Ep 229: Profit Isn't an Accident Part 4 - Stop Duct-Taping Your Business Together

Episode Summary

If you've ever ended the day feeling like you worked nonstop but still didn't get to the things that actually move your business forward, this episode is for you.

In the final installment of the Profit Isn't an Accident series, Michelle explores what happens when all of the little operational problems in a design firm pile up at the same time. The delayed vendor emails, missed lead follow-up, disconnected systems, inconsistent marketing, and never-ending procurement tasks aren't separate issues—they're symptoms of a larger problem.

Michelle calls it the duct tape business: a firm that runs on the owner's memory, attention, and personal effort instead of systems and infrastructure.

In this episode, you'll learn why being the "glue" holding everything together creates a ceiling on growth, how operational sprawl quietly erodes profitability, and what it takes to build a business that doesn't depend on you being involved in every detail.

You'll also hear an exciting update on Sidemark 2.0 and how Michelle is working to help designers simplify and connect the systems running their firms.

In This Episode, Michelle Discusses:

• What a "duct tape business" really is

• Why being the integration layer in your firm limits growth

• The hidden cost of fragmented procurement tracking

• How disconnected systems create operational sprawl

• Why marketing is often the first thing to disappear when operations become overwhelming

• The delayed consequences of inconsistent marketing

• The mindset and identity shifts that keep designers stuck in chaos

• How to identify the most expensive operational problems in your business

• Why consolidation is more valuable than adding more tools

• Building infrastructure while actively running projects

• The common thread connecting procurement, markup, financial tracking, and operational inefficiencies

• A first look at what's coming with Sidemark 2.0

Key Takeaways

You're Not Running a Business—You're Holding It Together

Many design firms operate with the owner serving as the connection point between every process, decision, and system. While that may work for a season, it eventually consumes all available time, energy, and mental bandwidth.

Operational Chaos Isn't a Requirement

The complexity of running a design firm is real. The chaos doesn't have to be. Sustainable firms are built on systems, processes, and connected tools—not constant personal oversight.

Marketing Problems Often Start as Operations Problems

When your backend is disorganized, marketing becomes the first thing sacrificed. The problem is that the consequences often don't show up until six to twelve months later when the pipeline starts slowing down.

Profitability Is a Structure Problem

The gap between what you're billing and what you're actually keeping is rarely caused by a lack of talent or effort. More often, it's the result of fragmented systems, poor visibility, and operational inefficiencies.

Resources Mentioned

• Join the Sidemark 2.0 Waitlist: https://api.mysidemark.com/widget/form/4Ug6Rgg2uqCX0MydoJ2v

• Learn more about Private Coaching: https://thedesignbakehouse.com/private-coaching

• Explore the Profit Mixer: https://thedesignbakehouse.com/profit-mixer

Loved This Episode?

If this series helped you see your business differently, share it with another designer who could benefit from it.

The interior design industry doesn't have a talent problem—it has a business systems problem. Sometimes one conversation can help another designer start building a more profitable firm.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next series from Michelle.

Transcript

Michelle Lynne (01:02)

I'm Michelle Lynn. I run ML Interiors Group here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And I teach designers how to build profitable businesses through the design bakehouse. And I'm genuinely a little obsessed with the operational side of running a design firm, admittedly. You know, it's the stuff that doesn't photograph well, the stuff that determines whether you actually make money or just look like you do.

This is episode, I think, four in this little mini series. So if you're just joining, go back and start at the first episode of

The mini series. A Prophet Isn't an accident.

We've covered real-time procurement tracking, markup math, the double entry problem, and the markup myth too. Today actually is going to build on all of that, but even if you're coming in fresh, what we're talking about today is is definitely you you don't have to listen to all of the other ones in order. Let me just put it that way. But today is more of the big picture episode. We're talking about what happens when it's not just one problem, when it's all of it at the same time.

And it's held together with good intentions and sheer personal will. I call it the duct tape business. And what it's gonna take to finally put the duct tape down is what we're talking about today. So I want to describe a day and I want you to tell me, and you can just tell me quietly, okay? Or or or just tell yourself if any of this sounds familiar. You start the morning.

Okay, and you feel like you're already behind. And it's not because you slept in, it's not because you weren't organized, but because you before you even sat down at your desk, three things had already come in that needed a response. Let's just say it was a vendor email about a shipment that was delayed, a text from a client asking about something that was supposed to be resolved yesterday or last week, a message from one of your team members who needs guidance in order

To move forward with placing an order. So that's what we do. We handle these things, right? So you get that done and then you handle the next round and then the round after that. And somewhere around noon, you look up and you realize that you have been completely occupied all morning and that the things you actually meant to do today, the things that would have moved the business forward, the things that require your actual thinking haven't been touched. Y'all, I feel this.

I feel this in my soul. Okay. And somewhere, okay, somewhere in the back of your mind, there's a project that closed two months ago that you still haven't fully reconciled.

prospective client that reached out, I don't know, four or five days ago that you haven't followed up with because you never had a clear place to track that lead. And then you blinked, and then almost a week has gone by. And then you've got a marketing plan that you made at the beginning of the quarter that hasn't happened the way you planned it because every week something more urgent ate the time that you meant to spend on it. This is what I call a duct tape business.

From the inside, it looks like busyness. From the outside, it looks like success. But underneath both of those things, y'all, it's a structure problem. I get it. I've been there, done that, got my t-shirt. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull this apart today. So let's start with what is a duct tape business. It is one where the owner is the integration layer.

That's the most precise way I know how to say it. It's in a business with real infrastructure, information flows from one part of the operation to another because the systems are connected. An order gets placed, it flows into procurement tracking, which connects to billing, which connects to the financial record. A lead comes in and it lands in a pipeline. It gets followed up on, it gets documented, it gets converted or it gets closed. And this is all in a place where you can see it.

But in a duct tape business, none of this happens automatically. The information flows through the owner, through her memory, through her attention, through her tabs are open at all times, awareness of where everything is. It's kind of like being a mom, right? Somebody says, Where's my mom, where's my sock? And you know exactly where it is. Where's my water? Same thing in your business, okay?

She knows which vendor is holding a delayed shipment because she's the one who read the email. She knows the status of the lead from four days ago because it's in her head. She knows the state of the project finances because she's the one who was there for every decision. She's the glue.

For a while, it works, right? A smart, capable, driven person can hold an amo an enormous amount of complexity together through sheer personal investment. And going back to the mom example, that's just kind of what we do, right? The business functions, projects close, clients are happy, revenue's coming in. Check, check, check. But here's what it costs it costs the owner almost all of her available capacity. And capacity.

Her time, her cognitive bandwidth, her creative energy, that is the most finite resource in the whole business. And when she is the integration layer, she has almost nothing left for the things that actually require her at her best. The strategic thinking, the high-level client relationships, strategic partners, the decisions about where the business goes next.

Not to mention the actual creativity of design. So this is basically the ceiling that a duct tape business creates. It's not a ceiling on ambition, it's a ceiling on available hours. Because you can't work your way through that ceiling. You can only build your way through it.

We've spent this little mini series and we've talked a lot about procurement. So I want to zoom in on what the duct tape problem looks like in that specific context, because procurement is where the financial consequences are the most direct and most expensive, in my humble opinion.

In a duct tape business, procurement tracking lives on a spreadsheet or it lives in multiple places. Okay, maybe it's a set of spreadsheets that somebody maintains with varying degrees of consistency. Okay, there are order confirmations in multiple email boxes. There are vendor invoices in a folder or in a pile. Maybe you printed them off in a pile. Okay. Or in a software that doesn't connect to anything else.

What about reselects that that happened and they got handled, but they never made it back into any official record? Freight charges that arrive separately. ⁓ my gosh, right? Like a month or two later. They arrive after the original invoice got paid, and then that freight invoice wasn't tied to the project. Maybe you got credits from vendors that came in and got processed, but were not reconciled against what the client was billed. Prices might have increased, tariffs might have been applied.

But again, they were processed, but they weren't reconciled against what the client was billed. So each one of these, you know, it feels like it's a small thing. We talked about this in the other episode. But what happens is that there's a pattern. Okay, this is what we've been tracking across this entire mini-series. Small things consistently across every active project add up. And babe, it adds up to real money. Okay, it's not like a rounding error, it's like real margin erosion.

Month over month, project after project. And it's that gap between how hard you're working and what's actually landing in the bottom line. So the duct tape version of procurement tracking is always slightly behind, always slightly incomplete, and always dependent on somebody's diligence and memory and bandwidth.

And whether you are a solopreneur or if you have a team, if you're even slightly busy, diligence and memory and available time, y'all, they're in limited, mostly short supply. So things fall through the cracks. And it's not because anybody sucks at what they're doing, okay, but it's because the system isn't designed to catch them.

So where the deeper problem is, is that when procurement tracking is fragmented, you can't actually see how your projects are performing in real time. You have a version of the picture. Okay, maybe a pretty good version on a good week, but you don't have the full clarity. You don't have the full picture. You have educated guesses. And I don't know about you, but when my brain gets full.

Like there's there's there's things that my educated guess is not so educated.

So there's procurement. Let's pull back from that for just a second. Okay, let's look at the operations. Okay, because procurement is just part of the operations where the duct tape duct tape shows up. Let's think about the tools that's currently running your business. Project management, accounting, client communication, order tracking, proposals, contracts, marketing, lead follow up. my gosh, it's like Frankenstein.

For most design firms, these functions all live somewhere between, I think I've had between four and eight tools, maybe ten. Okay, and these tools don't talk to each other. So again, it's like Frankenstein, because what you have to do is you have to manually stitch them together. A lead comes in through Instagram, and somebody has to manually copy that information to wherever leads are tracked, if you're even tracking leads somewhere outside of just your email.

Or an order gets placed in the project management system and then the financial is information has to be separately entered in accounting. Right? That was our double entry system that we talked about in another episode. A proposal goes out in one system and the signed contract comes back through a different one. And somebody has to make sure that both systems reflect the current state of your business.

This is like operational sprawl, y'all. That's fun to say. Operational sprawl, y'all. Like the business is running, but it's running on patchwork.

And that patchwork, it has it has these costs associated to the maintenance of it. Okay, it's it's not just the labor cost of the manual data entry.

But it's the attention cost of managing multiple systems, the cot like your brain overload of knowing where things live, the time cost of switching between platforms constantly throughout the day.

None of these costs show up on a PL, though. Okay? PL profit and loss. Financial report. They show up as end-of-day feelings as if you were busy all day and you can't account for where the time went. my God. I know that feeling. When I get that feeling, I know something's wrong in my firm. Okay.

These things are those little nudges when you know that things were supposed to happen but they didn't. And and the reason why is because the the friction of this Frankenstein patchwork makes running a business harder than it needs to be.

So we've got procurement, we've got general operations, okay. what about marketing? Okay. what I've seen after coaching hundreds of interior designers is that marketing specifically is the first thing to go when your operational sprawl reaches a certain level.

And the consequences, here's the thing. I was in sales for a decade. Okay. The consequences are delayed enough that most designers don't connect it. So here's the pattern. Okay. You know that consistent marketing matters. You've probably said that to yourself more than once. It's like, I've got these ideas. I know what I want to put out. And in a in a quieter month, it gets done, right? You post consistently, you show up, you produce content that actually re represents your firm well.

And then you get this big project or installation week. Okay, maybe your kid gets sick. Okay. But what happens is that the capacity that you had for marketing, it just up and evaporates. Poof, it's gone. So you go quiet for three weeks and then another week. Okay. And then you feel guilty and you're like, ⁓ I you post ⁓ I need to be posting. So you post a few things in a burst without any thought, and then it's quiet again. But here's the result.

With your marketing presence that's inconsistent, and it's not in a like, well, this one post didn't land kind of way. It's inconsistent in a way that makes it hard for the right clients to find you in a reliable rhythm. It's hard for your positioning to build any real momentum. It's hard for you to pick up where you left off because you don't remember because it's not familiar anymore. So the work, the hard work that you did do on marketing is not getting compounded in the way it's supposed to.

So the delay between inconsistent marketing and pipeline, like incoming leads, the consequences is usually six months to a year.

So you're thinking about what you're not doing right now, babe, that's going to show up in six months. Because what happens is by the time the pipeline gets thin and you're wondering where the leads went, the cause of a of that particular season of inconsistency, it's already happened. You are dealing with the consequences of decisions made months ago. So the designers who have stable, healthy pipelines, y'all.

They're not necessarily better than you. They're not necessarily doing better marketing than you. They're just doing it more consistently.

And it doesn't mean it's because they have more time. It's because they have built a back end that creates the capacity for this consistency instead of a back end that consumes every available hour, leaving nothing left for your marketing.

So the part that I think is most important, but also the least comfortable to talk about, therefore it doesn't get talked about very often, is that duct tape businesses don't just exist because of bad systems. And I I'm gonna tell you this, and it might hurt some of you. It hurt me when I made this connection, okay.

The duct tape business doesn't exist just because of bad systems. It exists because of an identity that keeps the bad systems in place.

Okay. That identity sounds like this. Hmm. Well, this is just the way it is. Running a design firm is inherently co chaotic. Busyness is a sign that I'm in demand. If it were easy, everybody would do it. I knew what I was getting into. Okay. I'm calling BS on that. There okay, there might be a grain of truth in some of it. Design is demanding. I was shocked at how complex.

This field is. It requires a lot from the people who do it well. I'm not arguing against that difficulty, but I am calling BS against the idea that operational chaos is inevitable. fragmented systems are a price of entry. the only way to run a successful interior design firm is to be the person who holds it all together personally, indefinitely, at the cause of your time and your sanity, No, babe, that's ego.

I've experienced this. I've coached hundreds of designers. I have watched designers build firms that do not run that way. Firms where the owner has a life outside of the business. Projects run on processes, not on the principal's personal attention to every detail.

Okay, a firm where the financial picture is clear because the tracking is connected. Not because somebody sat down and reconstructed it by hand. Okay. Or you're just managing based on your bank account. Okay. Or where marketing happens on a rhythm because the back end of your business is stable enough to make space for it. And honey, these firms are not unicorns. They're just built differently.

The building starts with deciding that the duct tape is not a permanent solution. you've been in this phase long enough. So what it takes to move out of the duct tape business, because I don't want this to be an inspirational episode that doesn't give you anything useful. Y'all know me well enough, that's not the way I roll. The first thing that requires ⁓

A fix, the first thing that a fix requires is an honest accounting of where the sprawl actually is, not a theoretical assessment. Okay, a practical one. How many tools is your business currently running on?

Okay, stop, write them down. It's probably Canva and your email and maybe DocuSign and something to manage your social media, hopefully something to manage your email marketing, something to manage your procurement, something to manage your your accounting. Okay, that's seven. That's just seven right there. And that's just off the top of my head. Okay, where are the manual handoffs between all of these?

Where's information living in two different places or maybe even three? Where are things falling through the cracks consistently, not occasionally, but as a pattern? Like you have to know what you're working with before you can decide what to change.

So make a list. Then prioritize them. You cannot fix everything at once. Okay, trying will just paralyze you.

The question is, where is this sprawl costing you the most? If your procurement tracking is fragmented and it's eroding your margin on every project, that's a pretty high priority. If your lead follow-up is the thing that's consistently failing and it's costing you converted client leads to clients, then that's a priority. If you're not marketing, that's a priority.

But look at these and pick the most expensive problem first.

Then what you need to do is get the right tool for the job.

Okay, imagine you're trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver.

You've got tools. You're they're just that's not the right tool for the job. Okay. So the what I'm what I'm telling you is that you don't need more tools. If you have fewer, better connected ones, the goal is consolidation, not addition. Every tool that you add to a fragmented backend is just another place that information has to travel manually.

So the the goal is moving towards integration, not towards a more sophisticated patchwork.

And the fourth thing, and this is the hardest one, I'm not gonna lie. Okay, it's the willingness to invest time in building the infrastructure while you're still running the business. I call it you're building the jet while you're flying. Okay. You don't get to pause client work to fix your systems. You have to do both simultaneously, which is a pain in the ass. Okay, it's uncomfortable, but it's a decision that you make.

And the decision is that building is a priority even when the day-to-day is loud. So most designers, they they know they need better systems. Maybe inherently, maybe they've never put a name to it. But the ones who actually build them are the ones who decided that it was a non-negotiable. And it's not just on the nice to have list.

So before I get to what what I've got working in the background right now, I do have something to tell you about what's coming. Okay. I wanna ⁓ but first let's take a minute and close the loop on this little mini-series. We've got an episode with procurement tracking, where the money's actually going line by line, item by item. Okay, Debbie and Megan story, the cost of reconciling after the fact instead of tracking in real time.

We had an episode about markup, the math behind the minimum viable markup, why cost plus thirty percent is a number most designers have never verified against their real cost, and what it means to price from understanding rather than from habit or fear.

We talked about the double entry problem. Okay, the cost of maintaining financial information in two systems that don't talk to each other.

We have the markup myth. Okay. Or rather the industry's inherited pricing structure doesn't account for what design work actually cost to deliver in a modern firm.

So pulling all of these together, the duct tape business, the operational sprawl, the way every individual problem we talked about in the earlier episodes is part of the same underlying pattern. Okay, it's a business that's running on the owner's personal effort instead of on an infrastructure that supports her.

If there's one thing that I want you to carry out of this little mini series that I've created, it's this. The gap between what you're billing and what you're keeping is almost never a marketing only problem. It's never or almost never a client only problem.

It's almost always a structure problem. And structure is buildable.

So I said I had something to tell you about what's coming. Okay. You've heard me talk about Sidemark throughout this series, throughout, I think I've had some commercials on Sidemark in the podcast. It's it's it's the platform that I'm a co-founder on for interior design firms. Okay, it's it's been strictly for marketing.

What I'm really excited to tell you about is that we're building Sidemark 2.0. Okay. So what I can tell you right now is that the current version of Sidemark is about getting your marketing organized. Okay. You've got your pipeline, you've got your email marketing, you've got your automations, you've got your social media, you've got your ⁓ contracts that can be signed. All of that's in Sidemark today. Okay.

What we're doing for Sidemark 2.0 is getting your business organized. We're putting everything in one place, not just the marketing. We're connecting the pieces, we're stopping the links. Okay. 2.0 is about giving you your time back. We're gonna have it's gonna have procurement tracking, project management, client communication, pipeline, financials.

Portal, floor plans. What I can tell you right now is that I can't go into a lot more detail than that, but because we're still building it. And I want to get it, I want to get it right before I say too much. But if that direction sounds like exactly what you've been waiting for, I want you on the waiting list. On the waiting list, okay? Because the people who are on the waiting list are gonna get first access, early information.

Okay. Also, we're gonna need some some feedback. So you can if you if you're interested, you can shape what we build. Because I wanna know how you're using these fragmented systems that we're pulling together. Okay, you can get on the wait list. I'm gonna drop it in the show notes and I'll make sure that it's easy to find. Okay.

Whew. So that's it, y'all. Those are all of the episodes of Profit Isn't an Accident. ⁓ but I want to say I want to say one more thing. Okay, before we close this series out. Cause I don't take I don't take it lightly that y'all spend time with me here in the podcast. Okay, there's a lot of podcasts, a lot of content, a lot of people telling you what you should be doing, what you should be doing differently in your business. And I am truly honored that you spend time here.

So I hope that what you got from this series is not just information, but a different way of looking at your business. Because that that's really kind of what I came into this about. It's not just like here are the problems, but here are the problems, here's what's underneath them, and here's the kind of thinking that changes them. The designers who are profitable don't stumble into it. ⁓ y'all, I stumbled a lot and I did not stumble into profit. Okay.

Designers who are profitable get curious about their numbers. They get honest about what's working and what isn't. Okay. Deciding that building a sustainable business is worth the discomfort of looking clearly at the one that they had. That's what designers have done to become profitable. And you can do that too. Okay, that decision is available to you right now. If you want to keep the conversation going,

Find me at the designbakehouse.com. If you're ready to look at the firm, if you're ready to look at your firm with someone who will be honest about you.

with what I see what she sees, private coaching. The design bakehouse dot com, private coaching. Or if it's the profit mixer, if you want to get real clarity on your procurement, on your pricing, on your margins, the actual financial structure of your firm.

Then that's also at the at the design bake house. Okay, and then get on the sidemark 2.0 wait list. Seriously. All of these links are in the show notes. And my final ask is share this series with a designer who needs it. Y'all, this industry is full of beautifully talented people, but they're underbuilding the business side of what they do. You sharing this?

might be what changes that for somebody. If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred thousand million bazillion times, there's enough ugly houses for all of us. Okay. Other designers are not your competition. Your competition is yourself. It is your procrastination. It is your excuse making.

It is hiding behind the busy. So do something for yourself, do something for another designer. And thank you for being here, y'all. I've got another series planned and I'll see you there.