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Interior Design Business Brief Podcast

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by David Shepherd

15 episodes

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Based on 25 years consulting with over 400 interior design firms, university professor David Shepherd brings designers a weekly newsletter with the most impactful knowledge and useful tips from his vast archives. <a href="https://idbrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">idbrief.substack.com</a>

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3/30/2026

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Recent Episodes

June 19, 2026

Creating Your Own Uncontested Market Space

Resources:* Subscribe to my new YouTube channel for free weekly tutorials. (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/@shepherddp?sub_confirmation=1">HERE</a>)* Check out the four circumstances in which hiring me as your consultant can create shortcuts to the next level, or avoid the Big Mistake. Click <a target="_blank" href="https://www.interiordesignmba.com/dyf-consulting-1">HERE</a>.* Interior Design Business Brief Archives. Click <a target="_blank" href="https://idbrief.substack.com/archive">HERE</a>The Interior Designer’s Blue OceanMost interior designers spend their careers competing in a market they did not choose. They inherit the industry’s assumptions about what clients value, how services should be delivered, what belongs on a website, how proposals should be written, and even what kind of client is worth pursuing. Then they spend years trying to persuade prospective clients that they are somehow different from dozens of other firms making nearly identical promises.They spend heavily on beautiful photography. The service is personal. The process is customized. The firm is experienced. The work is luxurious, livable, timeless, layered, thoughtful, curated, and deeply reflective of the client.The problem is that everyone else is saying some version of exactly this same ol’, same ol’. To you it sounds different. To the prospective client, it sounds just the same. This is what business strategists call a red ocean, and yes, the red is to signal bloody competition. An existing market space crowded with competitors fighting over limited demand. Many designers I work with don’t think they have all that much competition, but that’s a myopic view. Just ask your prospective client who may have spent hours on Houzz or other sites and finally quit because there were just too many options! The ocean is red because everyone is battling for the same clients, using the same language, emphasizing the same credentials, and trying to win on increasingly subtle distinctions that may be obvious to the designer but are nearly invisible to the client.A Blue Ocean Strategy Asks a Very Different QuestionInstead of asking, “How can I beat the other designers in my market?” a blue ocean strategy asks, “Where is there uncontested market space that no one has claimed?”That may sound like the kind of thing only giant corporations can do, but that’s a misnomer. I don’t mean that an independent design firm is going to disrupt the entire interior design industry. That will never happen, and it doesn’t need to for you to find a highly-profitable niche.A clever blue ocean strategy doesn’t need to disrupt a local market; it can simply ignore it and embrace a newly defined segment of prospective clients.You Don’t Need to Become Southwest AirlinesYou do not need to become the Southwest Airlines of interior design. Southwest did not win by becoming a slightly better version of American or Delta. It changed the basis of competition. It reduced or eliminated many things traditional airlines treated as essential—first class seating, meals, assigned seating, baggage transfers through large hub airports—and raised other factors dramatically: turnaround time, low fares, and convenience for travelers who might otherwise have driven.They even made “friendly” a unique competitive edge and carefully hired for that.In your case, you don’t need to “beat” the other airlines (designers) in your market, you just need to find a route that no one else is flying. Just one route will do. Maybe your route will be from Hot-as-Hell, AZ to Freezin-my-Rear, AK. Fine, just so long as no one else is competing for that route.The True Value of Industry Case StudiesIn the business school classroom, we teach that companies can often learn more from studying case studies of companies in unrelated industries. That’s where the real breakthroughs can come. Which brings me to the case study of Yellow Tail wine and how much interior designer’s can learn from their winning blue ocean strategy.The wine industry has long competed on identifiable features like prestige, aging, complexity, terminology, awards, and a certain intimidating “sophistication.” Because of consolidation and giant marketing budgets, it is almost impossible for a new brand to compete in that bloody “red ocean.” Then came Yellow Tail, which essentially asked, “What if we targeted the millions of people are not even wine drinkers because they find the category confusing, pretentious, or unnecessarily complicated?” What if reducing the complexity, simplifying the choices, making the brand fun, and appealing to people who were not traditional wine buyers would turn them around? What if we could get even Hank Hill, standing on the sidewalk with his friends, to set his beer down to sample some new concoction? They did just that and the results were extraordinary. Casella Wines (maker of Yellow Tail) expected to sell about 25,000 cases of Yellow Tail during its first year in the United States. Instead, it sold nearly nine times that amount. Within just two years, Yellow Tail had become the fastest-growing wine brand in the history of the American wine industry, and within just three years, cumulative sales had reached roughly 25 million cases. Yellow Tail soon became the number-one imported wine in the United States and, for a time, the best-selling 750ml red wine in America, outselling many established French, Italian, and Californian competitors, who had neither the ability, nor the desire to compete in this low-cost, lowbrow market. Clients v. Nearly ClientsThe most interesting blue ocean opportunities are often found not among high-end clients who already understand and value traditional interior design. They are found among what blue ocean consultants call “near-clients:” people who have money, homes, and aspirations, but are dissatisfied with the current offerings of interior designers as they don’t seem to offer what this customer wants. Maybe, like fine wines, they consider traditional interior design too complex, too elite, too sophisticated for them.This sort of insight is where Blue Oceans begin.For example, some clients may not be resisting the end results of professional design, but rather the traditional design process. They may imagine it to be slow, opaque, expensive, intimidating, subjective, and filled with endless meetings. Another group may value design deeply but want a more rigorous project-management experience, with budgets, timelines, online dashboards, and accountability. Another may want speed and simplicity more than unlimited customization. (Mark Zuckerberg is the client of a consulting client of mine. For the 3,000 sq. ft. grand room of one of his Maui homes, he wanted built-in cabinets, one large sofa, and four matching chairs. That’s it. He wanted simple and fast.)None of these by itself is a “target market,” but they provide the seeds to develop a true blue ocean, an uncontested market space.(Back to Zuckerberg for a moment. Imagine the websites of 10 “high-end residential” designers. I’m here to tell you that to a lot of people, all of your brilliant work and all of your expensive photography will all start looking alike to Mark. Now, imagine a website that shows a giant, magnificent grand room looking out onto the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean. In that room is a single sofa. Now that will get his attention! That will stand out.)The Four Actions FrameworkBlue Ocean Strategy relies on a simple but demanding framework built around four questions.* What should be reduced well below the industry standard? * What should be eliminated? * What should be raised well above the industry standard? * What should be created that the industry has never really offered before? Below, paid subscribers will find a complete video tutorial on how to answer these questions, and a case study of how to create an uncontested market space of their own. I’ll walk you through the process of mapping your current market, identifying “near-clients,” and the process of deciding what to reduce, eliminate, raise, and create, to shape the result into a differentiated strategic position that you can own! Your own uncontested market space. This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://idbrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">idbrief.substack.com</a>

June 12, 2026

(15) Escaping the Competitive Herd

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://idbrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">idbrief.substack.com</a> Uniquely Identical?Ever wonder why the harder you work to stand out, the more you seem the same?A few years ago, I stood at the front of a ballroom filled with about 400 hundred interior designers and asked them this question:What makes you so different that your ideal prospective clients will be inspired to choose you?Hands went up across the room, some of them quickly and with real confidence — service, taste, relationships, track record, we really listen, we’re full-service and on and on.I called on one woman, and she explained, with great pride, that her firm had adopted a 3D software application that allowed her to show clients renderings and make sure they would get exactly what they wanted. She was certain this separated her from the pack.I then asked the audience whether, just by chance, anyone else happened to offer a similar capability.About 75 hands went up.Later that day I broke the group up into smaller breakout sessions. The assignment was to look at the websites of at least six other designers in your group, and to make a list of the key capabilities they offered on their sites.And then, to compare that to your own site.The groups broke up and we reassembled en masse. I have to say, the crowd was more than a little “blah.”They had begun to realize that they were putting potential customers in a position not unlike placing an alien in a cereal aisle. Let me explain.This analogy comes from the fabulous book, Different, written a Harvard marketing professor named Youngme Moon.Imagine you are standing in the cereal aisleIn the book, Moons asks you to imagine that you are standing in a supermarket and must select a cereal you have never tried before.Truth is, this would be easy because you are what Moon calls a connoisseur of cereal, meaning that you would filter by reduction, ruling out the children’s cereals and the sugared ones and the oat-based ones until you arrive at something close to what you already like.Now imagine an alien drops from the sky into that same aisle — no history, no preferences, no working notion of what a cereal even is. No matter how much intelligence we grant him, he is overwhelmed, because where the connoisseur sees a hundred meaningful differences the novice sees only a wall of sameness: a hundred boxes of roughly the same size, similarly priced, each shouting its virtues in the same bright colors.He lacks the filters that would let him tell one from another, and so he cannot choose. He is in search of simplicity, but overwhelmed by choice.The trap Moon identifies is this: as a category (cereal or interior design) accumulates more and more options, the differences between those options gradually cease to register as differences at all, until heterogeneity comes to be experienced — her words — as homogeneity.What was meant to be different, begins to look the same.Google understood this. Before Google, the search engine game was a never-ending war between companies like Yahoo! and AOL to see who could jam the most ads, banners, and likes on a single web page.Want to know about sports, politics, history, weather, movies, celebrities, money and everything else under the sun? Go to Yahoo! or AOL.And then a funny thing happened. A website was introduced that had taken all of that away. All of that choice was gone. There was, simply a white page with a small white box in the middle of it.Google.Within years, Google became the lone behemoth and Yahoo!, AOL, and dozens of others struggled to survive.Because Google didn’t “augment” or add. It reduced. It took away.If you came in certain that you were different, the difficult news is that the very things you have been adding in order to stand out — the refreshed website, the blog, the e-design tier, the trade program, the white-glove concierge experience — are likely the very things that have made you resemble everyone else.The harder you worked at distinction the more thoroughly you buried it.Rather than becoming unique, you became uniquely identical.The vital role of tradeoffsLet me remind you of the definition of strategy:“A choice of complementary activities done different from or better than competitors, and acceptance of the tradeoffs.That’s it. That’s all you need to do to reach you highest goals, but you can’t pick and choose the parts you like. You have to do all of it, including the tradeoffs. (And sometimes, especially the tradeoffs!)Southwest Airlines is the business school poster child for tradeoffs. For over thirty years, they removed flyer choices such as reserved seats and meal service. They were willing to lose a large segment of flyers to achieve their primary goals of quick turnaround and low fares.They made the tradeoffs and mastered the complementary activities that made them the most profitable airline in the US for decades.Many larger airlines tried to copy the Southwest strategy and couldn’t because they could not bring themselves to truly make the necessary tradeoffs. They kept reserved seating. They kept meal service. And they failed.So, the useful question is no longer, “What more can I do?”But rather, “What less can I do…and do it brilliantly?”What am I prepared to stop doing — to give up entirely — so that I might master that which will lead to being known for the one thing that is genuinely mine?Want another example? Well, imagine the finest heart surgeon in the world — thirty years at the top of his field, the man to whom the most difficult cases are flown from across the globe — and notice how complete your confidence in him is.If you or someone you love needs heart surgery, this is the man for you.Now suppose I mention that he also performs a little oral surgery, and some breast augmentation on the side, and the occasional tummy tuck, and hair plugs, and that he has lately agreed to host a reality television program and wants to appear on Dancing With the Stars. Your confidence in him as a great heart surgeon falls, and it falls not because you have concluded that he is bad at any of those other things — for all you know he is genuinely accomplished at every one of them.Rather, your confidence falls because excellence, as we intuitively understand it, is a narrowing rather than a broadening, and the surgeon who does “everything” has signaled you, without intending to, that he is committed to nothing in particular.The narrow practitioner earns our trust; the well-rounded one we struggle even to remember.This is the move that every great escape brand has made, and it has always been a move of subtraction. Google launched a nearly empty page into a world of cluttered portals and won precisely on the strength of what it refused to place on the screen. In-N-Out has served the same six items on an unchanging menu for decades while its competitors piled on salads and breakfast platters and desserts.The most successful firms did not differentiate harder than their rivals; they escaped the contest altogether. (If your familiar with “blue ocean strategy,” rest assured that will be coming up in a future newsletter.)First recognition, then revolution!Discovering that you have likely become uniquely identical is the easy part.The harder part is becoming truly different, knowing the one thing your firm in particular should pour itself into, identify, and master the key capabilities for.And, of course, make the necessary tradeoffs.That’s the definition of strategy, and strategy is the only thing that will truly separate you from the pack.Below, I’ll take you through a case study of how one consulting client of mine wanted to do more, was convinced to do less, and thrived in a market she loves.

June 5, 2026

(14) The Costs Eating Your Profits, are NOT the Ones Found on Your P&L

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://idbrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">idbrief.substack.com</a> *EXPANDED EDITION INCLUDING DETAILED WORKSHEET AND DIAGNOSTIC*Every interior design firm principal knows that if total sales are higher than total costs, a profit will result.The problem is that mosts of the costs that are truly eating away at your profits, 24-hours a day, are not those found on a P&L statement or any other accounting report. In fact, your bookkeeper, accountant, and CPA spend no time at all thinking about them; they may have never heard of them. How bad is it? Based on my experience working interior design firms to develop compelling strategies, I believe as much as 80% of your “true costs” are of the invisible type. To make matters worse, these hidden costs are also the cause of much of the complexity that grows in design firms like hydrilla choking a lake. And if you’ve been following my work for a while, you know that “complexity is the killer of small firm profits!” How Complexity Grows Out of ControlConsider what happens to a single function — say, accounting — in a growing design firm. This is an especially rich area since many designers equate dealing with accounting somewhat like dealing with a root canal! Imagine yourself on the very first day you decided to hang out your shingle. You wanted to design, but the responsible entrepreneur in you knew there were other responsibilities as well. For example, you opened a business checking account. Simple. Twenty minutes each month to reconcile. Knowing what came in and what went out with little more than a glance. You are in control, and the accounting function for your business costs you almost nothing.But your business grows. Six months later you have eight clients at different stages, a few credit cards, and some tax filings due. Uh oh, time for the responsible entrepreneur to hire a CPA!The CPA (who probably knows little or nothing about an interior design business…but that’s for a different newsletter!) insists that you purchase QuickBooks. That makes sense — you’ve also formed an LLC, hired a part-time employees and you need real “books.” Conveniently, the CPA provides a bookkeeper who comes out to your office and sets up something called a “chart of accounts.” You’re not quite clear why this chart of accounts contains sixty-eight expense categories and you just nod when the bookkeeper explains you’ll be on an accrual-based accounting system. For your whopping 1 1/2 employee, including you, you follow the bookkeeper’s advice and also add a payroll service. You begin receiving monthly financial statements that show a profit or loss, but that number has no relationship to the number you see in your checking account, the one that used to make perfect sense to you!By year two, you hire your own bookkeeper to replace the CPA’s — hoping to get information you can actually understand and use. The new bookkeeper revamps everything: six custom spreadsheets, new data exports from the payroll service, a custom workflow that she’s very proud of.The tail is now officially wagging the dog. You are just along for the ride and you now spend about a minute looking at the monthly statements before tossing them into a bottom drawer. (And yes, one client of mine truly did proudly produce a bottle of vodka from that draw to show me how she deals with the monthly ritual!)By year three, the accounting function that was supposed to free you up to design has become a part-time job. One you never applied for, have no training for, barely understand…and one that imposes a hidden cost on your firm—the cost of complexity. But Wait, There’s More! Now multiply this same cancerous trajectory across every function in your firm. Marketing. Technology. Procurement. HR. Each one started as a single block, and each one underwent its own version of this expansion, challenging you to keep up. Each one is now generating hidden costs that will never appear on a financial statement — because they were never paid with money. They were paid with time, focus, and the slow erosion of the owner’s ability to do the work the firm was built to do.What Accounting Doesn’t MeasureEvery business owner talks frequently about different “costs,” but can you define the word? A cost means something given up in the process of doing things. Notice what’s missing from that definition. The word ‘money.’ Accountants added that later, for their own convenience.By the original definition, the hours your junior designer spends reconciling two incompatible software platforms every month are a cost. The project you didn’t pitch because you were buried in vendor disputes is a cost. The bookkeeper you kept for three years after you knew she wasn’t right, because switching felt impossible, is a cost. None of these appear on your P&L. All of them are real.There is a framework for understanding exactly where these costs live — and more importantly, where they’re doing the most damage in a design firm. It identifies five distinct categories of hidden cost that are almost certainly operating in your business right now. Some of them are recoverable. A few of them are surprisingly easy to eliminate once you can see them.Your P&L will never point you there. In this Expanded Edition of the Interior Design Business Brief, I’m going to provide a detailed process for identifying the hidden costs within your business, including a ranking scale to help you set your priorities for attacking this problem. Below, I’ll introduce five specific categories of hidden cost that are almost certainly running inside your firm right now — what they are, where to look, and what to do about each one. This is the framework your P&L will never give you.

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What is Interior Design Business Brief Podcast?: Based on 25 years consulting with over 400 interior design firms, university professor David Shepherd brings designers a weekly newsletter with the most impactful knowledge and useful tips from his vast archives. <a href="https://idbrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">idbrief.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Information about guest appearances is not available.

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