge to here's your proposal with zero hesitation is exactly what you need. You don't have to stay stuck in pricing panic. You don't have to keep guessing or tweaking or hoping the client says yes, because you deserve a business that's going to work for you, and it starts with your pricing. So if you're stuck in overwhelm around pricing and feel like you're in that rut constantly, please reach out to a member of our team. Our details are in the show notes below, and let's get you fully booked and highly paid in no time.