287: The Hidden Costs of Winging It in Your Design Business    

Michele: Hello, my name is Michele, and you're listening to Profit is a Choice. Today we're going to talk about the hidden cost of winging it in your design business. So, start thinking. What does it mean to wing it?

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company, financial health, enjoying the rewards of reduced stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit as a Choice.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm excited that you're here. We're talking today about winging it in business. What do I mean by that? I mean just kind of off the cuff doing something versus doing something with a plan or with intention. And many of us, especially when we start, can find ourselves where we're constantly winging it. You may feel like you are being very reactive instead of proactive, that's another term that I hear when people are telling me that they're just kind of working all over the place. Why is it important that we plan as much as possible? We're not talking about planning down to the last moment of every single thing you do. But why is it important to work with a strategy and a plan and with goals versus always winging it?

Well, I would say one of the very first reasons is because winging it has a high cost to our peace. When we're just winging something, we don't even know what to anticipate and we're just taking it as it comes. And certainly, there are points in business where we have to do that. But if that is our go-to day after day after day, then honestly, it can almost feel like a lot of stress coming in every day, not even knowing what's going to happen and how you're going to respond to it. I know when I started my first business, all the way back in 1990, I was winging it. I mean, I had somebody ring my doorbell and offer to pay me to make window treatments, and I was winging it. I said, okay. I didn't know how to make them. I didn't know what I was doing. And while there was some excitement to all of that, I got to tell you, I paid a pretty steep price for it. I was winging my pricing, and thereby what happened. I didn't get paid what I should have gotten paid. I was winging my market marketing. What was even marketing back in the day? It was here is a business card. Please tell somebody about me, or you put your name in the yellow pages of the phone book. Like that's what we had access to unless you were doing bigger marketing events. Winging it as far as procedures, I was just doing what I thought I needed to do next. I didn't even know where the projects were. I was constantly having to figure it out. I realized there was a huge cost to me, to my peace, to my time, and certainly to my money.

Here are some other hidden costs that happen when you're winging it. Missed opportunities. When we don't know what we're working for or working towards, there could be opportunities that come our way that we don't even understand their importance. So, we don't say yes. Or maybe sometimes we say yes to an opportunity that really is not great for us and then it's going to cost us. We talk all the time about good being the enemy of best. When we're winging it and we are not aligning our day to day task and what we're doing and how we're doing it with what we value the most and where we're trying to go with intention. We might say yes to something when we should easily say no. We might say yes to a client when we should be saying yes to a different client. Sometimes what happens is we do things too early, too late.

Here's another opportunity to wing it. Maybe we hire the person, maybe it's the right person. But we don't hire them when we're ready for them. We hire them too early. And then what can happen is because we're not ready and we're just winging it, we've brought them in, maybe the business is in a little bit of turmoil or we don't have the structure outlined for them to come in and to feel like a good part of it. Then they start feeling overwhelmed and have this idea that they have to wing it. Now we have all kinds of discontent going on in the company and we can have missed opportunities, lack of peace, doing something too early or too late.

Financially, we could spend our money on the wrong things. Look at it. We get really frustrated when our potential clients want to wing it. When they just want to go out and buy something. They just want to fill their house with stuff, but it's not all the right stuff and it doesn't go together well, and it doesn't feel right or feel good. We can do the same thing by spending our money on the wrong things, doing it too early, too late, putting it together in all the wrong ways. It's just that ours might show up in the areas of marketing or operations or HR. We might have bought something or signed a lease too early before we could financially afford it. We're doing the same things that our clients might be doing that frustrate us. Maybe we're spending too much on something because we didn't plan and maybe we're behind. We're just paying out money to get it done. I've seen that. Just spending money to hire a contractor or to have somebody else do something because we didn't take the time to lay it out, save for it and plan for it. Maybe we're having to go take out a loan that if we had planned for, we wouldn't be doing it.

Maybe we're working towards the wrong thing. Sometimes winging it says we don't have the plan, so, we might think we're going to go over to the left when really, we need to go to the right. We're working on the wrong initiatives, the wrong plans, and things that might support us in the short term, but not in the long term.

Maybe we're hiring the wrong people by winging it. We're just trying to get a warm body in the door.

Maybe we're not doing processes that can be repeated or that can be measured, or processes that aren't supporting where we're moving towards in the future. There are processes that have worked for us in the past, but they're not growing with us. And by not taking the time to sit down and intentionally invest in where we're going and what we're doing and how we're going to get there, then we've created this overall idea of what am I doing, where am I going. I'm just kind of fighting fires for the day that I'm in. Maybe I hired the wrong people, or I hired the right people, and they are in the wrong jobs, or we didn’t have an onboarding process. We're just kind of moving as we go and put out fires and hoping it's all going to go okay in the end. I know Even myself I used to call it, it was like spinning plates, right? And when I spin plates, I would say, I sure hope that these are paper or plastic so that when they fall apart, I'm going to be okay. And sometimes if we step back and look at it, we're spending a lot of glass up there. And the more we wing it, whether we have to in the moment or not, look again, there are always times where you just got to do the best that you can do with what you have, but we don't want that to be our M.O. our modus operandi for every single day. I would like to know how I want to run a project. I would like to have some input on how I want to hire people, how I want to put them into the jobs that they're in. What are the expectations of that job? What is the education that they need for that job? I would like to know a budget. I would like to have a marketing plan so that I know when it's working and when it's not. I'd like to know where my company is headed in the next two to three years so I can determine if this next opportunity is one that's meant for me or if it's a no, a, next opportunity so that somebody else can have it.

I would like to work with an intentionality on where I'm going, what I'm doing, who I'm doing with, and how I'm going to show up in the world, because that brings me peace. That helps me say the best yes and the best no. That helps me know what I'm working towards. That helps me know how to fill in the gap, so I don't constantly feel like I'm winging it.

The more that we wing it, the more we have increased errors, the more we have impulsive decision making or slow decision making. We don't even know what decision to make. The more that the people on our teams feel like things are frenetic, they feel like things are just stressful and they don't know what's going to happen, and the decision that you make on Monday might be a different decision than Friday. So, they don't even learn how to make decisions in the right way.

Maybe you feel caught up in all of this. There is a lot of cost to winging it. Maybe you don't even recognize that you're winging it. Perhaps you think that I'm just going through the day to day and taking what comes. And again, there is a piece and a part of that that we all have to do. But the goal here is to really be able to have an intentionality in what we are doing so that as we do it, we know that we are checking off those tasks and those goals that are moving us closer to the business that we want to become. Showing up with an intentionality.

I want to invite you if you have been doing more winging it than you're comfortable with, more reactive than proactive, offer yourself the opportunity to just take a stop for a minute, take a breath and really check in. Does this feel peaceful? Does this feel like what you're working towards and aligned and how you want to show up?

Are the people on your team stressed out because every day brings some challenge, they just don't even know what's going to come at them. Or are they showing up thinking, you know what, I got this, I'm excited about this, I want to do this. How are you showing up in that process?

I would love an opportunity to talk to you, and for you to give us a call. We even have an amazing opportunity for you to learn how we do our strategy days. You can look at the link in the show notes and it's going to take you to a training on how to do a strategy day so that you can quit winging it and start putting some plans in place. That's what we do here at Scarlet Thread. We help you put those plans in place and then help you monitor to them, and to align your financial and your marketing and your operations and your HR and all the other aspects of your business. Align it to your overall strategy so that everything in your company is working in the same direction.

You don't have to wing it. You don't have to pay those hidden costs and fees, whether they are financial or whether they're just to your own sanity and peace. There is a way to run a business without that level of stress, and we would love to help you find it because it is attainable, it really is. You can check us out at ScarletThreadConsulting.com where we can share more with you, we can help you and you can sign up for a discovery call. You can check out our free webinar and teaching that we have on this topic. Because you don't have to keep doing business Helter Skelter, winging it, reactive, graspy, whatever you want to call it, you actually can slow it down, slow your roll, as the kids would say, pump the brakes and start putting some plans in place so that you can be proactive, so that you can work with a plan and you can remove some of that stress.

Profitability shows up in a lot of ways and one way that it shows up is by creating a strategy and managing to the plan. So let us help you do that. Profit doesn't happen by accident, but it does happen with the plan, and we're here to help you find one at scarletthreadconsulting.com. Have a great day. Profit is a Choice is proud to be part of the designnetwork.org where you can discover more design media reaching m creative listeners. Thanks for listening and stay creative and business minded.