Spacecrafting
Founder and Principal Designer Sarah Randolph of Randolph Interior Design knows a thing or two about cultivating a loyal client base. Her interior design career spans more than 25 years, taking her from San Francisco back to her home state, Minnesota, where she founded Randolph Interior Design in 2008. With countless hours poured into project work and routine collaboration across trades, Randolph has found a few key factors help immensely in securing repeat business. The overarching theme? A thoughtful, meaningful, and relationship-focused approach to interior design.
Get to Know Your Clients
One of Randolph’s key values when it comes to her work is building relationships with clients. Over the course of her career, she has found it to be the single-most important key to her success.
“I am an extremely relationship-focused person. My client’s relationship will always be more important to me at the end of the day then dollars,” she says. “What we do is so personalized. We are in these people’s homes. We are in their lives.”
For Randolph, that means kicking off a project with a new client by getting to know them on a deeper level. By forging a strong connection, she finds it keeps her top of mind when those same clients have more projects down the road.
“I think it’s really important to get to know the client as well as you possibly can. That’s asking lots of questions about their likes and their dislikes and what they don’t like about their current space, she says. “I think it’s taking a genuine interest in them, in their lives.
“It’s also remembering that they’re going on a trip and ask them about that. Remember that their kids had a huge hockey game. Ask them. It’s just being a good friend, in a way.”
Take Diligent Notes
While it might sound simple, Randolph emphasizes the importance of detailed notes. If you’re taking the time to build a lasting relationship with a client and putting in the extra effort to personalize their projects, then documenting a client’s preferences goes a long way.
“That has been an invaluable shift in my business for sure in being able to go back through and look at those notes and what we talked about and saying, ‘Oh, that’s right, they don’t want do this in the mudroom because of XYZ.’”
The most important piece in getting to know your clients well is understanding what their sticking points are, Randolph says, and making them feel cared about and heard. Documenting those sticking points will pay off in the future when you work with them again.
Not the most talented note taker? Randolph admits this isn’t her biggest strength either and recommends that designers who feel the same should feel no shame in leaning on their detail-oriented team members to join meetings and own notetaking.
[Related: 5 Ways Design Professionals Can Use AI]
Maintain Strong Relationships With Partners
Relationships with clients aren’t the only relationships that matter. Your relationship with project partners—builders, architects, etc.—is equally important to client satisfaction, and that can lead to repeat business.
Fostering a community of trust and collaboration with the project team is critical, and Randolph makes building and maintaining these professional relationships in the Minnesota design-build industry a priority. She sees the most success when the team gets on the same page at the project’s start. The earlier all of the players can come to the table, the smoother the process from start to finish.
Projects do go awry, though, and that’s when the strength of these connections makes all the difference. Randolph believes if you have a team that trusts one another and works together to quickly and efficiently fix the issue of the moment rather than playing blame games, clients will remember that collaborative problem solving when they consider tapping you for more business in the future.
“There has never been a project I’ve ever worked on where things don’t come up. Staying a united front and never throwing an architect or builder under the bus is really important to me,” she says. “Even if somebody did make a mistake … at the end of the day, it’s always fixable.” And that approach also keeps the client calm, she adds.
Find Ways to Stay Top of Mind
Locking in repeat clients can be difficult when their home projects are separated by years. That’s why Randolph thinks it’s crucial to find ways to remain in their orbit.
“I don’t have the golden solution for that,” she admits. “If it’s a long-standing client, they’re probably going to think of you regardless, right? But if it’s someone that you did a quick refresh with seven years ago, find a way to be the first one that they think of if they need to do something again.”
That could mean sending a message wishing them happy holidays once a year, sending weekly or monthly newsletters about your work, maintaining a strategic social media strategy, or other personalized communications.
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