3 Key steps to Create Confidence in your Kitchen and Bath Design Business

At Designer Sanity, our mission is to empower Kitchen and Bath Designers to create Calm, Confidence and Control in their businesses.  

Over the past 18 years in my design business, I’ve been on a mission to let go of the crazy that seems inevitable in the design industry, and figure out how to stay sane in my business on an ongoing basis.  I love figuring out better ways to do things, and over time, as I found things that worked, I incorporated them into my business and life.  

Now I’m so excited to share this body of knowledge with you at Designer Sanity.  

When I reflect upon everything that I want to share with you that I’ve learned over the course of my career, I realized that every tip, trick and tool falls into three main categories:  

Calm.  Confidence.  Control.  

In this 3 part series, I’m going to dig into each of Designer Sanity's 3 C’s and tell you how they are the secret to creating lasting and permanent sanity in your design business.  

Last week, I wrote about the secrets to creating Calm in your design business.  You can check out that blog here.  

Today, let’s dig into Confidence.  

Confidence is all about having a CEO Mindset.  As kitchen and bath designers, it's easy to focus on being designers first, and forget all about being the leaders in our own design businesses.  This can lead to feelings of stress and helplessness - the opposite of confidence.  It took me years to make the shift from from thinking of myself as solely a designer to thinking of myself as a business owner.  When I did, I stopped spending so much time working in my business and started devoting more time to working on my business.  

There are 3 key steps to developing Confidence and a CEO mindset in your design business.  

The first step is to cultivate your vision. 

As designers, it's so easy to become the worker bees in our own business, simply reacting to what lands on our plate in an effort to get everything done.  This can definitely lead to stress and burnout, and the business can easily head in the wrong direction.  Cultivating vision is all about stepping out of the day-to-day hustle to get a larger vision about what we want our business to be, and where we want it to go.  This is the joy and the responsibility of being a business owner, no one else can do it for you.  Getting clear on your vision is the first step to a CEO mindset and developing confidence in yourself and your business.  [for a very fun vision exercise, check out this blog post]

The second step to creating Confidence in your business is to take charge. 

I'll admit it, this is the hardest step for me.  So often we associate taking charge with being "bossy" and "controlling" and no one wants that.  I'm a spontaneous person who loves to go with the flow.  But the truth is, the only way for any of us to create the businesses we envision is to take charge of the reigns.  We need to decide what types of projects we are going to go after instead of just taking everything that comes along.  It's up to us to lead our clients through our design process to ensure it runs the way we want it to.  Taking charge is hugely confidence building.  

The third step to creating Confidence in your business is to multiply yourself.

Wowza, this was another hard one for me.  I used to always work alone because I thought it was too much work to explain a job to someone else when I could just do it myself.  This held me back for years, and wreaked havoc on my confidence because I could never seem to get ahead.  When I learned how to delegate and multiply myself - i.e. discover what parts of my business I could farm out to contractors or staff, my confidence soared as my business began to really take off.  [For more about multiplying yourself, check out this blog post].  

So there you have the three keys to finding Confidence and a CEO Mindset in your design business that I have discovered over the course of my career:

 Establish your Vision

Take Control

Multiply Yourself

How about you?  How has doing these things helped you have more confidence in yourself as a designer and create a CEO mindset in your business?  What areas could you work on more?

Next week I’m going to dig into how to create Control in your business.