ISSUE 007

SOMETHING LOVELY
​that I saw

I stumbled on this creator this week, who shared one of their grandad's hand drawn plans with their hand embroidery. The different stitch types and colours represent the different line qualities in the drawing. I thought this was absolutely delightful, and so clever!!

SOMETHING USEFUL
​that I do

EOFY is this weird time of the year when looking back and looking forward happens at the same time. Our bookkeepers and accountants make us do spreadsheets, but here’s something else you can do that is also useful, can be a bit more fun, and only takes around 30 minutes.

It’s a tactic called Better Now (from the ‘Pipdecks’ Strategy Tactics) - and the idea is nice and simple (perfect for when your brain is fried thanks to the accounting you’ve been forced to sort through). Instead of building a big strategic plan toward some imaginary future, ask yourself: what would a better version of right now already look like?

Write your answers to these three questions (and you can be honest, bold, conservative - whatever you like! No one has to read it but you):

1. What would a good year ahead look like for you? You can think big…but keep it reasonably real. eg More of the right clients? Fewer proposals that go nowhere? Projects that make you love what you do, instead of resent it? What kind of work feels like it costs you more than it pays? If a design publication profiled you next year, what would the headline say?
2. How would that be different from what you have now? This is the useful bit. The gap between those two answers is where your strategy lives.
3. Imagine you’re already there - what would you have stopped doing to get there? A lot of people skip this bit. A better future usually requires dropping something, not just adding to it.

Once you’ve got your answers, you have one more question to sit with: what’s the single thing you could do differently this week that moves you closer to that better version of now?

Not a scary, overwhelming 12-month plan. Just one super actionable thing.

And bam - now you not only have a broad strategy for the year ahead, but you also have one thing you can start doing to get you closer to where you want to be!

SOMETHING HONEST
​that I'd like to share

I turned 46 this year and over the last while I've (finally) stopped pretending to enjoy things I don't enjoy.

Oysters, mainly. I used to do the face at fancy dinners. You know the face. The "mmm, yes, briny oysters" face. I don't really like them. But I was eating them because oysters felt like something a person who had their life sorted was supposed to enjoy.

I ran out of the energy to maintain the performance somewhere around 42… and what a relief that is!

You're allowed to like what you like… and that includes the design work you actually want to be doing.

CDS runs on spare time and coffee - you can shout me a drink if you find my content helpful here.​

I am building a sales frameworks specifically for this - to make sure the way you present your work is as strong as the work itself. If you're working on that right now, my Fee Calculator is a practical place to start - or if you want to go deeper, get on the waitlist for my Sales Masterclass built specifically for Interior Designers (by an interior designer!).

A quick word to explain my newsletter format...every week I share three small things - something lovely, something useful, and something honest. Everything here is built around one idea: that interior designers lose work they should have won far more often than they should - and that it's almost never about talent. It's about process, presentation, and the small gaps that clients notice before you do. That's the thing I'm obsessed with fixing. And this newsletter is where I think out loud about it.

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