You’ve been loving working in the design field, and are receiving rave reviews from clients left and right! Now, you may be wondering about how you can expand your professional design services to other areas. Maybe you’re an interior decorator wondering about getting into home staging, or a professional organizer intrigued by feng shui.
Whatever the case, how do you branch in to new areas while still maintaining high quality service? We’ve compiled some considerations and tips for design professionals looking to expand their business!
Advantages and Challenges of Expanding
When you first consider offering more professional design services, it might seem like nothing but good can come of it. After all, more services means more clients, more income, and more creative outlets—win, win, and win! While this is all entirely true, there are undoubtedly going to be challenges as well. After all, you’ll be marketing and promoting different services now, so you’ll have to balance your time wisely and make sure that your previous skill set doesn’t get rusty as you’re investing yourself in something new.
Make sure you plan carefully, but remember to stay flexible. Opportunities can come up at any time, and you don’t want to be so rigid that you’re unable to take advantage when they do. It can often help to keep careful track of what your priorities and goals are in both the short and long term—this can help to address questions of where to invest your time and energy at different points.
As long as you think everything through and manage your time effectively, there’s no reason why the advantages of expanding can’t outweigh the challenges. And besides, challenges keep life interesting!
Let’s recap the important points in deciding to expand your professional design services…
Advantages of Expansion:
What’s the Best Fit?
It’s one thing to know you want to expand your professional design services, but it’s another to be able to figure out the best direction to go in! When choosing the best options for expanding your services, it’s helpful to consider what would be a natural and complementary fit with what you already offer. Are you an interior decorator? Consider helping clients further beautify and maximize their space by becoming a professional organizer. Are you a feng shui professional? Maybe clients looking for a home stager would appreciate your knowledge of balancing spaces and creating a positive flow in the home.
Whichever direction you decide to go in, you’ll save yourself time and money in marketing if you can promote all offered services at once. Plus, if a client loves the work you did in one design area, they’ll be confident that you can do equally great work on a related job!
Where to Start?
After you’ve considered the professional design service that fits best with your existing business, how do you actually get started on expansion? For many people, taking an online course in the new service area is the most logical first step. Even for experienced design professionals, new services mean new skill sets, and formal education combined with lots of practice is often the best way to learn. Online courses for will let you learn everything you need about your new area while fitting around your current work schedule. You can start incorporating your new service into future marketing plans and business development, but make sure you don’t start actively promoting your latest venture until you’re ready to actually offer it with skill and professionalism.Making the Change
After you’ve completed your training and developed your skills, it’s time to start incorporating the new professional design service into your existing business. Your website and social media accounts will need to be updated to show your expansion, and it might be a good idea to run a promotion to generate interest in your new service. Moving forward, your marketing efforts will need to reflect your expansion. Why not send a newsletter to existing clients explaining that you’ve expanded your business and are very excited to show them your new design skills? You’ll need to plan how to budget your time effectively between different services, and keep detailed administrative records for yourself. The good news is that you’ll already have established relationships, as well as the whole framework for your business in place, you’ll just have to modify your system in order to accommodate the expansion.Advantages and Challenges of Expanding
When you first consider offering more professional design services, it might seem like nothing but good can come of it. After all, more services means more clients, more income, and more creative outlets—win, win, and win! While this is all entirely true, there are undoubtedly going to be challenges as well. After all, you’ll be marketing and promoting different services now, so you’ll have to balance your time wisely and make sure that your previous skill set doesn’t get rusty as you’re investing yourself in something new.
Make sure you plan carefully, but remember to stay flexible. Opportunities can come up at any time, and you don’t want to be so rigid that you’re unable to take advantage when they do. It can often help to keep careful track of what your priorities and goals are in both the short and long term—this can help to address questions of where to invest your time and energy at different points.
As long as you think everything through and manage your time effectively, there’s no reason why the advantages of expanding can’t outweigh the challenges. And besides, challenges keep life interesting!
Let’s recap the important points in deciding to expand your professional design services…
Advantages of Expansion:
- Increased revenue opportunities
- Diverse work experience
- Personal development and fulfillment
- Adjusting marketing
- Time management
- Expenses associated with education, adjusting business plan, updating website etc.