What does it take to turn my interior design passion into a business or a paid side gig?

I want to help you drill down on three key considerations and by doing this, it should help point the way whether it’s a great idea for yourself to turn your passion in interior design a business or a paid side gig. What are the three questions you should ask yourself? Here they are:

1. What do you want to earn?

If you want to start a business, businesses are businesses, they have certain shapes and parameters and depending upon what you want to earn, that’s going to tell you what you actually need to do to structure your business. Additionally, just because you bring in certain dollars into a business doesn’t mean you get to keep all of those dollars because you might be paying for cost of goods. What do you want to earn yourself, not what you want the business to bill, but what do you want to be paid as the business owner doing it full-time or as a part-time side gig.

The bottom line is when you start an interior design business you’re going to be at your lowest earning point and then as you grow, that’s when your earnings are going to start to grow as well.

2. How hard are you willing to work?

Are you going to do this full-time or part-time? If you want to do this part-time or a side gig, say on evenings or weekends, because another full-time job somewhere else, that’s not at all easy, but that’s perfectly fine. You’re just not going to necessarily make  as much as money as you want to or as much as others who do it full-time. There are certain business models that you can do in interior design that wouldn’t require you to work full-time, however, your business model and offerings have to be very limit and specific in scope. So are you going to work full-time or part-time?

3. Do you have confidence?

When I talk about confidence, I’m not referring to, not the “Hey! I’m all that” type of person, but really talented people who are centered, who know what they’re doing, and aren’t big blowhards about it. Being centered and confident means that when clients, who are unsure of what to do next, come to you and emulate your confidence and certainty from your because you have your design chops. You’re not going to have the confidence that you need if you don’t extensive interior design training – your knees are going to be knocking. This is a real industry, you have real competitors out there and real risks in taking other people’s money in order to deliver a certain result. Confidence comes from making sure that you get the type of training that you feel that you need to know what you’re doing.

To tie all up in a bow, what do you want to earn? How much are you willing to do? Those will tell you, am I going to work part-time or full-time? And the last one, how confident am I? I’d love to help you drill down more in your thinking so we have a checklist, which we call The Interior Design Startup Checklist, with twenty four amazing important boxes you need to check.