Interior Design Business Tips: Learn To Delegate
If you started your own interior design business, one of the things you need to learn is successful delegation. Otherwise you will end up doing some robotic tasks instead of focusing on growing your business and the fun part – design itself.
Why is it so difficult to delegate? These are usually the most frequent reasons:
- Some negative experience in the past when you delegated a task and the person failed to do it
- Lack of management skills and experience
- You don’t know how to give the task and control its execution
- You are stuck with which tasks to delegate
- You are not sure about qualifications and skills of the person to whom you want to delegate
One of the most common misconceptions: “It is too early for me to delegate – I will reach certain level and then will start to do that”.
In fact it is never too early to delegate and in order to successfully grow your interior design business you need to start doing that from the beginning.
Several interior designers that I asked named these tasks that they would love to delegate:
- Site measurement
- Sourcing
- Project management
- Social media marketing
- Accounting
- Searching new suppliers, builders and other partners
- Interior styling for photoshoot
- Finance (expenses)
And here are the tasks they don’t want to delegate:
- First client meeting
- Project presentation
- Finance (profit)
- Visits to showrooms with clients
- Design (concept creation)
- Self-development
Before we jump to the algorithm of successful delegation, let’s see what it can give us and why do we need it:
- Breaking free from work overload = more time for strategic planning
- Business support (non-core tasks, such as office cleaning, office administration, logistics, etc.)
Above is a simple algorithm which you can apply whenever you need to delegate any task. Let’s have a look at it in detail:
- Before – preparation. At this stage you need to find the executor and think of motivation (terms, fee, etc). If you haven’t worked with this person before, it is useful to get the references and check his portfolio (e.g. you want delegate someone to do 3D renderings for you). Also you need to formulate the task itself. In order to do it correctly, check it against the SMART criteria:
S – is it specific?
M – measurable? (e.g. you delegating Social media management, so you can measure the amount of new subscribers)
A – achievable?
R – relevant? is it aligned with your goals and strategy?
T – time-based (e.g. renderings need to be done within 3 working days)
- During – explanation, motivation. At this stage you need to explain the task and encourage the person to do it properly. Depending on motivation and expertise of task executor you could and should use different methods of explanation:
The best option, of course, if you executor is experience and motivated. However you could still work in a teaching or convincing mode. And at all means I recommend you to avoid directive method, since you will waste lots of your time and energy without getting proper results.
- After – control stage. For efficient control you need to check the results that you’ve got agains your SMART criteria.
I hope this was useful and if you haven’t read my Marketing for Interior Designers eBook, check it out – it is full of practical and effective tools to grow your interior design business:
