Ep 242: Tended, Pt 4 - When Everyone Else Looks Like They Have It Together

Have you ever looked around at other interior designers and thought, What do they know that I don’t?

They’re booked out. Their projects look incredible. Their social media is polished. They seem confident, successful, and completely on top of their business.

Meanwhile, you’re staring at a quiet pipeline, difficult clients, late shipments, team issues, or a slow month and wondering if you’re doing something terribly wrong.

In this final episode of Tended, Michelle Lynne gets unusually honest about a season when her own business looked successful from the outside—but felt anything but successful on the inside.

After unexpectedly losing two key team members in 2023, navigating the launch of Studio Works and Sidemark, and then experiencing a prolonged slowdown in leads through 2024 and 2025, Michelle found herself questioning everything—including whether she should walk away from her design firm altogether.

And yet, if you had followed ML Interiors Group on social media during that time, you probably would have had no idea.

The projects were still being photographed. The posts were still going out. The business was still moving.

That’s the point.

You are comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel.

And that comparison can lead you to make decisions based on information you don't actually have.

In this episode, Michelle talks about:

• What it feels like to go through a genuinely difficult season while your business still looks successful from the outside

• Why social media gives you an incomplete picture of another designer's business

• The danger of assuming that a designer who is "swamped" is necessarily profitable or successful

• Why busyness and business success are not the same thing

• How industry events and conversations at market can fuel comparison

• Why year-end highlight reels can make a slow season feel even worse

• How Michelle pulled herself out of the comparison spiral by returning to her own numbers, pipeline, margins, clients, marketing, and team

• The difference between learning from another designer and reshaping your business because of what you see them doing

• Why slow seasons don't necessarily mean you're falling behind

• The reminder that you are not uniquely behind and probably aren't missing some magical secret everyone else has figured out

The big takeaway

The version of someone else's business that you can see is always edited.

You don't know their margins. You don't know their client relationships. You don't know whether they're profitable. You don't know what is happening behind the beautiful project photos or the confident conversation at market.

So before you change your positioning, blow up your brand, restructure your services, or decide that everyone else has figured something out that you haven't, come back to your own business.

Look at your actual numbers. Your pipeline. Your margins. Your clients. Your marketing. Your team. Your goals.

Your business needs a North Star—not a comparison.

And perhaps most importantly, remember:

You are not separate from your business.

Tending to yourself isn't the soft work or the extra work. It's part of the work.

Running an interior design firm is hard. You don't have to pretend otherwise.

Ready for support?

If this episode—and the entire Tended series—hit a little too close to home, private coaching may be the right next step.

Michelle works with interior designers who want experienced guidance from someone who understands the realities of building and running a design firm.

Learn more about Private Coaching at Design Bakehouse.

Join Michelle at the Northeast Design Conference

Michelle will be speaking at the Northeastern Design Conference during the first week of October.

Use code MICHELLE10 for 10% off your registration.

Check the show notes for conference details and registration information.

Transcript

Michelle Lynne (01:03)

You're listening to Design for the Creative Mind. I'm Michelle Lynn and this is Tended, a mini series about the part of business that nobody puts in a standard operating procedure. We'll be back to the operations talk, I promise, but first we need to talk about you.

And this is the last episode of Tended, and I wanted to open with something that I I usually don't talk about publicly. It was the middle of 2023, June, and I let go of two key people on my team. And it was unexpected. It was hard. The timing was really crappy because we were in the middle of opening studio works that month and launching Sidemark at the same time. So I'm managing these two unexpected departures.

Trying to figure out what the team needs to look like now, simultaneously trying to keep all of the other things in the air that had nothing to do with ML Interiors Group, and of course the ML Interiors group projects that these people were working on. So there was the emotional weight of losing these individuals who I knew and loved, trusted. And so that was real. But I didn't really have any space or

room to sit with it because everything else was just chuck moving along.

And then in 2024, so 2023, we were just juggling, trying to stay afloat, keep the clients happy. But in 2024, the lead started slowing down. And honestly, it went well into 2025 also. And by that point, I was just tired. Y'all, I was tired in a way that's hard to describe. Like the kind of tired when you start thinking about things that you would not normally entertain, like walking away from just

the entire thing, like burning down my design firm. And I actually, it wasn't just a passing thought. I actually prayed on this for for a while. But what I want you to know, and what a lot of this episode is that if you had followed ML Interior's group on social media through any of that, you wouldn't have been able to tell. Like the post kept the posts kept posting

Project photos, captions, behind the scenes content, all of it. And it was genuine. We were still producing work and I was proud of it. The firm was still running, but y'all, the full picture, the slow months, the fear, the mornings where I was just trying to get out of bed and through the day. The evenings where I'd wake up wondering how we were gonna make payroll. Like none of that showed up because that's not how this works, right?

You show up, you post the work, you keep the brand moving, even when the back end of your business feels like it's held together with like just tiny little pieces of scotch tape. And then I'd be at events or you know, networking or at market or whatever. And people would say things like, you are you look like you're doing well. And I'd smile and I'd say, Thank you. So I wasn't really lying, but I also wasn't telling the whole story.

And that's a thing that I want you to carry into like everything that we're talking about today. I was in probably the hardest season that I've ever had in this business. And from outside, it looked great, right? So that means that when you're scrolling and everyone looks confident and fully booked and like they've got their shizel together. Okay, maybe you think that they've got something figured out that you don't. Some of them are exactly where I was.

Showing up, holding it together, and not letting you see what's actually happening. So you cannot make decisions about your business based on what you think you're seeing in somebody else's business. And that, my friend, is what this episode is about.

Now during the slow stretch, I went to an industry event. I still remember it. It was at FaZey Showroom here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I think it

I don't remember what the actual event was, but I walked in and of course I was already carrying the weight of of the past year. Okay. Leads were quiet at the time. I was doing a lot of internal work. And a lot of internal work on the business that wasn't producing anything visible yet. So there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a lot of things to point to when people asked how things were going. But I started having conversations, of course, because I'm at the event. And it's like,

You know, I swear almost every person that I talked to, or this is what it felt like. They were swamped, right? They had packed calendars, clients lined up, they were turning the work away. And I heard some version of that over and over and over again. And I stood there doing the math in my head, right? That is if everyone else is that busy and I'm this slow, what does that mean? Like, what are they doing differently? Should I be doing something differently?

Should I change my positioning, restructure my offerings, blow up the brand and start over with something new?

Yeah, I totally did actually consider that. Again, it was just in the back of my mind. Do I just burn this down and maybe rebuild it as something entirely?

Like a rebrand is gonna fix a slow season, right? Obviously, I wasn't thinking straight. But what I could see clearly in that room is that I was letting emotion write a business case. The comparison felt real. The fear underneath it was real. But y'all, I didn't know anything about these people's businesses. I knew what they said at an event where everyone performs their best version of things, and that's very specific and not particularly reliable data.

So I went home and I didn't blow anything up. I just went back to my own numbers, went back to my own clients, my own work, and figured out what actually needed attention. There were some things that needed attention, but they were just very sp you know, very specific tweaks, and it was not a signal that everything was broken or that I sucked. Okay.

I also had to remind myself that marketing doesn't happen overnight. It's it's this long machine.

So when designers compare themselves to other designers, and we all do it.

What we're almost never doing though is an actual comparison. We're holding somebody else's highlight reel, okay, up against our own internal experience. And these two things, babe, they are not, they are not even remotely equivalent. So you're looking at a project photo that was shot on a good day by a good photographer with good light after a beautiful install. And you're looking at it from inside your own head where you know about the client.

that you're dealing with, who's being difficult, the shipment that's three weeks late, the contractor who went radio silent.

Okay, that image has no idea about any of that. It just looks beautiful. And your brain compares it the two as if they're the same kind of information when they're not.

Who knows? That image might have had a crap client, designer might have lost money, designer might have

Who knows? Okay. Cried. She might have cried because of the project. We know nothing behind that image.

Or maybe like me, you're at an event and someone mentions that she's on a wait list and you have no idea what that actually means for her business. Honey, you do not know what she's charging, whether she's profitable, whether the clients on that list are the ones she actually wants to be working with.

Busyness is not the same as successful. I have watched designers who are fully booked for years in a way that gen you know look that's genuinely exhausting, but they weren't particularly profitable. But from the outside it looked like they were crushing it.

So a reminder that the version of someone else's business that is available to you is always edited.

Okay, whether that's intentional or if it's just by the nature of what shows up in public.

I wasn't gonna tell people when they asked me how I was, how I how I am in the middle of twenty three, twenty-four, and in twenty-five that I was miserable.

Or my business was miserable, I wasn't part, I was part of it. You know what mean. Okay, so whatever shows up in public is never the whole picture. Making significant decisions about your own firm in response to that edited version of somebody else's reality.

is one of the most reliable ways to end up somewhere that you didn't actually want to go.

So there are seasons when this does get harder.

Okay, when the noise gets loud. So if you're in the middle of a valley, just know that when you go to market, sometimes it's hard. Okay, I love market. I love catching up with friends, coming home with real inspiration and new connections, and and spending time at, you know, events and talks and workshops and stuff that actually does inform how I run my business.

But I also know that the house business conversations that happen at market are not an accurate read on how anybody's business is really doing. Not the superficial conversations. Now you're gonna come across people that you know and trust, and you'll be able to say, Yeah, it's kind of sucky right now. But for the most part, everyone's there, the energy's high, and people just naturally present themselves as the most optimistic version.

Okay, myself included. It's not dishonest, it's just human. I mean, would you like to walk up to somebody and say, How are you doing? And they're like, man, things fucking suck.

If it's the right person, you would take empathy or sympathy. But you don't want people to just dump all over you. Okay. So what this means is that you should hold what you hear at market just a little bit loosely when it comes to drawing conclusions about your own situation. Okay. End of year. That's another time when the noise gets loud.

The recap content, the year-end review posts, the highlight reels of the best projects and the biggest wins, all of it's real, but none of it is complete. Does anybody have you ever seen anybody posting the hard months or the crappy projects in their year-end wrap-up? No.

And you know, towards the end of the year it slows down in general because your own business is quiet, everybody else's, it feels louder.

Okay, so you're looking for, you're noticing the evidence that confirms the fear more than the evidence that doesn't. A slow stretch. I like the slow stretch during end of year. And it doesn't mean that you're falling behind. Sometimes it just means it's slow. And slow seasons are a normal part of running a business, even if they don't feel that way when you're in the middle of it.

the thing that pulled me out of the spiral after that event at FaZe showroom.

Is it's pretty unglamorous. Okay. I go back to my own numbers, my actual pipeline, my margins, my client relationships, my email marketing, what my team needs. Okay, this is not as a way to spiral into anxiety about it, but it's a way to kind of ground back into something that's real after spending time in a C.

Of other people's narratives. What I mean by that is that your business is yours, your clients, your processes, your relationships, your direction. None of that is determined by what somebody else is doing or what somebody else says at an event or what their social posts look like this month.

The clearer that you can get in your own direction, like the less power that all of this external noise actually has. Because you have your own North Star. Okay. You have this reference point that is solid. It's not comparison.

And I'm not suggesting that you close yourself off from the industry or pretending that you have nothing to learn from other designers. It's just about getting discerning, keeping your blinders on. There's a real difference between genuinely learning from someone whose process you respect and reshaping your business in response to somebody's social media presence. One of those is useful, and the other one just makes you tired and pulls you sideways from work that actually deserves your attention.

I mean, how many times have you gone down a bunny trail following somebody's Instagram thinking that you're gonna, I don't know, pick up their secrets from reading their captions?

So

It's I know, it's not sexy, but it's true. A lot of designers are having the experience that I described here in this episode. The comparison, the slow season that nobody sees. The fear that everybody else has figured something out that you haven't.

And they're having it quietly because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you say out loud. Okay, I'm saying this out loud today because I think it helps to hear that someone who has a platform and a coaching business and a running firm has also sat in a hotel room after market just wondering if if I should just light the match.

Okay, you are not uniquely behind. You are not missing something obvious that everyone else has found. You are running a business in a very complex industry while also being a whole person with a life and relationships and a mental load that doesn't take days off just because you have a deadline.

Running an interior design firm is hard.

So tended, this little mini series, was always meant to be more of a conversation and not a lecture. Okay, we talked about what it costs the business when you put yourself last, where energy goes without you realizing it, and what no and what the word no actually does for your bottom line.

Today, what you're really looking at when you measure yourself against everybody else. Underneath all of that is the same thing. You, babe, are not separate from your business, and tending to yourself is not the soft work or the extra work. It's just part of the work.

So if something in this series kind of tickled you, okay, and you're ready to work through it with someone who's actually in this industry and has been through so many versions of it, that's what private coaching's for.

Feel free, take a look. I'll post it in the

Show notes, the designbakehouse.com. Click on the private coaching. Feel free to reach out if it feels like a fit. And if you are going to be in the northeastern part of the country the first week of October, I'm actually speaking on a little bit of content related to this entire series. I'll be at the Northeast Design Conference, Northeastern Design Conference.

You can find it online. We'll also post it in the show notes. And if you use the code MISHL10, you'll get 10% off. I think there's still a few seats left, and I'd love to see you there. So this is the end of Tended. Thank you for being here for all of it. Just remember that you're building something real. And just keep going. Keep going.

See you there.