Two good friends who also happen to be the two co-founders of a creative consultancy for designers, Gail Doby and Erin Weir share how their long and enduring friendship impacts the way they inspire each other and work through whatever life and business challenges come their way. In their own honest musings, and also in their open conversations with speakers, authors, and influencers, they further their own journey as friends and founders, causing us to further our own journeys, too.
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Two good friends who also happen to be the two co-founders of a creative consultancy for designers, Gail Doby and Erin Weir share how their long and enduring friendship impacts the way they inspire each other and work through whatever life and business challenges come their way. In their own honest musings, and also in their open conversations with speakers, authors, and influencers, they further their own journey as friends and founders, causing us to further our own journeys, too.
An Organized Designer Is a Successful Designer (Kathleen DiPaolo)
Creative Genius Podcast
39 minutes 44 seconds
11 months ago
An Organized Designer Is a Successful Designer (Kathleen DiPaolo)
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
Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.
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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.
Creative Genius Podcast
Two good friends who also happen to be the two co-founders of a creative consultancy for designers, Gail Doby and Erin Weir share how their long and enduring friendship impacts the way they inspire each other and work through whatever life and business challenges come their way. In their own honest musings, and also in their open conversations with speakers, authors, and influencers, they further their own journey as friends and founders, causing us to further our own journeys, too.
