Seven ways to make more money in your design business
I strongly believe that every design business owner should build in a range of different revenue streams to help them grow and scale their businesses. Most designers work in a traditional capacity where they trade their time (i.e. design services) for money that the client pays them.
But there are major issues with this business model if you want to grow a large business or ever want to reduce the number of hours you are working in your business. And today I want to share an alternative model with you to consider.
The problem with traditional interior design businesses
The problem with the traditional interior design business model is that you eventually will cap the amount of money you can make. Once you’ve filled your time with client work you’ve also pretty much capped the amount of money you can make.
At this point you then have two choices:
1️⃣ you keep the business at the current size, but you accept that your revenue is now largely fixed. Obviously it can go up a bit by raising fees, but only to a certain amount as there is a natural cap that the market will pay for design work
2️⃣ the second option is to start hiring junior staff to help you run your business and fulfil the design work you’re bringing in. But the problem with this model is you are essentially just growing a ‘body shop’ instead of scaling a business that can make more money. You will be able to bring more work in to the business now as you’ll have other staff who can help you fulfil it, but you now have a whole new set of issues and things to worry about; you have to pay those staff, you’ll have new expenses associated with growing a team (e.g. hiring office space and other overheads) and you’ll also now have a team of people who you have to manage and look after (which may not be what you want to be doing with your time). In many instances you may also find that you aren’t personally making that much more money than you were when you were working by yourself. The new revenue you’re bringing in will be going towards the salaries of your staff and the other expenses you now have. In my opinion this isn’t a great way to scale a business (unless you enjoy managing people of course).
An alternative model to scale your interior design business
But there is a third option to scale your business, and it’s the one that I have used to scale my own business to 7 figures and beyond, and that’s to build other forms of online revenue in your business that don’t rely on you being there to make money (i.e. making money while you sleep!).
Some people call this passive income but that’s not strictly true as almost every method of making money requires some time being spent on it. I am yet to find a revenue stream that is strictly ‘passive’ - i.e. doesn’t require any work. But in terms of trading time for money with client services work vs the sorts of ideas I’m going to share below - these are definitely much more passive in terms of how many hours of your time are needed in order to see a financial benefit.
So below I want to give you some ideas for how to get started with this sort of business model and some revenue ideas that you could consider.
Getting set up for online business
Before you can get started with some of the ideas I’m sharing below there’s a few things you’ll need to get set up and start building.
What you will need
✅ a community or audience
Building products to sell online generally requires you to have a reasonably sized online community (or audience) that are interested in the things you are doing and want more help from you. So for anyone who wants to try some of the ideas I share below then I would strongly suggest you start creating as much helpful, free content as you possibly can for a community of people you want to serve. Once you start to build this community they will naturally start to ask you for more help and will give you ideas of products and services you can create for them. .
There’s a famous essay by Kevin Kelly called ‘1000 True Fans’ and in this essay he outlines how easy it is to generate $100,000 per year when you have 1000 true fans who are completely obsessed with what you do. Think about the maths here:
If you have 1000 true fans who spend $100 a year on things you create for them = $100,000/year
When it’s broken down like this it seem quite as hard does it?
Your community and your audience is your biggest asset by far when it comes to implementing the ideas I share below so start creating things for them and being as helpful as you possibly can.
✅ an online presence
To build your community/audience and to implement the ideas I’m sharing below you’ll also need an online presence. There’s so many platforms for creating this but the best options for designers (in my opinion) are:
Instagram
a blog
a YouTube show
a podcast
TikTok
If you can’t decide where to start with this then the best platform for you to begin with is:
the one you enjoy using yourself and spend time on
the one where the people you want to help are spending time on
✅ an online store front
In order to implement the ideas below you’ll also need some kind of online store front to sell things online. Again there’s so many options for this these days including:
Squarespace
Wix
Shopify
Samcart
Wordpress
And so many other options as well. If you want to get something up quickly then my recommended solution would be Squarespace. That’s the website platform I’ve used for my entire time in business and it’s worked extremely well for me.
Seven Passive Income Ideas
OK so now you’re set up with some of the things you’ll need to get these ideas implemented it’s now time to share the ideas with you.
Now remember there is no such thing as genuine passive income. Almost everything on this list will require you to put in work at some point. But as you will see in many cases the work that’s required is often an upfront spend of your time (e.g. to create an online course) that will then deliver financial benefit to you over and over (i.e. by people purchasing the online course over and over without you needing to do much else to support it).
Let’s get stuck in to the ideas….
1: Online Courses, Workshops or Classes
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️
This one is fairly straight forward in terms of the idea but can be time consuming and potentially difficult to implement, especially if you’ve never created a curriculum and or online program before.
But an online course, workshop or class is also one of the most profitable passive income sources you can create (if you get it right!). Depending on the topic of your course you can price it anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars - so there’s a lot of potential in terms of revenue generation.
Although creating a course or workshop normally requires a reasonably high time investment up front, once it’s created it generally requires a low investment of maintenance time to keep it running smoothly. You will have some student support and potentially questions to answer plus you will likely need to update it from time to time, but apart from that it’s a great passive income stream.
If you want to create an online course the right way then come and join my program - ONLINE COURSE CREATOR
2: A blog or YouTube show
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Again this is quite straight forward in terms of an idea. You create a blog or build a YouTube channel and then eventually, as your audience grows, you can monitize that blog or YouTube show via a range of methods such as; the use of advertising/display ads, affiliate marketing (see below) or by selling products and services to the community you have built.
There are so many creators who have built extremely successful businesses off the back of this business model but this is definitely not a quick money making idea. It will take a lot of time and consistency (generally over many years) to build up an audience via a blog or on YouTube that is large enough to make a good living from.
3: E-books
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️
E-books are a pretty easy online product to create and start selling almost immediately. They generally take very little time to put together and require very little maintenance time once they are listed on your store.
The main issue with e-books is that they are normally priced low, which means you need to sell a lot of them to make good money. This will mean you need a large community or audience or good paid advertising skills to get them in front of people.
But e-books are easy for almost everyone to create and are a good way of putting together something that your audience or community may be interested in buying from you. So if you have a blog post or video that has done particularly well and you think you’ve got more in-depth information to share then this can be a great topic to turn in to an e-book.
Canva is a great tool to use to put together a professional looking e-book. They have lots of templates you can use and just drop your content in to.
4: Online resources, prints or templates
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️
The concept here is similar to e-books but instead you are creating resources, templates or prints you can sell. For example if you have spreadsheets or templates that you use with clients over and over then this might be something that you could turn in to a digital product. You could also sell supplier lists, done-for-you furniture packages, styling kits, paint colour templates - there’s all sorts of ideas that you could turn in to online resources for people to purchase and download.
A good way to start with this is to think about whether you get asked any questions over and over again and then create a product that solves that question.
But like with e-books these sorts of products are generally low price and so you are relying on a scale model here in order to make money. So by this I mean you need a lot of people purchasing the product in order for it to be financially beneficial.
But again, creating digital products like this has a low barrier to entry as they are pretty easy to create and often are based on things you already are using. So it can be a great way to get your online business started, test out some ideas and start creating some passive income on the side.
5: Affiliate marketing
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Affiliate marketing is where you advertise or promote someone else’s product or service and whenever someone signs up or purchases based on your recommendation you will get a % of that sale. It’s similar in some ways to getting a cut on trade discounts when you recommend products from a supplier to your clients.
Affiliate marketing has been extremely common in the online business world for years now but it’s not a model that has been adopted all that much in the interior design industry (yet!). But having said that there are increasingly more suppliers and businesses that understand affiliate marketing and have programs that are set up that you can use. There’s also huge affiliate marketing opportunities on large platforms like Amazon as well.
If you’re struggling to see how you might be able to make use of this sort of opportunity then here’s an idea to give you an example. You could write a blog post or create a YouTube video where you put together your favourite recommended ‘design’ items on Amazon. You can then share affiliate links to all the products you recommend in your post or video and when any of your community click on those products and purchase from you then you will make a commission on that sale. There’s heaps of other ideas for how to make this work - but hopefully that one illustrates the potential here.
Affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative but again it normally requires on you having a larger sized audience as you will need a lot of people purchasing from your affiliate links in order to make money.
6: Membership program
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Another lucrative idea is to create a membership or recurring revenue program. This is where you create a monthly program that has specific benefits for the people who are part of it and they pay you a monthly fee to stay part of this program.
Membership models are huge all around the world now. Think about how many things you pay a subscription for - e.g. Netflix, gym memberships, software subscriptions etc.
But this sort of business model is becoming increasingly more common in other industries as well and there are lots of opportunities here for service based businesses. You will need to think creatively about options for membership programs that may suit your audience. Group coaching is a very common one and this is something that can be applied to designers - e.g. a program or club for DIY renovators who are happy to do most of the work on their own but want access to a designer to be able to ask questions when they have them is just one idea.
7: Other informational products
Potential income: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Level of difficulty: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Upfront time required: ⭐️⭐️
Maintenance time required: ⭐️⭐️
There are lots of other informational products you can create and sell online that I haven’t mentioned above and the potential is really only limited to your imagination. Here’s a quick brain dump of some ideas:
a paid podcast with behind the scenes advice from you
sell textures, models, templates you’ve created for design software that you use (e.g. presets for Photoshop, SketchUp textures, floor plan options, design kits)
checklists and cheatsheets
workbooks
renovation kits/folders
bundles
processes
recorded trainings/videos
planning kits
questionnaire templates
There are literally unlimited ideas of things to try!
Overall the best way to get started with any of these ideas is to just get started! Over the years I have tried (and failed!) at so many ideas. I’ve created products that have never sold anything as well as products that have made me millions of dollars. The only way to find out what people might need and want from you is to start creating things and see what sells.
And don’t worry about getting things 100% perfect before you put them out in to the world. You won’t make any money from an idea that is 100% perfect in your head but you may start making money from something you make 80% perfect and put out in to the world for people to buy.
So instead of spending the next few months thinking, planning and perfecting an idea just choose one to get started with and implement it this week. If it doesn’t work you will have learned something and can move on to something else.
Good luck!
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
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Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
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Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
