The 3 Key Steps to Create Calm 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.  

Today, let’s dig into the 3 key steps to create Calm in your design business.

Calm is all about Self-Care.  As kitchen and bath designers, we spend all of our time taking care of our clients needs, often at our own expense.  But self-care as a kitchen and bath designer is about a whole lot more than bubble-baths and massages (although I highly recommend those!).  There are 3 specific forms of self-care that are absolutely essential if you’re going to create a lasting feeling of calm in your design business. 

The first step to creating Calm in your business is to value your boundaries.  

We don’t often think about boundaries as a form of self-care, but for kitchen and bath designers, it is absolutely essential.  Too often when we start our design businesses, we make ourselves available to our clients any time - evenings, weekends, you name it.  Last minute meetings, dropping everything to respond to an email or text - we think we’re providing excellent customer service, but what we’re doing is throwing ourselves under the bus and destroying our own sense of calm.  

The specific boundaries you need to create in your own business will be unique to you, but you can easily figure out what they are by noticing wherever you are feeling resentment in your business.  Creating strong boundaries is the first step to finding calm in your business.  [check out this blog for more on boundaries]

The second step to creating Calm in your business is to become a mindset ninja.  

Improving your mindset can take so many forms, but it is also absolutely essential to creating a sense of calm in your business. So often we get in our own way by being too hard on ourselves and beating ourselves up when things go wrong.  This weakens us and makes an already hard job even harder.  Learning how to see problems as opportunities is one of the biggest mindset changes that can help create calm in your business.  [for more on mindset, check out this and this blog].

The third step to creating Calm in your business is to seek support.  

So many of us as designers work alone, and it can be a solitary and lonely profession. Days working at home alone can mean you spend hours spinning on a problem that you could have gotten answered quickly if you worked in an office and had the support of a team.  Looking at other designer’s perfect pictures on Instagram, it’s easy to be hard on ourselves and feel like we’re the only ones struggling.  It can be crazy-making.

That’s why it’s so important to seek support.  This can take many forms, but first it’s important to find other like-minded designers with whom  you can share your struggles, ask questions,  and share support.  This is so key in not feeling so alone and feeling more calm in your business.  

Another way to seek support is to build your network of industry partners - your product and showroom reps who you can call or email when you have a question or need information.  This business is too complicated for any of us to be an expert in every aspect of our projects.  

While it’s important to educate ourselves, we’ll go crazy if we expect ourselves to know everything about everything.  That’s why it’s key to seek support from our industry partners and rely on them to fill in the gaps.  

No Designer is an island, and a key part of letting go of stress and finding calm is to find your circle of designers and trade partners you can rely on and seek support from them on a regular basis. [for more on seeking support, check out this blog].

So there you have the three keys to finding Calm in your business that I have discovered over the course of my career:

Value your Boundaries

Become a Mindset Ninja

Seek Support.

How about you?  How has doing these things helped you take care of yourself as a designer and create calm in your business?  What areas could you work on more?

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