As an interior designer, you know how important it is to keep organized and efficient. From sending contracts to developing floor plans to ordering furniture for clients, there’s a lot that goes into running your business smoothly. It’s essential that you have the right tools and platforms in place to save yourself time and energy while still producing high-quality results and a great client experience. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the five programs you need to implement to streamline your interior design business operations, so you can spend less time juggling tasks and more time being creative!
Dubsado
Dubsado is a comprehensive client management solution designed to automate client processes, making it ideal to streamline interior design business operations. This powerful tool enables you to automate your lead processes by capturing potential client data, sending your investment guide, and discovery call booking. Its form features allow you to send branded proposals, contracts, invoices, and questionnaires, eliminating the need for multiple platforms and making the process more efficient. Throughout the project, you can track client communication and appointments in Dubsado. Lastly, you can automate your offboarding process by sending a goodbye packet, a follow-up email to request a testimonial, and tie up any loose strings to end the project on a high note. With Dubsado, interior designers can automate the tasks they repeat for each client, leaving more time to focus on creativity while ensuring your client experience is exceptional.
At Hannah Bower & Co we offer dubsado setup, dubsado templates, and dubsado membersips – learn more here.
Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that offers an incredibly user-friendly interface for creating and editing engaging visuals and presentations. Within Canva, you can create your brand kit with your colors, fonts, and logos to quickly implement them in each design. You can also create a branded template for your presentation so that it is ready for each client project. Canva has so many design features, including an image background remover and graphic elements that are so useful for presentations. Moreover, Canva is excellent for creating social media graphics. With pre-sized templates for different platforms, you can craft visually stunning posts to showcase your work, promote your services, or engage your audience.
Design Platform
As an interior designer, you need a design management platform to manage products, product proposals, and other nuances of the design phase. Studio Designer or Ivy are excellent design management platforms that cater specifically to the unique needs of interior designers. Using these platforms, you can source and save product information in your client’s product library. You can then quickly take those items and add them to a product proposal for your client to review and approve. Importantly, Studio Designer and Ivy also include a convenient payment acceptance feature, allowing for a seamless and straightforward financial transaction process. During the procurement phase, your design platform can be used to track the status of each item and keep your client updated in their client portal.
Project Management Platform
Project Management platforms like ClickUp and Monday.com are integral to streamline interior design business operations as they give you a clear visual of your project timelines, task deadlines, and team to-do’s. These platforms enable you to assign tasks to your team members, set deadlines, and prioritize tasks according to their urgency. They include multiple ways to view your tasks, including list view, board view, calendar view, and Gantt chart view, to help visualize the project’s progress in a way that works best for you. With ClickUp or Monday.com, you can keep everyone in the loop with shared boards for simultaneous access to project updates, reducing the need for endless follow-up emails and meetings. Our favorite way we see designers use these platforms in their business is to create a template for your typical projects so that every time a new project starts, you have a list of tasks with assignees ready to go; you just have to add the due dates!
Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage solution essential for interior designers looking to organize and access their files from anywhere. As a designer, you’ll likely be dealing with an array of files, including high-resolution images, floor plans, renderings, and more, that require significant storage space. Google Drive allows you to store all your files in one central location, eliminating the risk of losing important data. Additionally, its collaborative features are a game changer for team projects or when working with clients. You can share documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, allowing multiple users to view, edit, or comment on them in real time. Furthermore, its integration with other Google services, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, means you can create and edit documents and spreadsheets directly in the Drive.
We hope this blog post about the five essential programs to implement to streamline your interior design business operations was helpful and inspiring. Streamlining your operations can be a huge time saver and can open up plenty of more time to be creative and take on more clients. These effective programs can help you handle all aspects of running your business with ease—from client management to presentations, graphics, and task tracking. If you have questions or are ready to get the most out of these programs for your business, contact us today to schedule a discovery call to discuss how we can assist. There’s no better time to get started than now. With the right tools in place, you will be on the right track to setting up a more streamlined business that you love.
