Katherine Wood
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katherine.woodParticipantHi, Sara! You asked for us each to check in with a status report. I have my onboarding process laid out in Asana. It takes discipline for me to actually follow it. At this stage, I don’t get enough serious inquiries to reinforce my process as a series of habits yet. I find myself winging it, then remembering to go back and check to make sure I’ve followed all the steps. I haven’t automated my process yet (though I plan to explore Calendly) because inquiries are so few. But I hear you when you say that I should design the process so that it’s ready when inquiries become more frequent (I’m working a lot on marketing with LuAnn as a COB).
I am least confident in my ability to present myself professionally when it comes to charging for my services and estimating budgets for projects. In historic rehabilitation, there are so many variables and unknowns to begin with, I find it hard to establish expectations (and my projects tend to be so involved and carry on for so long that my numbers become outdated). I feel like I have to do a lot of legwork before I can even begin to give clients a realistic sense of budget. I do charge a lot for my first site consultation ($1500) because I give huge value (in addition to time on site, I spend 5-8 hours preparing a comprehensive report that, like yours, ends with a proposal. I am going to carefully consider your sample reports/proposals to see if I can push myself to incorporate at least ballpark investment ranges to contextualize the project consulting fee I include in my proposals.
I’m on the lookout for when you post your sample reports/proposals to the Dropbox! Thanks so much.
katherine.woodParticipantThis seems like a great group of people! So glad we can come together to learn. As I mentioned, my specialty is historic rehabilitation. I shy away from suggesting that I’m an “interior designer” because I have such a healthy respect for what you all do. But I think there are a lot of similarities in terms of business design and best practices. And whenever I feel like I’m just “making it up” as I go, it will be good to know that I’m leaning on the hard-won experience of people like you.
I’m also happy to collaborate with interior designers on projects where we can each work in our respective “zones of genius”! I neglected to mention in my intro that my home base is New York’s Hudson Valley (about 2 hours north of New York City). @worthpreserving
katherine.woodParticipantThank you!
katherine.woodParticipantKat, when you say “way over”, how high do you mean? And does it include just design or also project management? I’m restructuring my pricing (while also increasing my rates) and ran the numbers for a project I completed last year. By my new calculations, the design alone (not including project management) would cost $26/sf.
katherine.woodParticipantThanks, Kat. Follow-up question about pricing for construction management for full service…do you find that clients are OK with just an estimate of the consulting fee (based on estimated blocks of hours)? I’m just thinking about projects I’ve had where the timeline gets dragged out. I’ve always charged a percentage of the total construction budget, which always feels like I’m benefitting from cost overruns (icky). I’m intrigued by your method, but a project that I anticipate will take 6 months could end up taking 8 months or a year.
katherine.woodParticipantGreat, thanks!
katherine.woodParticipantThank you so much!
katherine.woodParticipantThanks, Kat!
Just one more clarification: when you say “lump sum” do you mean that you collect the entire fee upfront?
katherine.woodParticipantAgree that more detail would be helpful!
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