Flailing Towards Ecstasy.

Ooops, I did it again.

Whenever I see anyone lately and they’re like “How have you been?” I never know how to respond. The people I’ve been socializing with, for the most part, are people that I’ve known for a long time. People I can have real conversations with that don’t rely on feigning joy or pretending everything is okay while the world burns down around us (sometimes literally). It’s complicated question to answer because for as much as I hate to be fake happy, I also hate to burden random people with the emotional labor or trying to respond to me being like “EVERYTHING IS A MESS!”

So I kind of go half and half. Sometimes I’ll say “Well the past few years have been a roller coaster but I’m stabilizing” (true) and sometimes I’ll say “My life has had a lot of peaks and valleys… And I’m in a valley” (also true). If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that (shockingly) I’m an optimist. An Optimist in a Pessimist Halloween costume that wont come off. I do think things are improving slowly over time but it can be hard to see that from within the daily minutiae of your life.

Today I want to talk about a few mistakes I made because I didn’t follow my gut, mostly surrounding my private interior design business. Before we chat about all that I need to just summarize the past few years as quickly as possible.

2019: Got a TV show. Filmed TV show while continuing to do brand partnerships (lucrative).

2020: Continued filming TV show, pandemic, all brand partnerships and other income disappears overnight. Was not paid living wage for TV show so was already dipping into savings to get by. Buys house because I finally qualified (hard as a freelancer) and didn’t know when that would be possible again.

2021: Expenses high, work slow, then May comes and I book $250k of work in a month. Decide it’s probably time to get a place in town again because living alone in the woods is taking a physical and mental toll. Rent LA house. A month later the Delta Variant postpones or deletes most of the income I brought in in May. To make up for a lower income from brand partnerships, I start working with private design clients, something I hadn’t done since before shooting the show in 2019 because there wasn’t time.

2022: Things start to heat up towards the end of the year. At the end of the year I take a trip to Spain, end up being extremely sick the whole time, and find that I cannot take a break from working because brands and design clients need everything NOW and if I don’t do it they’ll find someone else.

2023: I realize I completely set up my design fees incorrectly and am literally paying to do design work for clients (mostly because the level of drafting detail for these particular projects was very high). So I went back and adjusted my rates and terms, letting clients know I would still honor the contracts we agreed upon at the onset of projects but that I would need to start charging for things like meetings.

Interior design is a notoriously hard field to make money in. And quite frankly the only way to do it in a way that would make it possible for you to own a home one day is to do it for extremely rich people. I’ve known this forever and it’s one of the reasons I’ve always just kept a toe in designing for private clients. Just enough to be considered a “real designer” by networks and my audience, but not so much that I ever really got into an operational routine.

In 2020, when my show was canceled and I was looking ahead at months of no income, I started flailing. A voice in my head kept saying “Who are you to turn away work at a time like this?” I seriously just thought I was in no place to refuse work. Which was true in a way but also set me up for a ton of stress and even more failure.

Before the show, most of my interior design clients were furnishings-based, meaning I did not do a lot of major construction. And you have to charge differently for construction-oriented clients than for furnishing clients. With furnishings, you kind of use your design fee as a loss leader knowing that you will sell the client furniture and that will help you recoup some of the losses from paying assistants and drafters to do all the logistical work to get projects done.

The new construction projects I was doing were just a lot more complex and long than previous ones, partially due to their complexity and partially due to supply chain nonsense. Previously, I charged a flat design rate based on an estimate of how much each project would take. But with particularly complex projects and clients that needed weekly two to three hour meetings, I quickly found I was spending a LOT of time meeting with clients and even more money paying for the architectural renderings they needed for every space.

In short, I was extremely busy in 2021 and 2022 with a few very complex and demanding design projects. While I loved the design aspect of these projects, I realized I was literally not pulling an income from them. Let me explain why. I hired a renderer to create a 3D model (above) of my kitchen to use for marketing purposes and to get brands excited about sponsoring different elements of the kitchen. With all the revisions, that rendering cost about $1200. That may sound expensive, but these kind of renderings are actually still pretty complicated to make. First you have to model the room out in a 3D modeling program. Then they have to take it into several different programs and add the textures and fixtures. And those items all need to be modeled out, usually by a third party renderer that my renderer hires. Things like sconces and stools that don’t exist in libraries on Sketchup or whatever 3D program my renderer uses need to be physically drawn by a human being and that costs money.

All this is to say that a project that needs a lot of 3D modeling is expensive. And while I have basic rendering skills, it’s not an efficient use of my time to do these drawings myself because they take me too long and I operate multiple businesses and don’t have the bandwidth (most designers outsource this work). Another lesson I learned is that clients often underestimate the complexity of their projects and sometimes sell them to you as simpler and less taxing than they end up being. So a particular family I was working with, a gut renovation in Wine Country, thought they just needed help with paint colors and furnishings. But they ended up needing multiple and full sets of architectural drawings for their entire house. Which is not what I signed up for. And the cost of which I ate because I am a people pleaser.

I’ve never been AMAZING at balancing the books, but what I realized over the past few years is that I’d basically been subsidizing my clients’ projects with income from brand partnerships. Which was keeping pricing artificially low. All that was fine when I was making a lot on brand deals (which I’m not currently). So when I actually looked at the money flowing in and out, I realized I needed to make the design portion of my business profitable by itself rather than relying on outside funds to keep costs down for clients. You might be shocked it took me so long to realize this, but keep in mind the past ten years have been a constant pivot on my part, constantly switching where my concentration lies based on opportunities. And when you’re in that mode, just kind of working as fast as you can at a number of different jobs, you don’t always have time to figure out what’s making you money and what’s costing you money. Also, yes, I need a bookkeeper.

In January I made the decision to fire a few problematic clients and restructure payment for the remaining ones. One client got fired for just being generally disrespectful to my assistant and project coordinator. When I reached out about adjusting my fees so that I would be paid for meeting and travel time, another client responded that they were fine with the changes, understanding as a small business own that you have to charge for your time. And yet another client responded by just firing me, despite the fact that I offered to finish their (expensive) renders for free, just because I needed to charge for meeting and travel time. I was not offended by it because I knew I could no longer work for them without making a decent income and quite frankly I just think they couldn’t afford the service. I get it! I wish I could afford an interior design sometimes!

After the smoke cleared from the resetting of the pricing structure, I was left with one really great client. They’re the small business owners I mentioned above. And they’ve been super understanding about my rates. But I’m kind of on the fence as of now as to whether the stress and complexity of private client work is for me. I love designing homes and I am innately good at it, but the day to day logistics are far too time consuming and definitely not profitable enough.

Because design work makes up a TINY portion of my income (I’m still making most of my money on brand partnerships) I have very little financial incentive to continue with it. I do like what I learn when I work with clients - it keeps you up to date on what people are currently liking design wise and it is a great form of creative expression (when the clients actually follow your advice). In an ideal world, I think I’d rather be part of a team. One design team I’ve always looked up to is DISC Interiors, made up of Krista Schrock and David John Dick. They do great work and I think their partnership makes it stronger. So maybe I’ll look for someone to start a firm with so I’m not so alone in running my business. The fate of me working with clients is TBD, but I’m more interested in talking about WHY I chose to take on these projects in the first place.

I have a tremendous amount of self-doubt and I think one of my bigger character flaws is that I constantly think everyone knows more than I do. So when people started reaching out to me asking me to design their homes, I just assumed they were right and that I should. I thought “Well, I don’t have a lot else going on, I guess I should do this.”

I didn’t think “Do I want to do this?” or “Do I have the bandwidth to do this?” I just thought “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Can we just all agree right now that’s a fucked up phrase that is inherently classist and basically just means that poor people shouldn’t get to make choices because they’re poor? I think there are probably non-problematic ways of using that phrase but for the most part I think it’s ready to be retired. If someone comes to you in a bind about what to do and that’s your response, you’re a dick.

But that Beggars Can’t Be Choosers philosophy is exactly what got me trapped in the mess I’m currently climbing out of. Thinking that if you are having a tough time the only option is to work more and to work harder can be really counter-productive. It has been for me for sure.

When I started taking on more design clients, my self-esteem was gone. I went from having a life goal achieved to having a life goal dissolve in front of my eyes (and in front of a pretty large audience). So I wasn’t really in a good mental space to be making business building decisions. All I was listening to was my self-doubt telling me I was no longer relevant and had to try and make money however I could. Which is an understandable position to take given my situation but ended up biting me in the ass when the exact thing I did to stay above water started dragging me under.

So, here’s my conclusion. If you’re in a spot that feels impossible try and shut up the voices in your head telling you that you don’t have choices. In our desire to do the right thing, to be seen as hard workers, to feel like we’re needed and wanted, we sometimes make decisions that don’t make sense in the long term. We flail.

I realized I was flailing a while back. It was sometime after I rented my LA house and realized I had increased my overhead to a near impossible level. I immediately wanted to sell everything and get the hell out. But then I realized rents were going up, it was near impossible to find a place that would take my “scary” pit bull, and that living in LA was having a tremendously good impact on my physical health, which in turn was helping my mental state.

So at this point I’m anti-flail. I think almost daily about selling Londo Lodge (I’d probably make about 300K which would almost knock out the amount of school and personal debt I’m in). But that would open up the possibility of me being unable to have any sort of appreciable asset. And I think at age seventy-five I’d probably be bummed I did that. Sometimes the thing that seems right to do for now is not necessarily the thing you should do for your long term financial success.

This year has brought with it some challenges but mostly has been a great tool for me to practice being joyful when conditions are not ideal. The past few years have taught me that in addition to being an optimist (gross) I am also an idealist. And being an idealist is a double edged sword. It means you like to do the right thing but it also means that it can be hard for you to accept things that are less than ideal.

I’m working on reigning in the problematic parts of idealism (expecting things to be perfect all the time) and on figuring out how to roll with the punches. I have a group of freelancer friends and most of them are not doing great right now - it’s a weird time you guys. Whenever one of them messages me about financial stress I try to get them to breathe and think about the fact that all of this is temporary and it’s unlikely they’ll remember it in a year.

My general interest in writing this essay came from a desire to tell other people NOT to make the same mistakes I made. When things aren’t going right, the instinct to “correct” is high. But success is only partially the result of hard work, it’s also largely the result of opportunity. And opportunity isn’t something we have full control over. So while doing work you don’t want to do might feel like penance, in my experience it never ends well.

So take a deep breath, realize your situation (good or bad) is only partially under your control, and think long and hard about whether the course correction you’re planning is going to have a positive impact on your life.

Try not to flail. I’m still fixing all the damage flailing through the past few years has caused.