Ep 90 Stop Discounting Your Self-Worth, Set Real Boundaries and Price Like a Business Owner

Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue podcast, the interior design business podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside.

Today's conversation comes from a real mentoring conversation I had this week with a wonderfully talented interior designer.

A lead asked her a simple question:

"How much?"

Within two messages she had quoted a price, discounted herself, created an entirely new cheaper service on the spot, and talked herself out of her own value before the client relationship had even begun.

And here's the part I really want you to sit with.

The client could feel it.

They could feel the uncertainty.
They could feel the panic.
They could feel the desperation.

Because whether we realise it or not, clients can sense when we're negotiating against ourselves.

In this episode, I want to unpack exactly what happened in that conversation because it highlights three of the biggest mistakes I see interior designers making when it comes to pricing, services and boundaries.

We explore why answering pricing questions too early can undermine your authority, how "bitty services" are often a symptom of a lack of clarity in your business model, and why allowing clients to dictate timelines creates stress, overwhelm and scope creep.

This is a conversation about building stronger structures, creating clear processes, and positioning yourself as the business owner you truly are.

Because confidence doesn't come from pretending to feel confident.

Confidence comes from having systems, boundaries and processes that support you.

Inside this episode we discuss:

• Why pricing is rarely the real problem

• What happens when you answer "How much?" too early

• The hidden cost of negotiating against yourself

• Why creating cheaper services on the spot damages your authority

• How to structure eDesign services properly

• Setting boundaries around deadlines and client communication

• Why clients should never dictate your process

• The relationship between pricing, positioning and confidence

• Creating a business that feels stable rather than desperate

This episode is for the interior designer who knows they're talented but still finds themselves discounting, over-explaining, over-delivering or compromising their value when faced with resistance.

You do not need to become harder.

You do not need to become colder.

You simply need stronger structures.

Because when your pricing is clear, your services are well defined and your boundaries are protected, desperation has nowhere left to live.

If this conversation resonates with you and you'd like support creating profitable services, stronger pricing structures and boundaries that support your business growth, you can explore Fully Booked & Highly Paid, my complete pricing and service accelerator designed specifically for interior designers.

Fully Booked and Highly Paid HERE 

Continue the conversation and connect with Lisa-Marie HERE.

Feel free to DM or tag Lisa-Marie after listening to the episode.

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 lovely! xx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A designer messaged a lead this week and the lead asked a simple question, how much? And within two messages, she'd created a price and then invented a brand new cheaper service on the spot and talked herself completely out of her own worth. Two messages. That is all it took. And here's the part that should make every single one of you sit up without you most probably even realizing the client can absolutely feel this. They can feel the wobble in the voice. They can feel the discounts coming before it's even landed. And because everyone has at some point acted out desperation, clients have a nose for it. This happens so much in our industry. So today I want to take you inside that exact moment, anomalously, of course, with so much love because there is a lesson in it that is costing you clients money and authority without you even realizing. So let's dive in. Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue Podcast. I'm Lisa Marie Elkadrawi, and if you're new here, I'm a multi-entrepreneur across three businesses. I have an award-winning working interior design studio of 10 years running, Mosca Design and Style, and I mentor and coach women in this industry to build businesses that are as profitable as the work they put out in the world. Plus, we've got a phenomenal property development and construction company, which I absolutely love, servicing London and the home counties. Now, I'm not coaching and mentoring you from textbook, right? I'm coaching and mentoring you from inside the industry of 16 years. I am living it, I am breathing it, and I have been across all spaces. I've been private residential, commercial, show homes, staging, you name it. We have done it and we have won multi awards for it. And this is why I am lifting the lid on conversations like this to support you, the interior design business owner, whether you're in commercial, private research, home staging, show homes, I'm here to support you in your businesses. Now, the conversation I want to unpack with you today came from a message this week. And this designer, she is absolutely wonderful at her craft. She is a brilliant interior designer. She's in the thick of building her business and she's pivoting. And what happened in the message is something I see again and again and again. So here's the setup, right? She'd lost a potential client over the cost of a room transformation. A lead had asked her how much a living room would be, and she said, off the cuff over message, oh, about £500. Now the lead said, Oh no, that's way too much. And in a panic, the designer went straight back to her and said, Oh, actually, I've just added a new service, so that would be less. Let me know if you're interested in the new service, and it's gonna be under £500. Now, I want you to really sit with that because on the surface it looks like a pricing conversation. It completely isn't, okay? The price is the symptom. What actually happened is the moment she felt resistance, she negotiated against herself. She invented a cheaper service to rescue a lead who'd already shown her that they didn't value her work. And when I spoke to her about this, and I said it with so much love, these are acts of business desperation. Okay. And do you know what she said back to me? She said, I am desperate, I'm broken, and I know the client can sense that. So she even recognised that herself. And when we're at this point of business where we're acting out of a scattergun approach and acting out of desperation, we're plucking figures out of thin air, we're not applying logical formula to our business model, or we're not taking a client through the appropriate channels to onboard them, this can happen. And this is why I say time and time again with a broken wheel, like a broken record, sorry, that you've got to have a well-oiled machine in place, a place to give your clients surprise and delight when they land down and take them through that process. That's what they need and want. Okay. And that right there, from this lovely lady's act of saying, I am desperate and broken, and the client can sense that. This is what we're going to unpick in this whole episode. Because she's completely right, the client can sense this. Desperation isn't something you can just hide behind a nicely worded email. It leaks out of every price you discount, every question you rush to answer, every deadline you let someone else set. It is an energy, and your leads feel it before they even sign. So today I'm going to walk you through three places this desperation shows up and exactly how to turn each one around. Because here's my promise to you: by the end of this episode, you'll have a structure in place you can put what makes you look and feel like the business owner you actually are without acting out of desperation. So, lesson one: the moment you answer the price question, you have already lost my friend. Okay, so let's go back to the message exchange. A lead lands in your inbox and says, How much ish does it cost? Don't you don't you just love that client when it says how much ish? Like, give me a ballpark figure, just so I can understand if we can start this conversation. And I know, I know what happens in your body. You can kind of feel this pull. Someone's asked you a question, so you have to answer it. Oh my gosh, I've got a lead, I have to answer it. Now, this designer said it perfectly. She said, I can't not answer a question. I can't not reply to a message. And if someone messages me, I just have to reply, I have to give them the answer. And I told her the truth, which is that I am exactly the same at times. However, it is one of my own struggles that I have learnt to really reframe and react in a different way, which has supported me more in business. When someone asks me a direct question, every cell in my body wants to completely answer it immediately and be helpful because that's the type of person I am. But that instinct, that lovely, people-pleasing, helpful instinct is the very thing that is potentially costing you. And there is a better way to deal with this, and we're gonna unpick this together because as a business owner, you've got to learn to hold the gumpowder card back, okay? You've got to learn that there is a process. So let me give you an analogy that I gave her because I think this is gonna stick with you. So imagine you walk into Topshop, okay? You walk into Topshop on the High Street, and you march up to the manager on the shop floor and say, Don't tell me the retail price. I want to know what you bought this whole rail for from the wholesaler. What's the what's the trade price? Now, the manager is gonna exactly know what they've paid for it because they mark up their clothes enormously. That's the business model that they do, you know, across the whole industry, across the whole fabric trade, retail industry. But are they going to turn around and go, oh yeah, absolutely here, have the whole rail, 50 quid, it's on, you know, it's on trade. Of course not. They're going to smile and say, the price is on the tag, and that's the price. You do not get to walk into someone's business and dictate the answers. There's a process. And if you want to work with me, we go through that process. So these particular clients they don't get to frog march into your business and demand an answer on the spot. So here is what that looks like in practice. And I want you to actually use this. When a lead asks for a price over a message or an email, you don't just give a number. You say, This is my booking procedure, and I'd love to talk you through the project. I'd be delighted to jump on a free 25-minute, 30-minute discovery call so I can really understand what you're trying to achieve and make sure if I'm the right fit to support you in your interior design journey. That's it. That that's the whole reply. And if they ask again, you say beautifully and warmly, as a business owner, thank you so much for that question. It's exactly the kind of thing that we're going to discover on the discovery call and you leave it there. You put your links below. Now, if they're a red flag client, they are going to do this. They are not going to tap that link and book. If they're a genuine client that generally wants to work with you, they're going to click the link, they're going to book, and they're going to meet you on the discovery call. So that's instantly how you know who a red flag client is. Because think about what the discovery call actually does for you. It gets you in front of them. You get to see the whites of their eyes, as I always say, because it's so good to feel the energy of the other person, and you get to take them through your process from inquiry all the way through to the end result, and you get to position that on the discovery call. You get to set the tone of the discovery call, and you get to allow them to see how good you are at your craft. You then position a paid consultation at the end of it. And it's a rinse and repeat system you run every single time. Not a thing you reinvent in a panic when someone flinches at a number or someone asks you a sporadic quick question. And here's the kicker. By blurting out all about £500 over a message, the designer didn't just give away a number, she gave away her justification for a consultation fee. She downgraded herself before the relationship with that client had even started. So she set a precedence and not the one that she wanted. Now, lesson two. Bitty services comes from a bitty identity. Now, let's talk about what she did next because it's so common and so important. The second the lead said £500 was too much, she invented a new smaller service to accommodate them. It was a different room service, cheaper and more bittier. And I had to stop her because this is this is the trap that I see. When we start carving little services out to accommodate every individual person who hesitates, all we're doing is creating bitty services. And bitty services comes from a lack of identity. You are fragmenting your offer because in that moment you're fragmenting your own authority. So let me give you a rule, and I want you to write this one down. A service is a service. The price is the price. And obviously, I have got fully booked and highly paid, and my pricing and service accelerator. If you want to dive into pricing, it bespoke for you or start to understand how to price profitably. But a service is a service and the price is the price. So here's how I explained it to the designer. She is going through one of my pricing services at the moment. So we really brought it back into those pricing modules. So if a client turns around and says, actually, we're keeping the sofa, we're keeping the cabinet, but everything else is going, do you suddenly start slashing your costs down? No, you don't. You say, absolutely fine. It doesn't change the price. If anything, it's more work because now I've got to survey those pieces, document them, and source around them so the whole scheme still aligns. The same is true for eDesign. If someone wants an e-design service, the price is the price. The offer is the offer. You get up to a certain number of furniture items, a certain number of accessories, paint colours, wallpaper options, a pendant, a table lamp. Whether the client keeps some of their existing pieces or not does not change the price. You don't go, oh well, it's not going to be a full e-design service, it's only part of the room. So actually, we'll create a new service and we'll cut it all in half. The designer that I spoke to raised something really honest here, and I want to share it because so many of you are going to relate to this. She said she's been moving away from eDesign altogether. She didn't really enjoy working on homes that she couldn't actually see in person, and she didn't like waiting on clients to send loads of things over. She wants to be in the thick of people's homes, in the rooms, doing the in-person work. And she had a conversation with someone earlier on in the week who said, Why don't you just throw that back in? Why don't you actually do it? And when she asked me, Do you think I should just put it back in? Obviously, my answer was offer it. 100% offer it, but offer it as a proper structured service if it feels aligned and right to you. If you've taken it out, you've taken out for a reason. Don't put in a watered-down part and part thing you reach for when someone can't really afford the real work. Look at it as a restructured service in its own right. Here's the reframe. I asked her to ask herself some really honest questions. And I'm gonna ask them to you too if you're in this particular situation. When past e-design projects have gone really, really badly, was it the client's fault or was it your fault? Or was it she was actually asking them for everything she needed up front, but she actually hadn't put that into our onboarding process? Was she asking for photographs of all four walls, a wide angle shot, the window shot? Was she asking them to mark up the lightest and darkest points in the room? Was she asking for the full dimensions? Because if you haven't asked the client to do all of the prep work and you haven't given them a proper intake process, then you've set yourself up to fail from the very start. You didn't have the right materials to work with. So of course you're going to resent the client clients when it doesn't actually give you the right things to kick off the project with. Now that's not the client being difficult, that's an identity gap in your system. So you've then got to go in and address how that system actually works. And this is another thing I see in the in the industry is that we time and time again create a service, but we don't actually allow ourselves to properly put the systems in place. So the structure I gave her was this your full interior design service is your crown jewel. It's like the Dalai Lama of your office suite, it's your absolute everything. Your full in-person interior design service is like, oh, this is what they go for. And your eDesign sits beneath it as your beautiful accessible entry-level option if you want to. You get what you pay for. And this is the clever part, you can add boltons if you wish. If a client was is within, say, 15 miles of your postcode, they can pay an additional survey fee. They can be pay an additional service fee of 300 or 400 for you to come out and actually survey the room in person and do that onboarding process for them. But that's just a paid bolt-on. The rest of the service is remote, you don't get to speak or see the designer. And it's not you going, oh, you're local, let me just pop round for free. That free pop round is a full interior design service in disguise, and that should be paid for. Now, lesson three, you set the deadline always. Okay, now the third place desperation shows up, and this one is the structural backbone of everything we've talked about. The designer told me one of the reasons she'd come to dread remote work was that clients were, in her words, really rubbish at communicating. They wouldn't get back to her, they wouldn't answer her questions properly, she'd be waiting and waiting and waiting and then scrambling to hit a deadline that they set. And I stopped her right there in her tracks because listen to me on this one. They do not set the deadline. You set the deadlines in your business. No one. No one set deadlines in your business except from you. This is scope creep, and we covered that in last week's episode. And like I say, scope creep is never the client's fault, it's the designer's fault because the designer hasn't set the parameters. You've allowed the customer to be the one driving when it should be you. So here's the structure. When you put your eDesign service on your website, you state clearly that there is a 21 or 30 working day turnaround from the point all the information is received, not from when they inquire, from when everything you need is in your hands. And if the information doesn't come through, the deadline simply moves. You message them warmly and firmly and say, Hi, we've not received all of your information, your service can't begin until we have absolutely everything. And there's a 21 working day lead time from the date we actually receive it. Here's what's still outstanding, and that's it. You've already got their money, they've paid up front, and we're going to come to that in a minute. So it sits in a holding account. You don't touch it until you've done the service, you don't lift a finger until they deliver. No skin off your nose, absolutely. In the meantime, you focus on sales, you focus on needs and visibility, and the moment their information lands, the service can begin. You have to be really clear with that and really, really firm. And yes, you have to be cutthroat because this designer said to me, I just want to itch to get going, and when they don't provide the information, I just I really want to get going with it, and it really can frustrate me. And I've said to her, but you've got so many other things to be getting on with. If the client's paid and they're not giving you the information, it just sits there, like I said, and you chase and you chase, and you don't start anything till you've got it. You've got a million and one other things as a business owner to be doing, and this flows straight into how you take payment because the deposit structure is a boundary too. Now, for edesign, I always say to all of my clients, anything under a thousand pounds or anything just slightly over, you take 100% of the payment up front. It's a remote service. If you want it, you pay for it in full. The moment you do that, people take you seriously. For full interior design, obviously, that's another structural matter which I cover in all of my mentorships. Uh, you know, even with bigger projects, how house build designs, all of the payment structures within that, and we won't get into that into today's podcast. However, if it's an entry-level e-design, it's paid in full every single time. Now, I don't want you to hear all of this and think the answer is just to be really, really rigid and lose the work. So let me tell you about another designer I've worked with because she shows you the other path. Now, she put together a consultation for a client at just over £9,000. And the client came back and said, honestly, that is just out of our budget. Now, the old desperate response would be to completely slash the price, keep keep the scope, panic, and invent something cheaper. No, no, no, no, no. I've been working with this designer for quite a long time now, and instead we repositioned it. And I sat with her and said, okay, what if part of this was delivered as a full service and the other elements are delivered remotely as an e-design? We completely restructured the offer and the scope, this much for that, this much for that, and brought the whole thing down to just over 4,000. And the client said, absolutely perfect. We'd be more than happy to spend on that. She didn't lose the client, but, and this is everything, she didn't barter either. She priced the whole thing properly to begin with. She took them through the discovery call and consultation process, and then she got the client over the ridge by repositioning the structure. The value never dropped, the scope, she wasn't doing the full scope for less than the money. Only the configuration changed. Because here's the truth I shared with the designer at the other end. The designers I work with whose e-designs fly out the door at 795, uh 1095, you know, 1200, paid in full, they're not cheaper, they're not luckier, they've simply structured it properly with real sales and marketing behind it, real SOPs, real onboarding processes. The number on the page was never the thing standing in the way. It was the positioning, the boundaries, and the belief. So let me bring this all the way back to where we started. Alid asked how much, and within two messages, a gorgeous, brilliant, talented designer had discounted herself, fragmented her offer, and handed over her authority, all out of desperation. And the client could feel every single bit of it. And if you recognized yourself anywhere in the whole of this episode, whether it was maybe all parts of it or maybe one particular lesson, and I think a lot of you will, because I speak to a lot of you on a daily basis, because I saw myself in it too in the early years, I want you to hear this. The work isn't to become harder, colder, or less generous. The work is to build a structure so solid that you never have to negotiate against yourself again. A process you run every time, prices that are prices, deadlines that are yours, and boundaries you hold with love in your business. Because when your business is aligned, when it's structured and when it's boundary-led, the desperation simply has nowhere to live. And your clients feel that instead. They feel the certainty, they feel the certainty that they pay for a service which they believe in themselves. So this week I want you to do one thing. Pick the place this episode poked you at the most, your pricing replies, your Bitty services, or your deadlines, or your boundaries, and just put one boundary in place, just one. That's where it's going to start. And if you'd love my full breakdown on pricing structure or how to structure your services and profitable pricing and the boundaries that protect that, then head to the show notes where you can purchase fully booked and highly paid for $247. Or come find me over on Instagram at designboss diary and send me the word edges, and we will have a conversation about your business. And I said that to the designer at the end of the call as well when I spoke to her, and I'll say it to you now. Remember your boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. I'll see you in the next Powerful Packed Podcast. Take care.