139. Deciding Which Strategies Are Best for Your Business
If there is no right way to grow your interior design business, how do you know what to do next? As a business owner, determining which strategies to pursue and what to prioritize can feel overwhelming when faced with countless options and advice. In this episode, I dive into how to identify your unique right way forward.
Understanding your next steps requires examining three key areas: strategy, mindset, and emotional alignment. I share how to evaluate potential business moves through the lens of your goals and vision, while considering your current capacity and season of life. This practical framework helps you make confident decisions about which opportunities to pursue and which to save for later.
I explore the critical difference between feeling resonance versus relief when evaluating business strategies. True resonance feels grounded in your internal knowing, while relief often signals an external "save me" energy that can lead you astray. By learning to distinguish between these feelings, you'll make choices that authentically align with your business vision.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How to determine if a strategy truly aligns with your business goals and life vision.
Why testing and evaluating results helps you avoid getting stuck in ineffective methods.
Understanding the brain's natural resistance to change and how to work with it.
The importance of choosing approaches that match your natural strengths.
How to distinguish between resonance and relief when evaluating business decisions.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 139. This is going to be a follow-up episode to last week, which was the kickoff to CEO Summer School. In that episode, I shared how I believe there is really no right way to grow a thriving interior design business, and that it's really about finding your right way because there's many ways to achieve the success that you want to create.
But that brings the question, if there is no right way, how do you determine which steps to take and which strategies to pursue? How do you know what to prioritize and what you can let go of and say, that's not for me? That's what I'm going to be answering today on the show. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the first episode in the CEO Summer School series that launched last Wednesday. In that series, I am sharing what I know for sure about growing a successful interior design company that really supports you as the business owner and supports you financially and creatively and in your own growth as you evolve right alongside the business.
If you're already signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure you found the email that I sent you last week with the prompts that go with the episode so you can start to take action and integrate what I was sharing. And if you're not signed up, well, what are you waiting for? There's still time. It is never too late to sign up, no matter when you are catching this in the series. But if you want to get the free bonus resources, you want to go to desiid.com/summerschool. And what that means is you'll be able to follow along with these episodes throughout the summer months and also get some additional resources from me and support through this special email sign-up, but you only get it if you enroll. And I highly encourage you to do that.
And of course, share this with a friend if you're loving the series or love the idea of it, and you haven't participated before, so that way you can listen to the episodes and discuss it. This is something I love doing with friends, and I've got some moms that I do this with too, where we'll listen to a podcast episode and talk about it, and it just brings so much more life and richness to whatever it is that we've just learned about or been exposed to.
What I wanted to do today is a quick follow-up to that first episode where I shared the truth, there is no right way, there is just the right way for you. Now, when I outline these episodes, I like to think about you, of course, and what you might be interested in, and also what questions you might have as you're listening to the episode, so that I can try to address them. Of course, that's kind of the drawback of podcasts, right? In that we can't go back and forth, but I do really try my best to get inside your head and think, okay, what might they be wondering about?
When I was thinking about last week's episode, I was imagining you might be thinking, so, Desi, if there is no right way, where do I go from there? How do I know what projects I should be implementing, or methods or strategies I should try, or maybe you feel overwhelmed or confused when you think about all the options or advice that's out there about how to grow your business? Whether that's systems, marketing, hiring your next staff member. There's a lot of ways you can do it. And so, how do you start to make a decision and start taking action so that you can benefit from those resources?
That's really what I want to answer today. The question of, if there is no right way, how do you know which way to go or which methods to pursue?
I want to approach this answer really through the lens of how I coach all of my clients, and that's really considering the mind, the body, and the strategy. And there's that holistic approach to how we look at the individual, look at the business owner, and in that case, that is you.
The very first thing I think we look at is the strategy component, the actions you take, or the behaviors you engage in. When you're considering what your potential next right step would be or right way to grow and structure your business or whatever that looks like, you want to think about, does the plan you're considering align with your goals and your business and life vision? And if it does, that's amazing. You're right on track, pursue that.
But sometimes our pursuits are distractions or momentary fleeting feelings of fun. We hear about a strategy and we think, oh yeah, that would be really cool to do. But if you pause and think about what is it that my business needs from me right now to keep it healthy and strong and keep it growing the way that I want it to, and what do I need and what does my life need? Sometimes we look at those fun ideas and then we go, yeah, actually that doesn't really move me closer to what I want.
It's one of the reasons why I love quarterly planning and making decisions ahead of time, and also have kind of a little agreement with myself of if I have one of those fleeting fun feelings, I always pause and I never start taking action right away. I always give myself a little bit of time to let my feelings settle and know, okay, is this really something I want to pursue? Do I put it on the shelf for a future, who knows when? Is it something that's just not right now, but soon? We always want to look at, am I doing things that are taking me towards what I want more of?
You also have to look at, do you have capacity for it? Sometimes there's an idea that really sounds great, but it just simply does not match the life season you're in or, like I said, what your business needs from you right now. For example, maybe your growth this year in the business is actually stabilizing the previous year's growth before making another push. So it's not even necessarily adding in more, it could be staying steady and really solidifying what has happened or putting systems in place to support the growth that's already come to be.
A follow-up to this question of the right way aligning with your goals and vision would be, are you getting the results you want? So you've decided this is the right way for me right now, and it does align with where I want to go. Am I getting the results I want? If you're telling yourself what you're doing is the right way, but you're not getting more of what you want, after, of course, a period of time of testing and evaluating, it is time to tweak the current approach or try a new one.
So we don't want to get stuck in, I am on this and it's absolutely my right way, and I have no flexibility around what I'm doing or how I'm thinking about this. We always have the opportunity to decide again, especially if things are not going the way we thought they were. And we find that the way we decided was right for trying and testing, but not really right for getting what we want.
The second thing we want to look at is the mindset piece of this when we're determining what is our next right step or right way to grow. What I want you to consider is if the method or strategy you want to pursue or the business structure or type of growth you're looking to gain, really something you can either, first of all, get your brain on board with, or two, something you're willing to do the work to get your brain on board with.
Now, what do I mean by get your brain on board? Well, the human brain's really designed to seek comfort, avoid pain, that could be physical or emotional, and to be efficient. What this means is it really prefers and defaults to the status quo. The brain is going to resist you wanting to change. And this has nothing to do with you not having ambition, that you're not good at following through, or any of that. It just means that you haven't done the mindset work to get out of your own way. Because the comfort that we feel in familiarity is something that we have to overcome. Because if it's familiar, that means it has to stay the same. And if you're growing, things will be different, which feels unfamiliar.
That means you have to learn to sell yourself on pursuing your own right way. Now, of course, anything you do is going to require your leadership, your effort, stretching yourself. It might bring up some stress and anxiety, actually, likely. I know there's many episodes here on the podcast to help you get comfortable with being uncomfortable. But if something's going to give you a circumstance that you are just so resistant to, or it really stirs up a lot of hard emotions to process, consider if there are maybe ways that you could create the same outcome in a way that feels more aligned with your natural strengths or your natural tendencies. And then of course, make sure you have support, and this could be a therapist or a coach, or a peer group, if you decide to pursue that direction.
Knowing that there are going to be these internal obstacles that you have to overcome, even if it does feel like, yep, this is the right strategy or method for me, you want to make sure that you can either pick from things or come up with ideas of how can I make this easier for myself? How can I create less friction for myself to get you going? And also make sure you're willing to engage in the mental work to get yourself sold on the path that you're taking.
This last one I think is really important that I'm going to tell you about, and that is that emotional component that points you to your right way. This is a great way to tune into your body and start to see how different advice, things that you listen to, mentors, how things land for you, to determine your next steps and what might be right for you. And this really boils down to tapping into whether you feel resonance or relief when you're researching next steps.
So you have some obstacle, some problem in your business that you know you need to overcome in order to take your business to the next level. And you are seeking out information, researching your options, looking for how could I create a solution that's going to get me over this obstacle and closer to the results I want to create. As you do that, stay attuned to your body. Stay attuned to resonance over relief.
Now, for me, relief has this kind of save me energy, and it can feel outside of me. Meaning, like there's someone swooping in to save me and I can then take a really passive approach and let somebody else control it. And personally, I think we run into trouble when we have that type of energy driving our actions. Resonance, on the other hand, feels very grounded and true to my own internal knowing.
Just because there is that resonance doesn't mean it's going to necessarily feel easy or comfortable, or that I'm not going to have any internal obstacles to overcome. But there is that feeling of, ah, yes, this makes sense to me. This feels like relaxed shoulders, sinking into a plan and next steps instead of being in that frantic, chasing, hoping for the next thing that's going to fix everything.
When we're picking the right way based on relief, that really takes away our own power because the relief is coming from the belief of this thing's going to save me or be the end-all be-all and help me do everything, right? That is a lot of pressure to put on a solution. And not only that, then we start to forget that we are always the person who creates our own results. Good or bad, we claim them all.
Personally, I think this is the best place to be in because when we take responsibility for ourselves and our own influence over what happens in our business, that's really empowering. It means we have the ability to make change and consistently troubleshoot to stretch ourselves to create new results in whatever way that looks like for you. Versus if we are in relief, that means we don't have power. We have to wait for someone else to figure it out. We are hoping that this solution is going to do the work for us sometimes. So really pay attention to that.
All right, so I want to recap what we just covered. When you're determining which strategies to follow, what to prioritize now versus later, and knowing which way is right for you, these are the three things I want you to consider. The first is, do your next steps or your right way that you've determined align with your goals and your business and life vision?
The second thing is, are you able and willing to get your brain on board so you can take action? Either in a more natural sense of, yeah, I can wrap my head around this, or I'm willing to get support so that I can pursue this strategy. The third and final thing is look for, does the approach feel grounded in resonance over relief or sidestep the necessary effort and energy that any type of growth is going to require?
That's what I have for you today. Next week, I'm going to be back with the second truth in the series. I'm excited for that one. Again, if you're already signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure to check your inbox and take a few minutes to reflect on the prompts I sent you last week. This is really how you're going to integrate what you're hearing on the podcast and put it into action.
If you haven't signed up for CEO Summer School, it's not too late. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool. It's a quick little form, put your name and email in, and what'll happen is you'll get the truth I reveal every other week, emailed to you so that you have it for future reference, and then also get the bonus content, which really will help you take this work deeper. And like I've been talking about, it's low lift. I know it's summer. Everyone has a little less time or just has a little more desire to not be working. But these prompts are really impactful, and it'll only take you a few minutes to get those insights.
Next Wednesday, I'll be back with the next installment and sharing that second truth about what I know for sure about growing your interior design business in a way that feels good and creates the results you want, doing it your way, whatever that right way is. Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
But that brings the question, if there is no right way, how do you determine which steps to take and which strategies to pursue? How do you know what to prioritize and what you can let go of and say, that's not for me? That's what I'm going to be answering today on the show. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the first episode in the CEO Summer School series that launched last Wednesday. In that series, I am sharing what I know for sure about growing a successful interior design company that really supports you as the business owner and supports you financially and creatively and in your own growth as you evolve right alongside the business.
If you're already signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure you found the email that I sent you last week with the prompts that go with the episode so you can start to take action and integrate what I was sharing. And if you're not signed up, well, what are you waiting for? There's still time. It is never too late to sign up, no matter when you are catching this in the series. But if you want to get the free bonus resources, you want to go to desiid.com/summerschool. And what that means is you'll be able to follow along with these episodes throughout the summer months and also get some additional resources from me and support through this special email sign-up, but you only get it if you enroll. And I highly encourage you to do that.
And of course, share this with a friend if you're loving the series or love the idea of it, and you haven't participated before, so that way you can listen to the episodes and discuss it. This is something I love doing with friends, and I've got some moms that I do this with too, where we'll listen to a podcast episode and talk about it, and it just brings so much more life and richness to whatever it is that we've just learned about or been exposed to.
What I wanted to do today is a quick follow-up to that first episode where I shared the truth, there is no right way, there is just the right way for you. Now, when I outline these episodes, I like to think about you, of course, and what you might be interested in, and also what questions you might have as you're listening to the episode, so that I can try to address them. Of course, that's kind of the drawback of podcasts, right? In that we can't go back and forth, but I do really try my best to get inside your head and think, okay, what might they be wondering about?
When I was thinking about last week's episode, I was imagining you might be thinking, so, Desi, if there is no right way, where do I go from there? How do I know what projects I should be implementing, or methods or strategies I should try, or maybe you feel overwhelmed or confused when you think about all the options or advice that's out there about how to grow your business? Whether that's systems, marketing, hiring your next staff member. There's a lot of ways you can do it. And so, how do you start to make a decision and start taking action so that you can benefit from those resources?
That's really what I want to answer today. The question of, if there is no right way, how do you know which way to go or which methods to pursue?
I want to approach this answer really through the lens of how I coach all of my clients, and that's really considering the mind, the body, and the strategy. And there's that holistic approach to how we look at the individual, look at the business owner, and in that case, that is you.
The very first thing I think we look at is the strategy component, the actions you take, or the behaviors you engage in. When you're considering what your potential next right step would be or right way to grow and structure your business or whatever that looks like, you want to think about, does the plan you're considering align with your goals and your business and life vision? And if it does, that's amazing. You're right on track, pursue that.
But sometimes our pursuits are distractions or momentary fleeting feelings of fun. We hear about a strategy and we think, oh yeah, that would be really cool to do. But if you pause and think about what is it that my business needs from me right now to keep it healthy and strong and keep it growing the way that I want it to, and what do I need and what does my life need? Sometimes we look at those fun ideas and then we go, yeah, actually that doesn't really move me closer to what I want.
It's one of the reasons why I love quarterly planning and making decisions ahead of time, and also have kind of a little agreement with myself of if I have one of those fleeting fun feelings, I always pause and I never start taking action right away. I always give myself a little bit of time to let my feelings settle and know, okay, is this really something I want to pursue? Do I put it on the shelf for a future, who knows when? Is it something that's just not right now, but soon? We always want to look at, am I doing things that are taking me towards what I want more of?
You also have to look at, do you have capacity for it? Sometimes there's an idea that really sounds great, but it just simply does not match the life season you're in or, like I said, what your business needs from you right now. For example, maybe your growth this year in the business is actually stabilizing the previous year's growth before making another push. So it's not even necessarily adding in more, it could be staying steady and really solidifying what has happened or putting systems in place to support the growth that's already come to be.
A follow-up to this question of the right way aligning with your goals and vision would be, are you getting the results you want? So you've decided this is the right way for me right now, and it does align with where I want to go. Am I getting the results I want? If you're telling yourself what you're doing is the right way, but you're not getting more of what you want, after, of course, a period of time of testing and evaluating, it is time to tweak the current approach or try a new one.
So we don't want to get stuck in, I am on this and it's absolutely my right way, and I have no flexibility around what I'm doing or how I'm thinking about this. We always have the opportunity to decide again, especially if things are not going the way we thought they were. And we find that the way we decided was right for trying and testing, but not really right for getting what we want.
The second thing we want to look at is the mindset piece of this when we're determining what is our next right step or right way to grow. What I want you to consider is if the method or strategy you want to pursue or the business structure or type of growth you're looking to gain, really something you can either, first of all, get your brain on board with, or two, something you're willing to do the work to get your brain on board with.
Now, what do I mean by get your brain on board? Well, the human brain's really designed to seek comfort, avoid pain, that could be physical or emotional, and to be efficient. What this means is it really prefers and defaults to the status quo. The brain is going to resist you wanting to change. And this has nothing to do with you not having ambition, that you're not good at following through, or any of that. It just means that you haven't done the mindset work to get out of your own way. Because the comfort that we feel in familiarity is something that we have to overcome. Because if it's familiar, that means it has to stay the same. And if you're growing, things will be different, which feels unfamiliar.
That means you have to learn to sell yourself on pursuing your own right way. Now, of course, anything you do is going to require your leadership, your effort, stretching yourself. It might bring up some stress and anxiety, actually, likely. I know there's many episodes here on the podcast to help you get comfortable with being uncomfortable. But if something's going to give you a circumstance that you are just so resistant to, or it really stirs up a lot of hard emotions to process, consider if there are maybe ways that you could create the same outcome in a way that feels more aligned with your natural strengths or your natural tendencies. And then of course, make sure you have support, and this could be a therapist or a coach, or a peer group, if you decide to pursue that direction.
Knowing that there are going to be these internal obstacles that you have to overcome, even if it does feel like, yep, this is the right strategy or method for me, you want to make sure that you can either pick from things or come up with ideas of how can I make this easier for myself? How can I create less friction for myself to get you going? And also make sure you're willing to engage in the mental work to get yourself sold on the path that you're taking.
This last one I think is really important that I'm going to tell you about, and that is that emotional component that points you to your right way. This is a great way to tune into your body and start to see how different advice, things that you listen to, mentors, how things land for you, to determine your next steps and what might be right for you. And this really boils down to tapping into whether you feel resonance or relief when you're researching next steps.
So you have some obstacle, some problem in your business that you know you need to overcome in order to take your business to the next level. And you are seeking out information, researching your options, looking for how could I create a solution that's going to get me over this obstacle and closer to the results I want to create. As you do that, stay attuned to your body. Stay attuned to resonance over relief.
Now, for me, relief has this kind of save me energy, and it can feel outside of me. Meaning, like there's someone swooping in to save me and I can then take a really passive approach and let somebody else control it. And personally, I think we run into trouble when we have that type of energy driving our actions. Resonance, on the other hand, feels very grounded and true to my own internal knowing.
Just because there is that resonance doesn't mean it's going to necessarily feel easy or comfortable, or that I'm not going to have any internal obstacles to overcome. But there is that feeling of, ah, yes, this makes sense to me. This feels like relaxed shoulders, sinking into a plan and next steps instead of being in that frantic, chasing, hoping for the next thing that's going to fix everything.
When we're picking the right way based on relief, that really takes away our own power because the relief is coming from the belief of this thing's going to save me or be the end-all be-all and help me do everything, right? That is a lot of pressure to put on a solution. And not only that, then we start to forget that we are always the person who creates our own results. Good or bad, we claim them all.
Personally, I think this is the best place to be in because when we take responsibility for ourselves and our own influence over what happens in our business, that's really empowering. It means we have the ability to make change and consistently troubleshoot to stretch ourselves to create new results in whatever way that looks like for you. Versus if we are in relief, that means we don't have power. We have to wait for someone else to figure it out. We are hoping that this solution is going to do the work for us sometimes. So really pay attention to that.
All right, so I want to recap what we just covered. When you're determining which strategies to follow, what to prioritize now versus later, and knowing which way is right for you, these are the three things I want you to consider. The first is, do your next steps or your right way that you've determined align with your goals and your business and life vision?
The second thing is, are you able and willing to get your brain on board so you can take action? Either in a more natural sense of, yeah, I can wrap my head around this, or I'm willing to get support so that I can pursue this strategy. The third and final thing is look for, does the approach feel grounded in resonance over relief or sidestep the necessary effort and energy that any type of growth is going to require?
That's what I have for you today. Next week, I'm going to be back with the second truth in the series. I'm excited for that one. Again, if you're already signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure to check your inbox and take a few minutes to reflect on the prompts I sent you last week. This is really how you're going to integrate what you're hearing on the podcast and put it into action.
If you haven't signed up for CEO Summer School, it's not too late. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool. It's a quick little form, put your name and email in, and what'll happen is you'll get the truth I reveal every other week, emailed to you so that you have it for future reference, and then also get the bonus content, which really will help you take this work deeper. And like I've been talking about, it's low lift. I know it's summer. Everyone has a little less time or just has a little more desire to not be working. But these prompts are really impactful, and it'll only take you a few minutes to get those insights.
Next Wednesday, I'll be back with the next installment and sharing that second truth about what I know for sure about growing your interior design business in a way that feels good and creates the results you want, doing it your way, whatever that right way is. Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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