Page 46 - Lighting Magazine March 2019

Managing Client Expectations
Interior designer Gail Doby revealed proven techniques for avoiding potential budget and relationship pitfalls during a seminar at Las Vegas Market.
The designer-client relationship – whether it is an interior designer or a lighting designer – can be fraught with tension over budget, construction or shipment delays, personal- ity con icts, and the inevitable wrong color/
size dilemmas that o en crop up.
What interior designer Gail Doby – President of Gail
Doby Coaching & Consulting in Denver – has discov- ered is that by addressing client expectations upfront, there is less friction during the process. Even in a creative eld such as interior design, technology has become an indispensable tool. With so many consumers in the habit of searching online for most anything, Doby suggests interior designers have a website for their business.
For those designers who do have a website, many are not using it e ectively. The consumer preference for online shopping also extends to researching and evaluating service providers. Your design services will be “shopped” and compared to other designers in your market area.
42 enLIGHTenment Magazine | March 2019
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