Designing Your Interior Design Service Offer? 3 Critical Questions To Ask

Designing your Interior Design service offer requires careful consideration and planning. As an Interior Designer, it’s essential to understand your client’s needs and preferences to create a space that reflects their style and personality.

To design a successful Interior Design service offer, there are three critical questions that you should ask.

In this article, I will explore these questions in detail and provide insights on how to incorporate them into your service offer. By asking yourself these questions, you can create a tailored service offer that meets your client’s needs and expectations, ultimately leading to a successful project and a satisfied client.

What we cover show

Key Takeaways

Determine the type of business you want: Consider whether you prefer high-touchpoint, high-value consulting, community-focused work, a hands-off approach, or a team-oriented business.
Assess your financial goals and team structure: Determine how much money you plan to make and what it may cost you.
Consider the stage of your business: If you are in the growth stage, focus on creating an irresistible offer for a specific customer group and establish a simple system for selling and delivering it.
Identify your target customers: Understand the specific needs and desires of your customers. Avoid generic descriptions like serving everyone or targeting creatives.
Assess your available assets: Take stock of your resources, including your brand, products, customer acquisition strategies, team, finances, and technology. Different service offers require different growth assets.

Designing Your Service Offer? 3 Critical Questions To Ask

What is An Interior Design service offer?

An Interior Design service offer is simply a service that an Interior Designer provides to their clients. Most designers have multiple offers depending on their client base.

In my consulting & coaching programs, we always define an Offer Suite – a collection of offers that designers can sell to their clients. An offer suite consists of free offers to paid offers, that are sold at the front or back-end.

A well-designed Interior Design service offer helps the designer communicate their services effectively and establish a clear understanding of the project’s requirements.

It also helps the client to understand the designer’s approach and what they can expect from the project.

Overall, an Interior Design service offer and proper documentation are crucial tools for both the designer and the client to ensure a successful and satisfactory outcome.

Let’s Design Your Interior Design Service Offer

As promised, there are 3 specific questions you need to ask yourself when you start designing your offers.

Question 1: What type of business do you want?

For some, it’s high-touchpoint, high-value, private expert consulting, custom-made design work.
For some, it’s the community, togetherness, big volumes, and maybe educational work.
For some, it’s hands-off, as passive as possible.
For some, it’s all about team effort.

And so on…

When you build your interior design offers, you need to decide what kind of business you really want. You need to decide what price point you want to offer, and how many touchpoints you want to offer. There are really no exact rules to this, other than this:

If you want to be accessible for many, for example by keeping your prices low, you need to focus on volumes.

You can’t grow a business with this combination:

Low price + low volumes

If you want to go low price, you need to ramp up both your delivery capacity (turn into group model, scalable deliveries, team, bulk manufacturing, etc…) AND your marketing efforts. Low price + high volume is the name of your game then.

If you prefer low volumes, intimate, personal offers, the only way to do that is with high prices. This is your game then:

High price + low volumes

If you want to be high price + high volumes, that is doable too, but not solo. You need to build a team that takes care of your customers, offering them the high touchpoint, high-value service that you want your company to be known for.

Figure this out when making complex decisions for your service offers:

What do you really want? You might think you want to have a massive business, but when you are set on the journey, you might realize you, in fact, want something totally different. Or, maybe you right now want a solo business where you handle all the deliveries, but after a while, you might start longing to become a business owner, instead of an employee in your own business.
How much money are you planning to make? And what that can cost you?
Who will be part of your team? Are you solo? Or a small but mighty team of designers, assistants, customer care professionals, sales and marketing experts? Or, do you want a big team and offices in many locations?
What’s your role? What do you actually want to do in your business and what you do not want to do?

Then there’s the stage of your business… when you grow and scale, your offer strategy is changing, too.

Growth stage

When you get started with a new business, you might want to prefer low volume + high price. It’s the best way to get into the market and validate the idea. And… to make that money you need to be able to replace your salary and invest in your growth.

At this stage, your effort should go into creating an offer that’s irresistible for the chosen customer group and designing a simple, effective system to sell and deliver it.

Scaling stage

When you scale, you most likely (not always, but often) need a scalable front-end and a premium back-end structure. And a pathway, or AVENUE, as I call it.

At the Scale Stage, you need to implement a scalable product suite with the right infrastructure that allows you to scale it.

So, your first set of big questions

What kind of business do you want?
What fits your personality?
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
What working style works for your life situation?
Then: what’s your current stage?
Are you ready to scale or are you figuring out your sales?

Focus on what matters at the stage where you’re at!

Question 2: what type of customers do you want (and what do they want)?

You see, there are a bunch of different types of people, and just by saying “I serve everyone” or “creatives” or “those with money” (although we can’t say we don’t love them…), that’s not enough to be able to create the type of delivery model that suits your customers.

Your second set of big questions

Do you know and respect what your customers really want and design an experience that makes them happy and successful with whatever you help them with?
And are you willing to repel customers who “must have that thing you don’t want to offer?”

Question 3: What type of assets do you have at your disposal?

In our consulting and coaching, we always talk about Holistic Business Design. This means that your strategy and actions cover multiple areas of business: your brand, products, customer acquisition, team, finances, technology, and more.

Smart companies focus on developing strategic assets that increase their operational efficiency, profits, and joy. Your service offers are part of these assets, and different offers require different types of growth assets.

Let me give you an example:

If you have a low-priced offer, you need high volumes. High volumes require a high marketing budget, regardless of whether you use time or money to build your client base.

So, if you already have a big audience you can tap into, then offering a low-priced product could work for you. If you have no such audience, offering a low-priced product will kill your profit margins.

Unless… of course… you have a premium back-end offer in place.

Your third big question

Do you have the resources available to build that kind of audience you need, in terms of the volumes your business needs, right now?