Success comes in many sizes and forms, sometimes when you least expect it; and those successes are particularly sweet.  Recently, I was explaining the benefits of project sourcing to a potential client, a very talented, well known and respected designer, how we could assist by pulling fabrics or supplying tear sheets within the parameters that she would specify for us, staying true to her design vision.  She didn’t feel she would ever use that service, as she wanted to make those design decisions, she loved that process, and didn’t want to let that go.

To my delighted surprise, I was given the opportunity to pull supporting fabrics for one of her projects!  She had a presentation in several days, and could not fit the 5 hour round trip to the design center into her schedule.  She supplied me with the vendor and pattern numbers for the driving fabrics, and a few details about durability needs and budget.  The design center is 15 minutes from my office, and within 90 minutes, I had pulled approximately 60 fabrics from numerous vendors and showrooms, stopped at the FedEx store, and sent them off to be delivered to her doorstep the next day.

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Motifs are a powerful touchstone, bridging the gap between history and design, past and present. While some have been relegated to the ages, many are seeing new iterations, blending into the design schemes of today. Let’s take a peek into the fascinating stories of their symbolism.

Quatrefoil – From the French, literally meaning four leaves or petals, such as a four-leaf clover. It’s popularity peaked during the Gothic Revival and Renaissance periods, and can be seen on countless churches and cathedrals to this day. It has also been an official part of the Bishop James Madison Society, established 1812 at the College of William and Mary, and the national symbol of the women’s fraternity Phi Mu, the 2nd oldest female fraternity and founded at Wesleyan College in 1852.

Fleur de lis – Originally used by French royalty as far back as the 12th century. It depicts three petals of the iris flower, literally “flowers of the lily”. It is a symbol of royalty and government for many countries; England, Scotland, Hungary, Italy and Bosnia, to name a few. The three petals have been associated with the Holy Trinity, and also represent faith, wisdom and chivalry. Like the quatrefoil, it is used by military and fraternal organizations, and surprisingly, it is incorporated into the badging for the Chevrolet Corvette! The fleur de lis is the main element in the logo of most Scouting organizations, representing the themes of the outdoors and wilderness.

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Now that the New Year is upon us, we find ourselves cleaning up the holiday leftovers and formulating resolutions.  This year instead of pledging to improve your life through diet, developing your tennis serve, or organizing your travel photo’s, I challenge all of you to look around and see what compels you.  Think about what inspires you, give yourself a list of goals and once you are able to narrow that list down, then you will have a positive constructive vision on which to live by.

So look around yourself and soak in the little things.  Find the inspiration that made you who you are today.  Chances are if you surround yourself with positive and creative sources you will be the best version of yourself.

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.

On January 1, 2007, the Boise State Broncos shocked the country by upsetting the powerhouse known as the Oklahoma Sooners in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.  At the same time, the Broncos showed, in a David vs. Goliath battle, that hope, faith, and preparedness can be recipe for greatness.

I was lucky enough to be at this game.  I must admit that I lost faith; it seemed that the there were so many things that 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.

There is a great article from the New York Times about how this game even inspired the numbed sportswriters in the press box to believe that great things were possible.

This is not a football blog post though.  This is a New Year’s post about the importance of hope, faith, and positive thinking in each of our businesses.  We must be prepared.  Boise State would not have succeeded if they had not been completely prepared.  However, almost more importantly, when it seems that the odds are against you, there is never an excuse to give up hope.  Hope costs you nothing.  Great things happen every day; they’re not just on the SportsCenter highlights.

When setting your company goals this year, remember the nuts and bolts, but don’t ever forget the hope and faith that must accompany every day that you run your business and face adversity.  A little team from Idaho stunned the nation; everything did go “right” for them that day.  When you are faced with adversity in your business, don’t forget the Broncos.

This martini was featured in our December e-newsletter, The Gibson.  If you don’t receive The Gibson, click here to sign up!

Many of the Christmas and holiday martinis that I found sounded very sweet and thick.  This one, however, is a perfect marriage of class and elegance to add to a holiday night.

Ingredients:

• 1 (1.5 fluid ounce) jigger vodka (top shelf)
• 1/4 ounce Grand Marnier
• 1-1/2 ounces fresh lime juice
• 1 tsp cinnamon water (boiled water with cinnamon and sugar)
• 1 ounce blood orange juice
• 1 fig slice garnish

Preparation:

1. Place liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice.
2. Shake to blend and chill.
   
3. Strain into a chilled martini glass, and garnish with a fig slice.
4. Enjoy!

The design industry is no stranger to the acronym heavy list of professional organizations available to the trade. Professional organizations serve a vital purpose to those well established within the industry, help to foster connections with those that are new to their chosen field, and act as a resource and a mentor to those seeking an education or degree within the trade.

Let’s spell out a few of them for you!

AKBD – Associate Kitchen & Bath Designer. A certification examination for students provided by the National Kitchen & Bath Association.
ASID – American Society of Interior Designers. The leading organization for interior designers. Founded in 1975, with 40,000 members, there are also student chapters that are very active throughout the country.
IDS – Interior Design Society. Founded in 1973, dedicated to serving the residential interior design industry through its 3,000 members.
IIDA – International Interior Design Association. Founded in 1994, this organization has a global reach with 13,000 members in 29 chapters around the world.
NCIDQ – National Council of Interior Design Qualification. A competency based examination for interior designers, and serves as a qualifier for many of the professional organizations.
NKBA – National Kitchen & Bath Association. Founded in 1963 with over 40,000 members serving 11 industry segments in chapters throughout the US and Canada.

These organizations provide an excellent opportunity to network with your industry partners, celebrate at their many festive events and laud the achievements of fellow designers.

It’s 8:30 am Monday morning and you turn on your computer to start the day.

Enforce the one click rule. Once you open an e-mail it is much more time efficient and effective to reply the minute you finish reading it.

Organize e-mails by folders. Set up a folder with-in your inbox for each client to catalog all of your correspondence.  Then broaden your electronic mail message organization method with more general folders. Personally, I recommended assembling a folder for each client project, pricing, acknowledgements, tracking information, and invoices.  You can tailor your folders to your needs, for it will drastically reduce the time spent searching for e-mails.

Weekly cleaning of your inbox, spam, and unwanted deleted items. If you really want to go the extra mile, take a few minutes to unsubscribe from promotional e-mail lists you don’t use.  Cleaning out your e-mails will not only increase your productivity, it will also free-up storage space for the entire office.

The end of the year is fast approaching (we probably didn’t have to remind you!).  A few things to keep in mind so that you can turn over an organized file to your accountant in January:

1.      Make all of your charitable contributions before the end of the year in order to get the benefit of a tax deduction for 2009.  Itemize gifts of goods, while the information is still fresh in your mind.  Remember to also account for the professional time that you donated to that auction.

2.      Make the most of your retirement contributions.  Some contributions can be made until April 14 of 2010 for 2009.  So, now is the perfect time to plan that contribution and make the contributions over the next four months.

3.      Most of us like to defer our income, and increase our expenses in order to decrease our current year tax liability; however, you may need to rethink this strategy as tax rates are on the rise.  Tax cuts created during the Bush administration are set to expire in 2011, which may make it advantageous for you to recognize income now rather than later.  Ask your tax professional.

4.  Ensure that you are up to date on your bank reconciliations so that you have a true balance sheet and income statement on December 31st.

5.  If you do your own payroll, check with your accountant and/or the IRS to ensure that you are aware of the proper year-end forms to file.

6.  In many financial accounting software programs you can only have two fiscal years open at any one time.  That means that in 2010, you must have 2008 closed.  This is especially true if you use Studio Designer.  If 2008 is not closed, be sure to do this before December 31st or you will run into a big mess.

If you are feeling any pinch and worry about what to gather for the end-of-the-year financials, be sure to use your bookkeeper or accountant as a resource.  Feel free to contact our Accounting Services group and we will make sure to either help you or steer you in the right direction.

Recently our design firm ordered a few light fixtures for a project from Unilight out of Montreal, Canada.  The project was under renovation so the fixtures needed to arrive before the contractor left to avoid extra charges.  Two bathroom sconces shipped, one lacked a back plate.

After contacting Unilight to get a back plate shipped, it took them ONE WEEK to ship us a plate that probably cost 50 cents.  The reason?  Our contact said that they had to meet about why a piece was not shipped (to figure out what went wrong in THEIR process) and she had to get a replacement plate approved.  From a business perspective, this does not fly.

In your business, you should empower your people to make something right for your clients.  What this requires from you is

1.  Trust in your team’s decision-making,

2.  The ability to not get mad if your people do something that you would not have done,

3.  Becoming comfortable enough to let your people solve a problem from start to finish without necessarily involving you.

In order to empower people to make things right, you have to trust their good judgment.  By punishing people for

making a decision, you are sending mixed messages.  If you feel more comfortable, set a limit of $100 or $200 cost before they have to check in with you or the team about the decision.  If it’s going to make a happier client to overnight the pillows that are already late so they will be there in time for a party, and it will cost you an extra $50, your team should feel like they can fulfill that without asking.  Furthermore, if you can get your team to a place where they do this without the client asking, you are exceeding expectations (but that’s for another post).

The last thing a client wants when she calls with a grievance that can be easily and quickly solved (such as a back plate shipped) is to hear that it will have to go before committee to make a decision.

Once the error on your part is made, and your client is made happy, then it is time to study your process and fix what went wrong.  That should never be your client’s problem or concern, and should never be a reason for delay on fixing her problem.

This is the BARE MINIMUM that your company should be doing.  We’ll talk more later about how further empowering your team can bring the WOW factor…think Zappos WOW.