Ep 244:Do You Actually Want to Own an Interior Design Business?

Being an interior designer and being an interior design business owner are two very different jobs. Have you actually decided which one you want?

We talk a lot about the dream of owning an interior design firm: creative freedom, choosing your clients, setting your own schedule, and building something that is completely yours.

And those things can absolutely be part of business ownership.

But there's another side of the equation that doesn't always make it into the Instagram caption.

Because when you own the business, you're not just the designer. You're also the salesperson, financial manager, problem solver, technology department, decision-maker, and the person who ultimately has to deal with whatever goes sideways.

In this episode, Michelle Lynne gets very honest about what it actually means to own an interior design business—and asks a question that more designers should be asking:

Do you actually want to own a business, or do you want to be an interior designer?

Neither answer is wrong.

Working for an established design firm can offer the opportunity to focus on the creative work without carrying the full weight of sales, finances, operations, and business risk. And for some designers, that may genuinely be the career they want.

For others, the autonomy and opportunity that comes with ownership are worth the responsibility and uncertainty.

The important thing is knowing which one you're actually choosing—and making that decision based on the life and work you want, rather than what sounds more ambitious or impressive.

In this episode, Michelle talks about:

• The difference between being an interior designer and being an interior design business owner

• Why design is only one part of the job when you own the firm

• The reality of being responsible for sales, finances, technology, and problem-solving

• Why impressive revenue numbers don't necessarily mean a business is profitable

• The personal development that comes with putting yourself—and your work—out there

• Rejection, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and vulnerability as a business owner

• The financial risk and uncertainty that come with starting a firm

• Why working for another design firm is not a fallback or a failure

• What you can learn by working inside an established design business

• How to think about ownership versus employment based on the actual life you want

• Why you're allowed to change your mind about the path you've chosen

The question to sit with:

What do you want your actual days to look like?

If you want to spend most of your time sourcing, designing, presenting, and installing, working inside an established firm may be exactly what you're looking for.

If you want to build something that's yours, make the decisions, take the risk, and reap the rewards—and you're willing to engage with the unglamorous parts of running a business—ownership may be the path for you.

There's no prize for choosing the harder option.

There's no shame in changing your mind.

And there's certainly no reason to build a business simply because everyone around you says that's what successful designers are supposed to do.

Choose the career that actually fits the life you want to live.

Want to work with Michelle?

If you're wrestling with whether to start, grow, change, or rethink your interior design business, private coaching gives you the opportunity to look at your specific situation—including your goals, numbers, circumstances, and what you actually want your work and life to look like.

Learn more about private coaching with Michelle Lynne at https://thedesignbakehouse.com/private-coaching

Share this episode

Know an interior designer who's trying to figure out whether they actually want to own a business?

Send this episode their way. Sometimes the most useful thing we can give someone isn't permission to make a particular choice—it's a clearer picture of the choice they're actually making.

Transcript:

MICHELLE LYNNE (01:03)

All right, here we go. Welcome to Design for the Creative Mind. I'm Michelle Lynn. And if you're new here, this is the podcast about the business behind the beautiful, the real, unglamorous, nobody warned you about this side of running an interior design firm. And I've been doing this for close to two decades. I run my own design firm, ML Interiors Group. We're here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I also run the design bake house, which is where I work with designers on the operational.

And business side of what they're building. And I've been coaching designers long enough to know that there are certain conversations that need to be had more directly than they usually are. That's what today's episode is. We're gonna talk about something that is, well, it sounds simple, and but it's actually pretty loaded. The difference between being an interior designer and being an interior design business owner, and more specifically, the question.

of which one you actually want to be, because they're not the same job. And assuming that they are has cost a lot of talented people, a lot of time, money, and peace of mind.

I want to start by saying what this episode is not. It is not a motivational talk about going after your dreams. It is not a cautionary tale designed to talk you out of anything. And it's definitely not the kind of episode where I tell you that anybody can do this, just believe in yourself. Because I don't think that's true. And I don't think it's kind to say that. So what I wanna do today is to describe the job honestly.

Both jobs actually, because that's a conversation worth having. What does it actually mean to run your own design business? What does it mean to work inside somebody else's? And how do you make the actual decision between these two paths instead of drifting towards one by default or by pressure or by what sounds impressive on paper? There's no shame in either direction here. I wanna I I wanna say that clearly.

For those of you in the back, before we go any further, there's no shame in going either direction. There's this cultural narrative in our industry, and actually, I think it's just in general, it treats business ownership as the obvious next step for anybody with talent and ambition. And you know, as as as I was envisioning this episode.

I feel like I can say that I disagree with that framing pretty strongly. Because being good at design does not mean that you are built to run a business. It might mean that, but it might also not. So the question worth asking, and I think that most people aren't asking it enough, is what we're going to talk about today. So, when most designers think about going out on their own.

The picture in their head is usually something like this more creative control, better clients, work that actually reflects your aesthetic and your sensibility, and some version of freedom that a salaried position just doesn't offer. You want to choose your projects. You want to set your own hours, you want your name on the work. And you want the income to reflect your actual ability and talent rather than whatever a job description.

Has decided your role is worth. And that picture, girl, it's not wrong. All of those things are 100% possible. And I'd be lying if I told you otherwise because I've built them and I've watched plenty of designers build them too. But here's what tends to get left out of that picture. The design is fairly, it's a small portion of what you were at what you will actually do as a business owner. At least in

The early years and gosh, honestly throughout. The creative work, right? The sourcing, the space planning, the client presentation, the installs, that that part exists, but it's inside this container of other work that is not creative at all. And that container takes up a lot more of your time and your energy than most people anticipate when they're standing at the starting line deciding whether to go.

So the first year I ran my own firm, I spent a shocking amount of my week on things that had nothing to do with design. Sending proposals, following up on them, chasing invoices, troubleshooting vendor issues, trying to figure out what software I should be using, and then figuring out how to use it. Handling a client complaint that had nothing to do with the design and everything to do with the contractor's timeline. Writing my own marketing contact badly.

And inconsistently, if we're if we're honest. Okay. And it why? Because I didn't have a system and I didn't have a team. I didn't have a software platform that housed all the details for me.

So none of that is what I thought the job was gonna look like. And the gap between my expectation and the reality, y'all, I think that's where a lot of people get into trouble. So what the job actually is, like let's lay this out. It's running a design business, it basically means you're now in sales permanently. Whether sales comes naturally to you or makes you want to cancel all of your appointments and hide, you

Are responsible for finding clients. You are responsible for having consultations, presenting proposals, following up, and closing contracts with enough consistency that you have a functioning business. The design only happens if the sales works. And for most designers, not all, but most, sales is not the thing that drew them into this career. I was talking to one of my coaching clients yesterday, and he said basically.

He doesn't want to do sales. Like that's his least favorite part. And it's because a lot of times we are associating sales with, you know, the the greasy used car salesman.

But running a design business means that now you are responsible.

Because it's it's your business. And I think that a lot of times sales is the part where we hope to hire that away to somebody else someday. And there's things you can do, but eventually, but it's not usually at the beginning. And then even later, there are always aspects of business development that lands on the owner.

As the business owner, you're now responsible for your finances. And it's in a way that is more involved than most designers expect. It's not just hiring an accountant, but it's actually understanding what's happening under the hood of your business. Okay, month to month. You need to know your margins, you need to know your markup, whether it's enough to actually be profitable and not just busy, knowing what you're taking home after you pay everyone and everything else.

Consistently billing well and being profitable are not the same thing. The designers I've worked with who are the most stressed were often the ones that were billing impressive numbers and had pretty projects, but they're still not making real money because the back end did not support the revenue.

Running a design business means that you are now the IT department, at least until you can afford not to be. You pick the tools, you set them up, you maintain them. When something breaks or stops working, or the software you've been using changes its pricing or discontinues a feature that you depend on, you're the one who figures out what to do next. And for some people, this is genuinely not a big deal, but for others, it's a constant, quiet, silent, just

Painful drain on their time and attention. But it never fully goes away because the tools and the technology keep changing.

Y'all seriously, w if I knew n if I knew then what I know now, like I wish somebody had put this podcast out. I don't know if I would have had the the the gumption, the balls to start my own business.

But the this is this this is what like this is it. Because then on top of everything I just mentioned, there's the weight of the whole thing. When you own a business, the problems land with you. The contractor who goes dark in the middle of a project, the client who's unhappy about something that you didn't cause, the vendor who ships the wrong item three weeks before the install. The team member who quits two weeks.

With two weeks' notice during your busiest season. Like these are all just things that happen in this industry. And when you own the firm, your job is to solve them. Or at a minimum to hold the situation like it steadily while it gets solved. Here's the thing: nobody is above you to escalate it to. Like you are the escalation point. And I'm not saying all of this to be discouraging.

I'm really not. I've lived it for two decades and I'm still here, still building and I I genuinely love what I do.

But like I just said, I think the honest description of this job is one of the most useful things that I can offer to somebody who's deciding whether to take the leap. Because the gap between the imagined version and the actual version, hoo-hoo-hooy, that's a doozy. That's a doozy of a gap. And that's where people get hurt.

Beyond all the tactical business stuff, like the sales, the finance, the technology, the problem solving, there's that there's something, I never saw this one coming. There's something else that comes with owning a business. And running your own firm has this really particular way of surfacing every unresolved personal development issue that you have as a human.

Every single one. So rejection is a real part of this job. It does not get comfortable quickly. Proposals that you were certain would close and they don't. Clients who seem like so aligned with you and perfect, they go with somebody else, or you follow up and you don't hear back. And because it's your business.

Your name on the proposal, your concept on the presentation. The rejection does not feel removed or doesn't feel impersonal the way it might in a more corporate context. It can feel like a judgment on you specifically. And learning to process that without letting it change your pricing or your confidence or your willingness to put yourself out there again, it's genuinely hard work.

It gets easier with time. Okay, but it takes time.

And those early years they're just they can be rough.

That vulnerability that comes with this work.

I don't know, like I didn't even realize it was there. So I don't think it gets acknowledged enough.

Even posting to social media feels exposed when it's your firm and your name. You put a project out and immediately start wondering what people think.

You share your perspective on something and wait to see how it lands. You send a fee proposal and hold your breath. Which, by the way, do not send a fee proposal over email. Those need to be presented in person. Okay, just for the record. But all of this is a form of ongoing exposure. And if you have tendencies, and I know a lot of you do.

If you have tendencies, any tendencies towards perfectionism, running a business will put these tendencies right in your way over and over and over again.

How about imposter syndrome? Lord knows I fully had that full blown when I first started in the business. And I know it shows up in this industry constantly.

And it and sometimes it comes up so often, I wonder if we just stop taking it seriously. But it can genuinely be difficult to be out in the market positioning yourself as an expert, quoting fees that reflect expertise, asking people to trust you with their money and their homes, when underneath all of that, there's this little niggly voice asking whether you've really earned the authority to do this.

Almost everyone I've worked with has felt some version of that, including people who are exceedingly good at what they do and have been doing it for years.

When you own the business, there is no larger institution to lean on for credibility. You are the credibility. So building that confidence in yourself takes time and experience. And some seasons, y'all, it wavers, even for people who have been on it and in this for a long time.

And I want to say something, yeah. I'm gonna say something without any agenda behind it. Personal growth demands running, wait, the personal growth demands of running a business are real. And for some people, they are genuinely one of the most valuable parts of the experience. Being forced to confront rejection and vulnerability and your own tendencies towards perfectionism or avoidance, it changes you. Usually for the better.

And the version of yourself that comes out on the other side after a few years of business ownership tends to be more grounded and more capable than the one who went into it.

But you have to be willing to do that work. It's the personal development side of business ownership. If if if that side is something you'd rather not engage with, well, that's something that you need to really wrestle with because that is an important that that is important information about fit. Where do you fit in to this industry?

Hmm. It's kind of a downer. It's kind of a downer episode. I don't want it to be a downer episode. I want it to be realistic. Like I said earlier, I wish this is stuff that I would have known coming into the business. So, I mean, we've talked about some of the hard stuff, but let's talk about risk. Because there's there's again going back to the whole cultural narrative right now.

societal neck societal narrative of being an entrepreneur. Okay. It treats risk as exciting and courage as the answer to everything. Dun dun dun, like you're superhero. But I think that what it cut it's coming from a good place. Okay. But it doesn't serve people well when they're making real decisions about their livelihood. Y'all, the financial risk in this industry is real. Like

When you start a business, like it could be any business, you could be making donuts. Okay, there's a period, and it can be a long period of time where your income is inconsistent, unpredictable, and potentially much lower than what you were earning as an employee. So keep that in mind. If you have a mortgage, a family, financial obligations of any kind, you need a real plan for that gap.

Like not Sally wearing her rose-colored glasses, just being optimistic. That's that's great. You do need to be optimistic, but it needs to be a real plan. You need to create savings. And how long can your savings sustain you? Do you have a partner whose income covers the household while you build?

Do you have a side hustle or a part time arrangement as a bridge? What happens if it takes twice as long as you planned to get consistent revenue level?

The designers that I have seen struggle most in the early years of running a firm are not often the ones who lack skill or drive. Like they're some hardworking folks, but they're the ones who underestimated the financial runway that they needed. And by the time they were building something like genuinely good, they were so stressed out about the finances that they couldn't.

Sustain it long enough to see it pay off. So honest planning is key because risk does not disappear as the business matures either. Y'all, markets shift, a major client relationship can end unexpectedly, a key team member leaves at a critical time.

Or a slow season hits right when you were planning on investing in a in growth, and you have to allocate that money to keeping the business afloat. Running a business is is this how how would I describe it? It's a continuous practice of managing uncertainty.

Managing uncertainty. And for business owners who do it well, they have developed a real earned tolerance for not knowing exactly how things are going to unfold. Okay. If and that that tolerance isn't something that everybody naturally has.

So you need to ask yourself whether you have it or whether you need to build it before making the move to start your own business. Or and that's something that do you need to start your own business?

So let's let's let's talk about that because oftentimes this other option gets treated like a lesser choice in our industry. And I think that's crap. Going to work for an established design firm is not a fallback. For significant numbers of designers, it's genuinely the right choice for where they are in their life, for what they want their daily experience to look like, and for the kind of work that they actually want to be doing.

When you work inside of an established firm, you get to design. The sales are handled, the marketing is handled, the contracts and the client communication and the back-end systems, however imperfect they may be, they are somebody else's responsibility. Your job is to do the creative work and to do it well.

So for a designer who genuinely loves the design process and finds the business side draining or simply uninteresting,

It's not a small thing, it's actually a significant gift.

Because there's the well, there's and then there's also the learning that happens inside the established firm. And you simply cannot replicate that on your own in the early years. You get to see how a functioning business actually operates, how client relationships are managed, how procurement works at scale, how a team functions, how decisions get made under pressure. You might be looking at your boss and deciding that's how I'd want to handle it, or that's not at all how I'd want to handle it.

You're learning. And depending on where you land, you may have access to project types, budget levels, and mentorship that would take years to develop independently.

A lot of the designers that I've coached who have gone on to build really strong firms spent time inside other people's businesses first. And they would tell you that that time was invaluable.

Well, there's also the quality of life difference between owning and working inside a firm.

You get a constant salary or draw, okay, or you get constant hourly pay. The ability to close your laptop at the end of the day without being the one who carries the whole thing home with you.

You might have benefits if the firm offers it. The ability to take a real vacation without your business waiting for you when you get home.

or carrying it in the suitcase with you. Now, these are not small things and they're not things that you should feel embarrassed about valuing.

So like let's let's be like direct. Like I haven't been direct in this episode, right? I have watched designers leave firms to go out on their own, run their own businesses for a few years, and then decide what they actually wanted all along was to be a designer, not the CEO. In fact, my principal designer was self-aware enough to call me up and say, hey, Michelle, I don't want to.

Anymore, can I come work for you? Okay. She she came back into this firm environment. Now she can be more creative and less stressed. I mean, and it's not just her. I I've seen this, I've seen this, okay. The you can be more present to the work that you actually love. Like y'all, if you're out there running a business right now and you're thinking, my god, this is just so much.

It is not a failure story to go work for somebody.

What what like what Juliana did coming to work with me is that it's someone she gathered real information about who they wanted to be and she made a decision based on that. I've I've got a ton of respect for that. So how do you figure out which path is right for you?

The designers who tend to do well on their own share some things in common. They've got a real tolerance for uncertainty. Okay, like I like I mentioned a couple minutes ago. And it's not just intellectually, but emotionally.

They can hold the discomfort of an unpredictable month or two or three without it destabilizing them completely.

They are willing to do the parts of the job that feels uncomfortable because they understand that these parts are the price of everything else.

And there's the there's this part of them that is genuinely curious about the business and they're not just resigned to it.

And oftentimes, in the best case scenario, they have some version of financial stability or support that gives them enough runway to build without panicking. So maybe they have a partner, maybe they have savings, maybe they're coming out of a corporate environment and they have this big salary.

But on the other hand, the designers who struggle most on their own are the ones who love design deeply.

But I don't know, maybe they resent everything else.

They start here's this is what I've seen. I can I can think of like a lot of designers that I've coached over the years or I've interacted with that they start the firm hoping to mostly avoid sales and administration and finance and technology, like hoping all of that can be hired out quickly, and they can get back to just designing. Now you can hire somebody for it eventually, but in the early years and honestly in the ongoing years.

The business owner has to be genuinely engaged with all of it. It's your business. It has your name on it. It's your livelihood. I can tell you, I've taken my foot off the gas. That big mistake. Taking my foot off the gas with my own team, I was driving the bus, thinking that everything was handled. Y'all, as the business owner, you can't do that. You have to be genuinely engaged with all of it. Now, if

those parts of the job drain you to the point where they affect the quality of your work and the quality of your life. Like this is this is this is information I want you to sit with. And and it's and and take it seriously.

So ask yourself, what do you want your actual days to look like? If you want to be deep in creative work the majority of the time, sourcing, designing, presenting, and installing, a firm environment might genuinely serve you better than ownership.

If you want the autonomy of building something that's yours, of making decisions and taking the risk and reaping the reward, and you're prepared to do everything unglamorous that goes with it, ownership might be the right call. And neither of these is a is a character judgment. They're different profiles. Neither's right and neither is wrong. The goal is for you to be honest about which one you are and not one.

And not which one sounds better in a caption.

So you are allowed to try one path and then decide it isn't right and make a different choice. You're even allowed to do that more than once. This is your job. This is your business. This is your life. The idea that you make a decision, let's say, in your 20s or 30s or 40s, and it defines you permanently is not how real careers were working.

Actually, it is not how real careers actually work. And it's not something that you are bound by.

So there are designers who go out on their own, build something real, and then decide what they actually wanted was to be inside the design firm doing creative work without the weight of ownership. Okay, I gave you the example, Juliana. I I mean, I didn't even I as I was outlining this episode, it occurred to me that that's exactly what she did. Her business grew so big, she didn't want the weight of it.

And I've watched her make the shift and just ex exhale.

I've watched and and she's not the only one. I've seen other designers do this that I've coached to build their own business. They just they got their business up and running. It was profitable, but they decided that that it's not it it was making them sick. It was making them sick. Okay. But then I've also watched designers spend you know, a decade inside a firm hit a ceiling of some kind.

And decided to go out on their own with all of that experience behind and they've done really well.

They knew what they were walking into. And I think both of those trajectories are legitimate, they're successful, they're valid. Like I don't know why, for some reason, we all have it in our head that it's a sign of weakness.

If you're not running your own business. But the the most important thing is that the choice is actually yours. Like who gives a beep, beep, beep, beep? Who gives a beep what others' opinions are? This choice is made based on what's true for you, your temperament, your financial situation, your life circumstances, the work that genuinely brings you satisfaction, not what's

based on what sounds ambitious, not what's based on what your peers are doing, not based on a version of success that somebody else has defined, and we just absorb it without questioning it.

Now, if you're in the middle of this decision right now, like genuinely weighing whether to go out on your own or stay where you are, or maybe reconsidering something you've already built.

Y'all, working through that kind of decision is exactly what private coaching is designed for. My private coaching is not a one size fits all, but we can have a real conversation about your specific situation, your numbers, your goals, your life. Because the the honest answer of should I do this depends entirely on the details that only you know.

So, if that conversation sounds like what you need, you can find information about working with me directly. It's at the designbakehouse.com. Click on the private coaching. It's listed in the show notes. So don't stress about writing it down right now. But whatever you decide, I hope that this episode gave you something like tangible to hold on to, something real to think about. It's not permission to stay or go. You don't need my permission for either one.

But maybe it's a clearer picture of what you're actually deciding between.

So that that's what I wanted to share today. If it resonated with you, send it to the to a designer who's wrestling with the same question. Somebody who needs to hear it said plainly.

That's genuinely how my podcast grows. And I really do appreciate you sharing it every single time. And all the links are in the show notes. I'll be back back next week with more. And until then, take good care of your business because it cannot take care of you if you're not taking care of it. I'll see you next time.