Contrary to popular belief, an interior designer’s job does not consist primarily of design time. This is not the sexy vision that young men and women dream about when they enter design school but it’s the reality that any seasoned designer can confirm. Project management and project administration are the largest part of being an interior designer; all the brilliant design in the world cannot make up for a poorly run project and an unhappy client. Effective management and administration will continue to be of paramount importance when running a successful firm but can there be a better mousetrap?
The question that I encourage you to ask yourself and your staff is where that important project management and administration borders on inefficiency. If you’re like most design firms that we work with, that greatest inefficiency is in the purchasing process. You may have great technology (like Studio IT) and great systems in place to make this process a little less painful but the reality is that pricing, creating proposals, creating purchase orders, tracking and expediting takes time, often a lot of time. In fact, I can imagine that much of your purchase order management time can be summed up with a few of these frustrating points:
- Calling multiple showrooms and vendors to get pricing…leaving messages…then calling them again because they didn’t get back to you.
- Calling multiple showrooms and vendors to get pricing…leaving messages…and then missing their next calls because you’re on the phone with another vendor. Thus begins the illustrious PO management game of phone tag.
- Checking on orders weekly (if you know what’s good for you) because you’ve had too many times where a vendor has failed to notify you that the sofa, which was supposed to ship last week, will actually be another four weeks. The vendor does not have to deal with your irate client who wanted the sofa before Thanksgiving.
- Creating client proposals that accurately describe the items but don’t give the client too much information so that they don’t “shop” you.
- Dealing with a delay in orders when you’re on vacation, in High Point, on another project install, or generally completely incapable of handling the crises as you’re nowhere near your computer and your office, and might not even have a pen in your purse/pocket that seems to work.
In our design firm, we utilize great technology and we institute effective systems. Despite our finest efforts, this has not, however, eliminated the items above from rearing their ugly heads. The reality is that on each project, a design firm may deal with 30+ vendors and showrooms which mean 30+ lines of communication. When I look at our bottom line, I see this part of our business as the greatest drain, the greatest hindrance to our growth, and our greatest cost.
- Current Communication Web for Design Firms
When we launched Gibson Design Management, we focused on purchase order management. While we now have multiple services that we offer for the interior design industry, I still believe that our purchase order management service is the best way to make a design firm more profitable and healthy.
Instead of having those 30+ lines of communication open at all times and being the central hub with a plethora of spokes, our purchase order management services give you one “go to” person that handles every order that you place, every item that you want to price, and every piece that you need to track. At the same time, your company can actually make more money with fewer paper-pushing efforts.
- Communication Efficiency with GDM
As I write this post I worry that this might be the first time in the history of this blog that I’ve written a sales-y post that is also an educational post. I would not risk our readers with shameless self-promotion if I did not truly believe that this service can have the greatest impact on a single interior design firm.
We offer a lot of great services and our team is really, really good at what they do. However, when we sit and talk about our different services, purchase order management is the one service that the team unanimously says “that’s a no-brainer; every design firm should use that.” Once I explain and write down the numbers on the time and money lost on managing purchasing in-house and then I show that the design firm can actually make more money, it’s not surprising that they say that.
In 2010, if you are interested in growing your bottom line and getting back to the real reason you became a designer, please contact me and we can talk more. Don’t continue to do things the old way as we all now see that the old way is slowly taking a choke hold on the livelihood of our industry.
My latest company crush is on a Greenville, South Carolina identity and branding company called Brains on Fire. I am obsessed with the culture that they’ve created and enamored with the fact that their website shows that culture and personality. [I especially like their Tequila Shots book which explains the 12 company beliefs; imagine a mission statement minus the boring undertones].
The WordPress name is becoming more well-known outside industries who work with technology. It’s not as popular as the Facebook name, but more and more I run into people who have heard of WordPress. However, many of those people don’t know the difference between creating a website with 
Credibility – Having a website gives credibility to your design firm. It gives you an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in the field.
had to go “right” for Boise State to win the game after losing a 17 point lead and falling behind with only 1:30 left in regulation. Sooners fans filed out of the stadium, bound to get an early break on the traffic, to only listen to the game going into double overtime on their car radios.
