The Interior Designers Guide to Pricing, Estimating, and Budgeting

by Theo Stephan Williams

Provided here are practical guidelines on how to value the cost of designing commercial or residential interiors. From the designer's creative input to the pricing of decorating products and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1581154038
• ISBN13: 9781581154030
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Allworth Press
• Length: 201 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

chock full of useful information

This book has everything I need to know about budgeting and billing as an emerging interior designer.

A Perfect Professional Tool

An excellent tool that is fully up to date. A real necessity for every interior designer, student, apprentice, professional or studio. It does not disappoint as so many such volumes seem to do.

Avoid costly mistakes, learn from William's experience

I wish I had come across this book earlier! Then we would not have made the mistakes that we did. Williams is very right. What she experienced in America is the same as our experiences here in Malaysia. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn here and this knowledge is adaptable anywhere and in every situation. Already 8 years in this business, we are still learning and growing with this book!

Great book for pricing - not just for interior decorators...

This is a phenominal book for pricing and structure in any business. As an independent consultant one of the most difficult things when starting out is finding the right pricing structure. This book covers that as well as many suggestions on how to effectively organize and run a business. I have already recommended this book to my husband who is in Home Improvement and a friend who has a curtain business. I think it is so well written that it could be of value to many types of businesses small and large.

Good Advice from Someone who's Been There Before

One of the hardest things to learn about interior design, or any other service industry is that the only thing you have to sell is your time. To do this in a profitable manner, you need two sets of skills. The first is the one you know about. You've got to find customers, you've got to do the job they want done and you've go to make them happy. This is probably the job you've trained yourself to do through experience, through training, and through the basic aptitude that you had to get into that business in the first place. The second job is harder. You've got to realize that you are a business manager. You need accounting (to keep your business partner the IRS happy). You need to develop a busines plan, budgeting, etc. You need to know how to prepare and send out bills and how to handle the money when it comes in. And the most critical of all, telling the customer what your effort is going to cost him. In this book Mr. Williams gives an excellent introduction on how to do these critical things. He also includes enough war stories from his past to give you the understanding of how he learned these things. I really enjoyed his page one story of starting his own company: sold his car so as to eliminate the payments, crammed his office into his bedroom, paid off all credit cards, in general reduced his expenses to a minimum. When I started I did almost exactly the same: I had a very tiny kind of dumpy house in not too good a neighborhood - but no payments. I had an ancient vehicle - but no payments. Like with him, I was profitable the first month, but you had best not bet on it. Mr. Williams has been there, done that, walked the walk. His book makes excellent sense.