To maximize your client’s product investment, you need to know how to deploy the ten layers of design to best drive your profits. By incorporating choices from all ten of these layers, from the flooring to the window treatments and everything in between, you keep your profit margin while providing your client with a customized, finished product. And, each choice adds another layer of investment for your client, which further increases your profit!
Want vs Need Mindset
But, before you can expand the value of a project, you have to learn how to move your client away from focusing on what they need and into focusing on what they want. When we talk about a client’s “needs,” we are usually focused on their logical, rational side. Designing based on a client’s needs translates to a specific budget and creates a limit on what you can do for them. What a client wants, however, is in the heart and tied to their emotions. Want is not a spreadsheet or a budget, it is an investment.
But how do you get your client into that realm of thinking? First of all, never push, never sell, never manipulate, and never convince a person against their will. Instead, it’s up to you to educate them on the value of each layer and selection that ultimately makes up their design. Educating about the value lights up different parts of their brain and puts them in a place of want and desire.
You can do this many ways: by keeping the final room design a surprise so your client doesn’t see the room until it is finished with all of your selections, by giving clients the chance to live in and appreciate your choices before immediately sending invoices, or by just incorporating the ten layers into your design portfolio so that clients expect a comprehensive design process from you at the start. All of these strategies help to encourage your client to see the value of each layer selection and how it creates the whole of the room instead of getting stuck in their limiting budgets.
Maximalist vs Minimalist
The best part of this process is that creating layers of investment for your client creates layers of profit for your business, as well. And this holds true whether the client has a minimalist or a maximalist design style.
The design should always employ at least ten important layers that you can leverage for varying effects, depending on your clients’ taste. However, a minimalist design will have one element of each layer, while a maximalist design will have multiple elements of each layer. You might keep the same layers, but add in a lot more pattern or color within those maximalist styles. Or, a minimalist design might call for a single window treatment while for a maximalist, you might have three to four layers. While the layers are still present, you have the ability to make varying selections in each that will maximize your bottom line, regardless of the scope of your particular project.
When you’re ready to take your design practice to the next level, explore your expert coaching and training options with Melissa Galt. To catch the entire podcast episode LISTEN HERE.
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