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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Advice from Someone who's Been There Before, August 7, 2005
This review is from: The Interior Designers Guide to Pricing Estimating and Budgeting (Paperback)
One of the hardest things to learn about interior design, or any other service industry is that the only thing you have to sell is your time. To do this in a profitable manner, you need two sets of skills.
The first is the one you know about. You've got to find customers, you've got to do the job they want done and you've go to make them happy. This is probably the job you've trained yourself to do through experience, through training, and through the basic aptitude that you had to get into that business in the first place.
The second job is harder. You've got to realize that you are a business manager. You need accounting (to keep your business partner the IRS happy). You need to develop a busines plan, budgeting, etc. You need to know how to prepare and send out bills and how to handle the money when it comes in. And the most critical of all, telling the customer what your effort is going to cost him.
In this book Mr. Williams gives an excellent introduction on how to do these critical things. He also includes enough war stories from his past to give you the understanding of how he learned these things.
I really enjoyed his page one story of starting his own company: sold his car so as to eliminate the payments, crammed his office into his bedroom, paid off all credit cards, in general reduced his expenses to a minimum. When I started I did almost exactly the same: I had a very tiny kind of dumpy house in not too good a neighborhood - but no payments. I had an ancient vehicle - but no payments. Like with him, I was profitable the first month, but you had best not bet on it.
Mr. Williams has been there, done that, walked the walk. His book makes excellent sense.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book for pricing - not just for interior decorators..., May 12, 2006
This review is from: The Interior Designers Guide to Pricing Estimating and Budgeting (Paperback)
This is a phenominal book for pricing and structure in any business. As an independent consultant one of the most difficult things when starting out is finding the right pricing structure. This book covers that as well as many suggestions on how to effectively organize and run a business. I have already recommended this book to my husband who is in Home Improvement and a friend who has a curtain business. I think it is so well written that it could be of value to many types of businesses small and large.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
not really that helpful, July 2, 2010
This review is from: The Interior Designers Guide to Pricing Estimating and Budgeting (Paperback)
I didn't get what I was expecting out of this book, and I think the title is really a misnomer. This book is written really more as a reference for young and inexperienced designers looking to start their own business. Note the following:
The author is a GRAPHIC designer, not an interior designer. She (yes, "Theo" is a she) makes reference to interior design projects that are laughable--designing a carpet is not interior design. And just because it will be a vinyl applied to a wall, doesn't mean a logo design is interior design. Not being an interior designer, the author makes absurd comments about the industry that just aren't true (like that per-SF billing models are a bad idea. maybe for residential but for commercial design, per-SF is standard. And profitable). I just don't think the author is qualified to be writing this book.
Furthermore, estimating and budgeting are ONLY talked about in very generic terms. Basically, the author wants you to know that these are important things to do right, or you won't make any money. Unfortunately I think most readers already know these are important things, otherwise they wouldn't buy the book. But there are no specifics on how to calculate different types of materials, labor, processes. Nothing of real substance that the reader can take with them to the job and apply.
There are lots of contradictions and very astonishing ideas expressed by the author. For example, the author says to 'respect the client's personal time' by not contacting them outside normal business hours....but then suggests that when you have bad news to share, wait until the last possible minute, so that the client can think about it over the weekend. How is expecting the client to think about work on the weekend respecting their time?? Even if that is respectful, its still bad advice--the LAST thing you want to do is give the client time to stew about the problem. By Monday morning they're sure to be really pissed. She also says that over the years she learned NOT to take responsibility for her staff's mistakes. Um, HELLO!?!? A client hires the company, and as the boss, you do have the ultimate responsibility for everything every employee does. Her advice is the exact opposite of what a designer should do.
I might reference the forms in the back of the book, maybe some day. But overall this book just didn't offer me anything I can use. Might be better for someone who has only a year or two of work experience.
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