Working in residential design means having a very close relationship with your clients. What is the most important thing you can do to establish trust in a professional environment?
It’s definitely an intimate, personal thing, being invited into someone’s home. Usually the first time we meet a client face-to-face is when we’ve already been hired and are in their homes kicking off their project. We work really hard to start to develop that trust long before that day, though.
We use our Website and Social Media as a way for our future clients to get to know us before we ever meet, building the know/like/trust factor through everything we put out into the world. From website copy that reads like how we actually talk, to showing up in Instagram Stories so they can see our faces and hear our voices, we want our clients to feel like they already know us so that when they’re ready to start working together.
Then when we begin the project, we try to listen more than we talk to get to know them and figure out their needs. Only then once we feel like we have an understanding and they feel like they’ve been heard do we begin sharing our expertise in a way that feels authentic and helpful, rather than boastful and showy. It helps to establish a “we’re in this together” approach right from the start. We want it to feel a bit like we’re old friends who are finally getting to work together on bringing their dreams to life, when in reality we are near perfect strangers!
Your husband works with you at your firm. Working together would be challenging for most couples but you two do it with such ease! What tips do you have on handling conflict resolution as a couple in business?
Well I’m so glad we make it look easy! Honestly, most of the time it really is. But in any personal or working relationship conflict is going to happen. It definitely helps that we have very different roles in the business so we aren’t “in each other’s lane” most of the time and can each stick to our zones of genius.
When we do have the inevitable work disagreement, we try to do a few things.
1) Don’t make it personal. We try very hard not to drag any personal relationship things (this is just like that time 6 years ago when you fill-in-the-blank!) into business differences of opinions.
2) Don’t rush it or push it. There’s this tendency (at least for Type A people like me) to want to work everything out RIGHT NOW. And of course it’s good to not let things fester, but sometimes I think we do ourselves a mega-disservice to not give some situations time and space. Giving an issue some room to breathe and come back to it later helps to not make mountains out of molehills.
3) We try and remember that ultimately no business disagreement is worth creating marital strife. We both love and respect each other and that means that if something is going to suffer a bit, let it be the work stuff and not the relationship stuff. Marriage is #1 priority, end of story. I’d rather sacrifice some sliver of profit or business result over hurting the most important relationship in my life.
If you could go back and tell 22 year old Tara anything, what advice would you give her?
Oh man, this was a tough one! 22 year old Tara was such an eager go getter and wanted to please everybody (probably to an annoying degree if I’m being honest). I feel like if I was having a whiskey with 22 year old me I would tell her to take a few more risks.
I came in guns a blazing and wanting everyone to think that I was doing a good job. I didn’t want to fail, which means that I didn’t push myself creatively as much as I could have. The shadow side of being a perfectionist can often be that you don’t take many risks because you don’t want to take the chance on failure. By staying in and executing from my comfort zone, I was able to learn a lot and begin rising through the ranks, but I bet if I would have let go of being “perfect” I could have produced more interesting design work.
The Stacy Strategy 