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.

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.

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.

Last Friday night I received multiple calls on my cell phone from a local number that I did not recognize.  I was out to dinner for a friend’s birthday so I decided not to answer.  However, after the 4th call (at 8:30 pm), I decided that I should answer in case of emergency.

It was a robot recording from the dermatologist’s office calling to confirm my appointment for the following Tuesday.

While we love systems and technologies as much as (or probably more than) the next guy, this was over the top.  Once my blood pressure lowered, I thought, “What should be our litmus test on whether or not to implement a system or technology?”

Before implementing a new system or technology ask, “Will this system compromise the warm and fuzzy feeling that our clients or our employees feel about our company?”  If the answer is “Yes”, don’t do it, despite the efficiencies gained.

Needless to say, I did not feel warm and fuzzy about my dermatologist.  In fact, I felt like I would probably be put on a conveyor belt and inspected and stamped by #43 (while still paying the full service price).

Many of us set out each day, especially each Monday, with a spring in our step and the greatest of intentions to do many of the business tasks that we have been putting off for far too long.  History has shown, however, that as business owners or managers when we walk through the door to the office our best laid plans are going to be sidetracked.

Mondays seem to frequently start for me as mentioned above and then quickly spiral out of control; all of a sudden it is 6:30 or 7 pm and while I have been frantically busy all day, I have not checked one item off of my best laid Monday plan.  Unlike Office Space, as a CEO, this is what I call our Case of the Mondays.  While I will take our Mondays over the cubicle nation Mondays depicted in the movie any day, I still feel less than fulfilled after a day like this of heavy firefighting.

I recently read a great article by Peter Bregman for Harvard Business Review with tangible steps to managing your day.  As today is a Monday and we still have four more days left this week, I thought this might be particularly applicable to making the most out of not just tomorrow but the rest of the week.

[Below is an excerpt from Harvard Business Review]

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.

Read more…

Utilizing Gibson Design Management Project Sourcing services has many benefits for your design firm.  From more hours in the day to increased profits, you will see the advantages when you let your Project Sourcing team assist you in meeting the needs of your design projects.