Interior designers deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of details every day. It only takes one slip-up to jeopardize a project and potentially lose a client. Being well organized can help prevent mistakes from happening or deadlines falling through the cracks. You need someone on your team with top-notch project management skills.

In this episode, Gail talks with Kathleen DiPaolo, founder and CEO of Kathleen DiPaolo Designs, based in Newport Beach, California. Kathleen also operates a website and a blog called Return on Interiors dedicated to helping designers take control of their businesses. For the past several years she has been living abroad and attributes her ability to keep operating her design business remotely to being well organized.

Kathleen recounted that she has been obsessed with being well-organized since she was very young. “It gives me a sense of calm and frees up space in my mind to do what I need to do,” she said.

Over time, Kathleen also has found that it is a competitive advantage for her business. As a client, she said, “you want to have the organized designer working for you.” In her experience, clients have greater respect and confidence in you as a designer. They also will pay more because they trust you will save them time and money.

For an interior design firm, a key component of being organized is having top-notch project management. Kathleen defined project management as organized processes. Usually these are processes that are frequently repeated. Standardizing them makes the business more efficient and effective by helping to prevent mistakes, avoiding duplicating routine work, and improving communication among members of the team and with clients.

“We’re creatives, but you have to keep the machine going, even when you don’t want to,” she said. She suggested designers who can’t afford to hire or outsource someone to do project management start with a simple project, such as setting up a digital file structure for documents, to begin to get better organized. As a next step, she recommended “taking something that’s repeatedly a roadblock or time suck, and building a better process around it.” Begin to develop a repository of these processes.

In her conversation with Gail, Kathleen also talked about her experiences living abroad and some of the challenges and life lessons she’s picked up along the way. Listen to the entire podcast to get all the details.

If you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full shownotes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s11e10-shownotes

Mentioned in This Podcast

For more information about Kathleen and her design firm, go to the website www.kathleendipaolodesigns.com.

To learn more about Kathleen’s Return on Interiors time savings and organizational tactics system, and to read her blog, go to www.returnoninteriors.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SotGamHTIys

Episode Transcript

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Welcome to Creative Genius. Kathleen, it's so great to see you. So where are you living these days? Gail, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Of course. am here in London right now. So I've been here for about two years now, believe it or not. my gosh. You have been on quite the journey. As long as I've known you, you started, I believe, in India? Yes. When I first knew you. And then from there, you went to?

Budapest I was there for four and a half years and then moved here. So I was in India for two years too. So two and four and a half and now I've been here too. Wow. Are you ever coming back to the U S I really thought maybe we would be doing that at the end of this second year, but we just found out.

last week or the week before that we'll be staying for another year and they said it's a little open-ended. So you never know. my gosh. Well, that is so different. So what is it like being an expat and being gone for...