Ep 95: Building 90-Day Cycles in Your Business That Create Momentum

Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue podcast, the interior design business podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside.

What if the biggest thing holding your business back isn't your talent, your pricing or your marketing - but the way you think about your role?

In this episode, I'm exploring the difference between being an interior designer and becoming an interior design business owner. Although the two often go hand in hand, they're not the same thing. One focuses on delivering beautiful projects, while the other is intentionally building a business that can grow sustainably, generate consistent revenue and create freedom over the long term.

We'll explore why so many talented designers become trapped in a cycle of constantly chasing projects, why momentum matters more than motivation, and how shifting from reacting to strategically leading your business can completely change your future.

If you've ever felt like you're working incredibly hard but never quite getting ahead, this episode will help you understand why and more importantly, what to do about it.

In this episode, we cover:

• The difference between an interior designer and an interior design business owner.
• Why creativity alone isn't enough to build a profitable business.
• How chasing projects keeps you stuck in feast-and-famine cycles.
• Lisa's "rowing versus sailing" analogy for creating business momentum.
• Why consistency compounds while constant restarting keeps you stuck.
• Understanding your capacity, forecasting and long-term visibility.
• Building momentum through strategic leadership rather than constant effort.
• The mindset shift that takes you from hobbyist to sustainable business owner.

Building a successful interior design business isn't about working harder or becoming more talented.

It's about creating the structure, momentum and leadership that allow your business to keep growing long after you've finished today's project.

Because beautiful interiors might attract clients, but sustainable businesses are built through intentional leadership.

Continue the conversation with Lisa-Marie: HERE

Studio: Moska Interior Design HERE

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Download your free guide: 7 Ways to Springboard Your Interior Design Business and Redefine Your Success HERE

ABOUT DESIGN BOSS DIALOGUE
Design Boss Dialogue is the interior design business podcast for ambitious women who are ready to build profitable, sustainable businesses with greater confidence, clarity and intention.

Hosted by Interior Design Business Strategist and Mentor Lisa-Marie Elkhadraoui, each episode shares practical business strategies, honest conversations and inspiring interviews to help interior designers master pricing, profitability, visibility, leadership, marketing, systems and sustainable business growth.

Whether you're building your first design studio or scaling an established business, you'll find practical strategies and honest conversations to help you create a business that feels just as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Welcome back to the Design Boss Dialogue Podcast, the Interior Design Business Podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside. And I am your host, Lisa Marie El Kadrawi. Now, today I want to talk about something that separates two types of people I see in this industry: interior designers and interior design business owners. And I promise you, by the end of this episode, you're going to know exactly which one you are. And more importantly, which one you actually need to become if you want longevity in this industry, not just a good year here and there. Okay, so this is one of these episodes that I've been meaning to record for a while now because I can see this distinction play out constantly in women I see in the industry. And I don't think anyone's ever actually said it to them this directly. So I'm gonna dive in. You know me, I am the woman that wants to get results for every single woman out there. And the more exposure I can bring to this, the better, because women start really pivoting their businesses for success. So here is the thing nobody tells you when you start out. Being brilliant at design has almost nothing to do with running a profitable, sustainable business. They're actually two completely different skill sets. They're built through two completely different processes, and so many talented women get stuck because they've only actually developed one of them. An interior designer naturally will chase projects. And yes, there is nothing wrong with that, but hear me out on this. They are brilliant at their work. I get it because in my interior design studio, if I think back to the woman that was 10 years ago when we first started out, we yes, we're brilliant, we're still brilliant, but we chased the projects. We loved the creative process, the mood boards, the sourcing. Oh my god, the client reveal like the moment a space finally comes together, and you look at it and go, I've created that for my client. So their focus and quite naturally is on the next client, the next space, the next brief. And whilst there's nothing wrong with that, like I said, it's often exactly what draws us into this industry in the first place of why we absolutely love our jobs and we absolutely love what we do. But nobody falls in love with interior design because they dreamed of spreadsheets and forecasting models. Right, you get me, you hear me, but we fall in love with it because we love transforming spaces and the people who live in them. So naturally, yes, we want to chase the projects. We love the client work, we love the creative. But if you are an interior designer that wants to run a business, this is going to land for you. An interior design business owner does something entirely differently. They build momentum, they think in cycles, not just projects. They look ahead rather than only reacting to what's landing in their inboxes this week or next week. They understand that a business isn't simply a series of beautiful projects strung together, it's a whole architectural structure, a structure that needs to be led, forecasted, and strategically grown separately from the creative delivery of the work itself. Okay, so just let that land. An interior designer will naturally chase the projects, the next project, the next client, but a business owner builds momentum to think in cycles, not just projects. And here's where the pitfalls really start to show up. So many women build a business without ever consciously realizing they're still operating purely as a designer chasing work, rather than an owner building momentum behind it. And I hear this constantly. Invest in myself. Let me just get up on my two feet first and then I will invest. Getting up on your two feet first and then investing is often the reason why so many women don't hit six figures, burn out, and cannot build a business sustainably around their family, around their children, and around their passion and earn good money from it. And these women are wildly intelligent and capable, yes, absolutely, but without structure, without cycles, without a clear roadmap, a direction, sitting underneath all of that beautiful creative work, they end up just bumbling along. They get a couple of clients, they do beautiful work, but they never quite build the kind of business that actually holds them financially, emotionally, or sustainably, and gives them the freedom, such as dictating, you know, how to build that white space, time in their diary, consistent revenue, income, being able to take two to three weeks off, maybe twice a year, Christmas and summer, half terms, this all comes with building momentum in a structured business. I think about this like the difference between rowing a boat and sailing one. When you're rowing, every bit of movement comes from your own physical effort, project by project, client by client. The second you stop rowing, the boat stops moving. But when you're sailing, you've built something that catches momentum. Okay, when you're sailing, you've built something that catches momentum from something bigger than your own effort in that single moment. The wind does some some of the work for you because you've positioned the sail correctly, you're going in a direction, and that's what momentum in business actually is. It stopped being entirely dependent on your constant individual rowing. So I want you to think about are you rowing or are you sailing? And if you're rowing, what do you have to do to start sailing? So why does momentum matter so much in our businesses? Momentum matters because it what turns our effort into compounding results rather than effort that simply resets to zero over and over and over again. Without momentum, every quarter starts from scratch. You're back to square one, chasing leads, hoping something lands, reacting to whatever happens to come through the door that week. And quite frankly, it can be exhausting because you're essentially rebuilding your business's visibility and pipeline from nothing again and again and again every few months. And with momentum, everything you've built starts to build on itself instead. Your visibility compounds because you're not starting your marketing cold each time, you've got an established presence that people already recognize you. Your client relationships compound because past clients refer to new ones, and those referrals often come warmer and more aligned than cold inquiries ever do. Your understanding of your own numbers compounds too, because you're not guessing what a good month looks like anymore. You actually know your patterns, your averages, your seasonal dips and lifts. You stop starting over every 90 days, and instead you start building forward from where you already are. This is really the shift from information to consistency. You almost certainly already learned the foundational pieces by now: your offers, your pricing structure, your onboarding processes, how you run discovery calls, how you run all the way through up to stage one. Okay? That's information and it's important information, but holding consistent visibility, consistent sales activity, and consistent financial leadership month after month, quarter by quarter, that is a different skill altogether. Okay, it's not something you learn once and then you simply know forever. It's a discipline that you constantly practice. And it's this exact skill, the discipline of consistency, that determines whether you gain real lasting momentum in your business or whether you quietly slip back into overwhelm. Those are feast and famine cycles and the kind of self-doubt that comes from feeling like you're working incredibly hard, but somehow never quite getting ahead of yourself. And some women have been in their businesses two, three, four years, and this is still happening, and it's because you have never been shown how to build momentum properly in your business. And I want to be really honest with you here. This is often the stage where women either slip into their next level really, really beautifully, or they quietly plateau without even realizing what's happening. And it doesn't look dramatic from the outside. It looks like you're still working, you're, you know, you're chasing projects, you might be in one project one month, you might be in another project two or three months down the line, but underneath it all, nothing is actually compounding. The it feels like you're working, you're working really hard, but there's no money to show for it. And you're just repeating the same cycle quarter after quarter without ever building on what came before. So let me give you a picture of what this actually looks like in practice because I think it makes it much more tangible when I can put an actual physical uh image in your head behind it. So I want you to imagine two designers, both are incredibly talented, both have been in business roughly the same amount of time. Designer one is fully in delivery mode. Okay, she takes on a project, throws herself completely into it, delivers something beautiful, and the moment it's finished, she is scrambling to find the next project. She is so focused in the project that she forgets to be on the business. And her marketing happens in births, usually when she's between projects, and suddenly she has the capacity to think about visibility again. Her income looks like one of the largest roller coasters that you'd see at Thought Park that's just going all over the place year after year. Some months she's really thriving, she's on top of the world, but other months she is quietly panicking, like she's kicking, she is feeling the anxiety build in, wondering where is my next inquiry gonna come from? And because she's got to pick up that momentum roller coaster again, her might her her next project might not come in for two or three months because she's desperately trying to now market. But designer two operates completely differently, and even though her talent level is identical to designer one, she has a rhythm to her visibility that doesn't ever switch off because she's she's busy delivering a project, but she knows roughly what her inquiries look like across a quarter, so a quiet week doesn't send her into spiral or panic. She can see it's part of a pattern, not a crisis, okay? And she's already thinking about her next quarter's capacity while she's delivering this quarter's projects. Her business isn't necessarily bigger than designers one, but it feels completely different to run because it has momentum behind it and it has compounded effect rather than relying purely on the ability for her to keep growing. And that's the difference we're talking about today. It's it never comes down to talent, it comes down to structure and how you actually build your businesses. So, what do you actually need to start considering as you make this shift from designer to interior design, business owner, or stager or show home designer or stylist? First, you need genuine visibility into your own numbers, not just glancing at your bank balance and feeling either relieved or anxious depending on what's in there. I mean actual forecasting, understanding your pattern across cycles, not just individual months. So you can see what's coming rather than simply reacting to what's already happened. Second, you need consistency in how you show up, not just when inspiration strikes or when you happen to have a spare hour. Visibility that only happens when you feel like it isn't a strategy, it's a hobby dressed up as marketing. Okay? And it is so important that we compound our visibility, we compound our marketing so that we are not running a hobby. And thirdly, you need to generally understand your own capacity and build your business around that capacity rather than constantly trying to blend your life around whatever your business happens to be demanding of you that week. This is such an important one because so many designers build businesses that technically succeed on paper but leave them completely depleted in real life. And we don't want that, we want feel-good, aligned, beautiful businesses. And fourth, and this ties everything together, you need to stop treating growth as something that simply happens to you by accident and start treating it as something you actively lead quarter by quarter, decision by decision. So if you take one thing from today's episode, let it be this you are not just running a hobby, you happen to be passionate about, you are running a business, and businesses that generally thrive are led, not just delivered. And you will have heard me say this time and time again, and I've been saying this since I started the business in April 2024. I started this because I saw so many women running hobbies rather than businesses. And it's my goal and mission to take every single woman out of hobbyists so that they build passionate, aligned, profitable, sustainable businesses. And that distinction between delivering the work and leading the business behind it is going to come up again and again and again in the next couple of episodes because I think it's the single biggest thing standing between where you are now and your next level businesses. So you are going to want to tune in, certainly for the next couple of episodes, because there is going to be some absolute gold in there to support you, taking you out of that hobbyist mode into interior design business owner mode. That's it for today's episode of Design Boss Dialogue, the interior design business podcast for women who are ready to build businesses that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside. And if this has resonated with you, take a screenshot, share it on Instagram and tag me. I generally love to hear which part has landed for you. I am Lisa Marie Elkadrawi, your interior design business mentor and soulful leadership coach. And I cannot wait to bring you another beautiful podcast next week.