89: Processes, Procedures & Pricing: How To Mindfully Scale Your Business and Make More Money

Michelle Lynne is the owner of ML Interiors Group, a successful design firm based in Dallas, Texas. She started her firm in 2008 while still working in Corporate America. It was also the year she got married and purchased her home… AND the year the market crashed. More than a decade later, she is still happily married and her interior design business is thriving.

Michelle is also the owner and founder of Designed for the Creative Mind™, where she teaches interior designers and decorators the proven practices, effective processes, and profitable systems to run their business with purpose and efficiency — leaving them with more time to design. Through her comprehensive online courses, Michelle inspires interior design business owners to weave intention into their business strategy and identify who they really are so they can refine their processes and attract more of what they want in their interior design business (and life!).

Michelle has been published on Forbes.com, where she inspires other entrepreneurs and business leaders in the Greater Dallas area. Michelle adopted a newborn in 2018, loves Jesus (but swears a little), and believes gratitude is the key ingredient to happiness.

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You can find the resources Michelle mentioned on the interview here. Make sure to look around the site to learn more and see the newest resources to help you on the business side of design.

Katie (00:02):

Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning into the Hustlenomics Podcast. I’m your host Katie, and today I’m so excited to be talking with Michelle Lynn. She is the owner of M L interiors group, a successful design firm based in Dallas, Texas. And Michelle is also the owner and founder of Designed for the Creative Mind™ where she teaches interior designers and decorators, the proven practices, effective processes and profitable systems to run their business with purpose and efficiency, leaving them with more time to design. So Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Michelle (00:33):

Thank you for having me, Katie. It’s such an honor.

Katie (00:35):

Oh well, absolutely. So I’d love to know a little bit more about you and your background and kind of how you got to where you are today.

Michelle (00:41):

Well, it’s quite a quite a circular story. I’ve always been interested and fairly good at designing and decorating and my friends would always say, Hey, can you come over and give me a hand with my house and you know, I’ll feed you or give you some wine or whatever. So that was just something that I did for fun. I had been working like my day job in two different industries of corporate America and the second one actually ended up getting sold and I just did not want to stay in a cubicle for the rest of my life. So basically I just said, okay God, what next? And since this is something that I’d always been doing, I thought, well I’ll just start this on the side and see where it takes me. So I started doing home staging, redesign and organizing and it’s, that was in 2008 when the market crashed. I got married, we bought a house. It was kind of a crazy year, but it has just grown and expanded since then. So in 2010 I left my corporate job and have been doing this full time since then. So I joke that I’ve been doing it forever. I’m just finally getting paid for it.

Katie (01:49):

Yes, I love that. And I always love to hear the dirty and the process people take from moving from that full time corporate job to something on their own. So did you start a side hustle before you left or was this something that all kind of happened at once? What was that journey like?

Michelle (02:02):

Totally a side hustle. So I was waking up at four 30 in the morning, you know, trying to build this business, working in the evenings and weekends on occasion. I’m also, since I just got married, it was, it was a juggling act because I wanted to be a good wife at the same time and be present. So yeah, I was doing both for quite a while and I had full support from my management team at corporate and I stepped out of two levels of management myself. So I went part time and then I, I left altogether. It took about a year and a half to completely extricate myself from my cubicle.

Katie (02:40):

Yes, that was very, very similar to my path as well. I definitely took the kind of slower one, which I think is is nice. You don’t feel that kind of hot water as much, but what were some of those first steps that you took to get things started? Was it your website, your branding, your social media, where did you start

Michelle (02:56):

All of that? First it a website and it was such a baby website, you know, you look back now and you’re like, Oh my gosh. That was just, it was almost like just a reference point and there was no SEO to it. So being found was a struggle, but there was Google maps somehow found me and I ended up with a lot of business from that. And so getting placed on their business cards, the portfolio that I had to build was something that I would, you know, take vignettes of my own house, right. And rearrange my house. Or I’d go over to my friend’s house and say, Hey, I’m going to rearrange your living room. So I have a before and after. It was just piecemealing things together and praying that it all worked. And social media was not a huge presence back in 2008.

Michelle (03:46):

So Facebook, I don’t even know if I was on Facebook at the time. Maybe I had just started Facebooking. And of course there wasn’t an Instagram. I don’t think Pinterest had really taken off houses of presence now in, in our field. And it was really word of mouth and I would find networking events that I could go to that were just mostly women and realtors because I was doing a lot of home staging and that that was helpful. A lot of work. I mean that is exhausting work when you home stagers don’t get nearly enough credit for all of the effort that goes into that service. Absolutely. So yeah, I always like hearing those first kind of processes. And so when did you decide to start expanding and move into doing design for the creative mind? So designed for the crate, so I’m gonna back up a little bit.

Michelle (04:38):

In 2013 in Dallas, I’m in Dallas, Texas in 2013 the market for real estate just exploded. So I would get a call from a realtor on a Monday saying, Hey, can you come and stage a house on Wednesday because we’re going to take pictures of it on Thursday, enlisted on Friday. So then I would get a call the following day saying we put a sign out in the yard saying coming soon and we have three offers so we don’t need you to come stage it. So in 2013 I had to do a really quick pivot and focus on interior design and Katie, nobody was teaching or sharing how to go about it. So processes, procedures, pricing, like how you run a project, where you buy your stuff. Nobody was talking about it and I was just flabbergasted. It was like major secret of some sort and at the time I promised myself, okay, when I get this figured out I am going to share it with others.

Michelle (05:39):

And so a few years past I figured things out. Like it was ugly, just struggling and losing money and losing sleep, but stubborn to make sure that I could get this done because I didn’t want to go back to corporate. I just, I was not going to, I was not going to give up. So a few, let’s say a few years ago I thought, okay, I can, I’m ready, I can do this. I can share it with others and I wanted to create an online course. So it was not something that I had to do in person and literally take away from my interior design business because I still love doing that. And so two years ago, I guess it was in 2018 I left for a month to go adopt a baby. And so I was gone for 30 days. I was still domestic.

Michelle (06:26):

We didn’t go in and go terribly far, but I wasn’t in the office. And my interior design business just ran perfectly without me. And I have an amazing team. But the processes and the procedures and the pricing and everything really kept them from calling me often because it was all mapped out. It was all written down, it was all practiced. We, we’d done it for a year leading up to that. And during that month, not only was my daughter born, but designed for the creative mind was born because I was convinced that if I could leave for a month and keep the processes and the business practices going, that it was viable to teach others at that point. So there we go. That’s, that’s I, you know, like my daughter was birthed. And so it was this other baby designed for the creative mind.

Katie (07:17):

Well, I’m moving, I’m sharing that feeling of knowing that you can take a step back and things are not going to crumble. That has to be the best feeling in the world. And I think a lot of us are, are wanting to get there. And I’m so curious, you mentioned some of those struggles and difficulties and growth and stability and all that stuff. So what were some of those mistakes or maybe just things that you wish you could have avoided that you could maybe share with the audience so they could avoid them when they’re trying to do what you’re doing?

Michelle (07:41):

So I think the biggest, the biggest lesson that I learned was one is that I wasn’t charging enough. So there, there’s a money mindset that I think that we have to all overcome. You know, we’re selling our services, we’re not selling ourselves. So there’s, there’s pricing, but also creating a solution that allows you to calculate a value based fee or a flat fee rather than charging by the hour changed my life. I started becoming much more profitable. I wasn’t losing sleep because in a creative role, which, which you all know, whether you’re doing graphic design or interior design or just whatever, sometimes it takes a really long time to find the perfect something and then it takes like zero time to find something else. So in my instance, maybe it’s, it takes a while to find the right couch, but I can find the rug really quickly.

Michelle (08:43):

But then the couch is out of budget, so you have to find something else and then it, there’s a snowball effect. So I was struggling sharing with my clients. Yes know it took me eight hours to find your couch, but look, it only filmed, it only took me 20 minutes to find your rug. But justifying the time spent was just a huge challenge. Plus I wasn’t charging enough by the hour when I was charging by the hour. And then how do you charge when you’re in the shower and you’re thinking about the project? So being able to come up with a calculation where I can just charge a flat fee and say, look, this is what it’s going to cost. If it takes me eight hours or if it takes me two hours, then this is what’s going to happen. Plus you get at your job, the less time it takes you, so you make less money, but you’re delivering a better product. So it was just a big circle.

Katie (09:33):

Absolutely. And you know, it’s funny how things work out in that. You’re talking about that because I am making that exact shift in my business right now. I’ve been a combination of hourly as well as set packages and just realize the exact same thing, that it’s just not feasible to do that as a creative and I could provide more value to my clients if it’s that flat fee. So it sounds like you had to make that transition as well. Do you have any advice on making that transition and showing your clients that they’re still going to get so much value?

Michelle (10:02):

Yes. And I think that my advice would definitely be as to do it, go back and review your data so the numbers that you have collected leading up to your transition will lead you to understanding more about how to calculate it. Like for us, we do it by the square foot, but we can cross reference and confirm how many hours a similar job as taken us. So when we were coming up with that formula, we could cross reference and determine that it was going to be an accurate number. And then I would say take whatever number you’re you were charging by the hour and increase it by at least 50% because there’s no way that you ever bill for all of the time you spent like going back to that shower. I mean, I come up with some of the best ideas in, in the shower as I’m shampooing my hair and you can’t really bill for that. So making sure that you have that buffer. And I think the clients really dig it, Katie, because you’re telling them, look, this is what it’s going to cost period. And they can budget for it and be done with it and not worry about bleeding money for the project.

Katie (11:15):

Absolutely. I love that. And that just gives me so much more confidence to know that I’m going in the right direction.

Michelle (11:21):

Oh, I’m super stoked for you.

Katie (11:23):

Yeah, absolutely. And you talked about a positive money mindset, which I think is so interesting, and this comes up a lot with other female entrepreneurs as we talk about money and earning money and what that profitability is like. And I think there’s so many limiting beliefs and issues that women have surrounding money. Did you have any of those limiting beliefs and if so, how to do

Michelle (11:43):

Yes, I definitely had plenty of limiting beliefs. I didn’t believe that I was good enough because I didn’t go to school for it. I didn’t believe I was good enough or fast enough to ask to ask for more. And I didn’t know what other people were charging because like I said, nobody was, nobody was talking about it when I reached out for help. So there was that. Now I didn’t have a limiting belief that I was not personally worthy of earning it because I had been in corporate and had been earning well into the six figures. So that part to me was more frustrating that I wasn’t earning into the six figures at the time. With this, with this business, I believe we have to separate ourselves from our product. I as, as I’ve worked with different students through my course, different coaching clients and so forth.

Michelle (12:36):

What I’ve seen, and I, I’m sure it probably aligns with your conversations with so many women on your podcast, is that oftentimes we associate our service or our product or whatever it is with our own self and quite frankly, we’re selling our service. We’re not selling ourself, so our prices should be determined on the services that we provide, not necessarily who we are and being able to take that baby of a business that we have and let it walk on its own and us stand back and watch it as a, as a strange analogy, but that’s what you’re charging for. You’re not charging for, for your, your own worthiness because quite frankly, if we were charging for our own worthiness, we’d be unaffordable because we are all worthy of so much more that, you know, as, as individuals.

Katie (13:30):

I love that approach. Absolutely. And so with doing all this, I’m sure setting boundaries has to be a part of it. Setting boundaries with your clients, with yourself. Can you talk a little bit about why it’s so important to set boundaries and maybe a few that you’ve set for yourself?

Michelle (13:46):

Yeah, I think boundaries are very important. As women, as creatives, we’re nurturers and I think that we all want to be bullies. We are people pleasers oftentimes to our clients and then they’re paying us. So we, we go back to that. The client is always right philosophy that at my, at least my generation kind of grew up with that. And so boundaries I believe are important. It’s just like when you’re raising children, you know, I talk about the fact that I adopted a child. She’s a couple years old now. And boundaries are important because otherwise it’s the tail wagging the dog. And I know that my child likes the boundaries that we have in place because when we don’t enforce them, then the wheels fall off. And I believe it’s the same thing with our projects. And that’s why I am such a huge advocate of processes in your business, which goes back to, it runs itself.

Michelle (14:36):

I share all of our processes with our clients. I mean, well not all of them, but everything from a 30,000 foot view that’s going to affect them. And I walk them through this is how we work on our projects, this is what we do, this is what we don’t do. So forth. And it weeds out some of the clients that would become difficult if they don’t want to adhere to our processes. And then the ones that do sign with us totally dig it because they know that everything’s in control and the boundaries are, you know, things such as you have X number of days in order to make a decision about the design that we’ve provided to you. And we communicate via email. We don’t communicate via text, we don’t work on weekends, evenings or holidays. So, so some of the boundaries, we spell them all out in our frequently asked questions that we share with our clients when they’re signing with us or before they sign with us, they’re written down. And then sometimes, yeah, we do text our clients, but it’s only after we’ve set boundaries with them. And it is, it’s important because we are not all about our business.

Katie (15:42):

Absolutely. And it took me so long to learn that and I think I narrowly avoided burnout within the first year of my business because I didn’t set those boundaries. So it’s so important to set them early on and really honor them. So thanks for sharing that.

Michelle (15:55):

Yeah, it’s for your own sanity. It’s for your health and it’s for your, if you have relationships, it keeps them healthy too because you can’t be working 24 seven and be present with the people who love you. Absolutely. A hundred percent

Katie (16:09):

So I was just going through your website and saw some fantastic courses and master classes that you offer. So can you share a little bit about what those are about?

Michelle (16:17):

Thank you. Yes. So based on the years of experience that I had and the many tears and sleepless nights and pulling these processes together, I have laid them all out in a masterclass. It’s through the designed for the creative mind platform. It’s an interior design business masterclass and it provides interior designers the ability to implement the exact processes I share, like I lay it all out. This is how I run my business. I lay out exactly how I price my projects and we walk through it, so I have both the self paced version as well as a guided version. The guided version is with me, we have six weeks. We have six Q and a live calls and just a variety of ways that we can communicate, but even through the self paced, I explain that everybody has a different level of deliverables. Everybody has a different market that they work in, but this is how I calculate mine.

Michelle (17:16):

Use this to set your own foundation and here’s the processes that no matter what part of business you’re in, if you’re a baby designer and you’ve been open for two weeks or you’re thinking about starting a business or it’s your side hustle and you want to leave your corporate business, you can implement all of this. And so that masterclass is just my signature course. I love, love, love it. I’ve been doing some group coaching and some individual coaching because not everybody loves to do the online courses. And then I’ve got a bunch of freebies over on the design for the creative mind, whether it is, you know, some social media images or downloadable construction document, just a variety of different things that I think are useful enough that people need to have them. Absolutely. I love that. So many great resources. So what was it like creating a course for the first time?

Michelle (18:08):

I just released my own first one and it was a doozy. It wasn’t doozy. It was, it took me quite a while. It probably took me over a year to actually pull it all together because I was still trying to run my business and had just brought this baby home. So I started and put way too much into it and really had to edit it back just based on the feedback. And so it is down to, this is the exact everything that you need and if you want more than we can coach one-on-one or we could go to the next level. But I enjoy putting it together because it also took me back to the basics and really ensured that we at the studio were doing exactly what we said we were doing and cleaned up a few things that we’ve gotten lazy on.

Michelle (18:57):

But for the most part it was fun. It was really fun. But man, it was a lot of work. Oh yeah. So everybody can find those on your website, correct? Yes. So you can either go to the ML interiors group.com and then you can click on where it says to the trade and it’ll take you to designed for the creative mind.com or you can just go there directly so they they talk to each other. Awesome. Awesome. And you also mentioned you have some freebies and free guides on your website and how do people check those out? So for, for you, for your listeners, I actually have a couple of extra things too. So for your listeners, if they go to designed for the creative mind.com forward slash hustlenomics and I’ll send it to you so you can drop it in your show notes. If any of your listeners want help with their house, we have E designer virtual services, so wherever they are, if they don’t want to fly us out there, I’m offering 10% discount off of that.

Michelle (19:57):

The review and planning guide is my favorite thing to do. I do it at least once a year. Sometimes I do it twice a year depending on how busy it is. There’s times I’ve done it once a quarter and it just allows you to look back and see what’s been working, what you like to do, what you don’t like to do, what you can outsource, where you’re making money and need to keep repeating things. It’s just everything. Yeah, it’s just, it’s a fabulous tool. And then I also have a discount on that masterclass that we had talked about earlier for your listeners on the self paced one so they can access it any time you get a hundred bucks off and it is just fantastic. You don’t have to have my Q and a and you don’t have to wait for that guided course. So there’s benefits for your audience but then they can also find it on the website. And then I’m also on Instagram for design for the creative mind and MLS interiors group. So I’m around.

Katie (20:49):

Wonderful. Awesome. I thank you so much for offering that. That’s so many valuable resources. I so appreciate it. And guys check the show notes to be able to get access to all of that. I’ll make it really easy for you to find Sue. So you can really take advantage. And do you have any other resources like books, podcasts, courses, anything out there that’s been helpful for you as a business owner or just in personal development that you would recommend to the listeners?

Michelle (21:10):

Yeah, so I am a big, and you either love him or you hate them. I’m a big Tony Robbins fan and I just have gone to many of his events and have found that that for personal development really translates into the business development as well. So if you can ever just watch him on YouTube or attend one of his events in person, anything along that line. That’s fantastic. I love the book Jay. Her name’s Jensen Cero. I don’t know if I pronounce your name right. It’s called you are a badass. And I think that’s fantastic. The E design myth of the design myth book is really good, but it reminds you that you need to run your business like a business and it’s not a hobby. So especially in our fields, the creative field, it’s not a hobby. Run it like a business. Those have been fantastic and a little bit on the woo side there is a book called becoming supernatural and it is by doctor Joe Dispenza and it just talks a lot about the power of your mind and it even ties in with, it’s a heavy book.

Michelle (22:21):

It ties in with the scientific aspect of your brain and how it ties in with the universe and so I just, I totally dig it and I firmly believe that we have so much power in our own selves that we have barely tapped into it and he talks about it and I’m a very firm believer in God and Christ and so forth and I believe in the universe and all of the power that it is in us. We just have to be taught how to tap it, if, if, if that makes sense. It, it’s a great book. It’s really heavy and it’s something that you pick up and you put down and you pick up and you put down, but it has really changed my focus on my thoughts as to what I believe we invite into our lives through our thoughts.

Katie (23:17):

Wonderful. Yeah, I’ll definitely link to all those in the show notes because those sound like great things to check out as well. I would love if you could share again how everybody can find you and connect with you online.

Michelle (23:26):

Thank you. It is ML interiors group as in Michelle Lynn M L interiors group, and that is our interior design firm and then designed for the creative mind is the platform that is almost like a side hustle. Again, like I didn’t have enough to do, but it is created solely for the creatives because we don’t always think as business owners when the right side of the brain is busy creating. So I think if you get your business in order, it just gives you so much more freedom to be creative. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Well, thank you so much, Michelle, for coming on the show today and sharing your valuable insights as well as your story. I so appreciate it, Katie. It has been such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.