Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Doug. I’d love for you to just tell us a little bit about yourself and your business. Thanks, Gail. Interior Design Her. It really came about during like the darkest days of COVID when we were all locked up at home and I was helping to homeschool my kindergartener and realizing how amazing teachers are. But what happened was,

About six months before then, I had sold the second of my fitness businesses. I’d had a real life and an online. And I’d sold the second one. I was kind of at loose ends. I’d been working since I’d been 14. This is the first time I’d been without a job of some sort. And other than, like I said, homeschooling my daughter, I got to watch a lot of Netflix and listen to my wife run her residential design business.

from home on the phone. And going back to selling my businesses, the only reason I was ever able to do that was because I had systems set up that at that point, I was irrelevant to the business. People or automations or software did everything. you know, I stuck around for three months when I sold the business to the new owner.

just to kind of help ease them into it. But I really wasn’t necessary. And I realized that my wife, with her design business, she will never be able to sell it. It won’t happen because she’s everything. She’s the creative, she’s human resources, she’s everything. So because I love being married to my wife, I very gently suggested that maybe we could look at pulling those processes out of her brain.

and putting them down on paper and then eventually building that up into something more self-sufficient. And that’s what we did. And that led to us talking to other friends of hers, other designer friends of hers and helping them with that. And then that led to why don’t we do this on kind of a broader scale? And it’s not that I’m an expert on systems by any means.

or running a business by any means, I’ve bought and sold a couple of companies. But I understand that.

designers do a lot. They wear a lot of hats beyond the design side of it. It’s the business side of it. And design school never taught anyone how to run a business. I mean, I guess that’s why you exist, right? Exactly. You fill that gap in the industry and help designers create a better business. So that was my idea for interior designer to create a low cost or no cost business education resource.

for residential interior designers with a soft spot for solo designers and like tiny micro team designers. So that’s where interior designer came from. I got it. Well, that’s great. And of course, isn’t that all is the case every time you build a business is because you see a need in the market or something that’s missing in your own life or your own business. And it just leads you to the direction of developing something that hopefully other people will want to buy. Yeah.

So you’re also a podcaster. So what led you to starting your podcasts? It wasn’t a natural thing. It came about because of Interior Designer, but part of how I started putting my website together and the concept for Interior Designer was listening to podcasts, listening to interior design business podcasts like yours, like Luanne Negara’s and…

You know, I found out pretty quickly that some were amazing and some were less than amazing. And it was the less than amazing ones that gave me the confidence to say, okay, I think I could do it at least that good or bad. So I dove in. are your goals for the podcast? to, to educate. Right.

across the board. that’s fantastic. If anybody gets something from it, I’m happy. But if I can also redirect them back to the website and to all the other content that we’re building out on interiordesigner.com and improve their business. And that could be stuff that we’re building. I’m building different kind of low cost barrier to entry tools, but I also want to…

kind of create a hub where designers can feel comfortable knowing that they can come to the site, find things that they need. And if I can’t provide it, then I can direct them to somebody who can. And that could be a business coach. That could be someone who creates, I did a podcast. It just came out the other day with a lawyer who designs templates for interior designers exclusively.

And I know there’s a lot of templates out there already, but not many of them are created by someone like this who is a lawyer and focuses exclusively on this aspect of the law, contract law for designers. I’m like, you know, instead of using some DIY thing or asking chat GPT, you know, what should I put in my, in my contracts? You go to, to a lawyer who does this every day and is constantly updating.

her templates because she’s working with other designers and they’re finding new ways to make your company bulletproof from a litigious homeowner. Good luck on that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It’s kind of funny because we teach contract sessions to our team or to our clien