What Do Designers Manage?
The word “manager” is not exactly music to the ears of most interior design firm principals.
It sounds so corporate when they view themselves more as artists, or at least as creative craftsmen.
But the complexity of the business, and the addition of staff can quickly lead to the role of managing. In fact, I often tell my interior design coaching clients that one of the biggest leaps they must make if they want to grow their firm is from managing projects to managing people. The next leap is from managing people to managing systems so that you don’t have to spend so much time on managing, well, people!
But you manage more than just people. You manage marketing, technology, cash flow, vendors, clients and more.
But have you ever thought about what all that means you are really managing? Or trying to manage?
You’re trying to manage the future.
The funny thing is, there’s one simple tool that more than any other makes managing the future possible. It’s called a budget and almost no designers I’ve worked with as interior design coaching clients, nor the thousands of attendees at my various events ever have one.
That’s why I’m developing a simple budgeting tool to help you not just project the future, but to create it. It will expose the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and show you specific action items to get from here to there.
This simple tool is available to members of The Edge in their Archives section on this site.
No, go forth and manage…something!
