Do you want to pursue a career as an interior decorator? If you can conceptualize and execute ideas to decorate home or office spaces, you can make a good living as an interior decorator.

Unlike architects and interior designers, interior decorators do not need any special industry certifications to work or run a practice. If you have the skills necessary and can get clients, you can get started today. You may need to get a business license to run a local business, though.

Building the Right Skills

No one will hire you if you can’t prove that you are competent in your chosen area of work. You don’t have to take a 4-year college course to be proficient in interior decoration. The most effective path to take is to just go to a good trade school or apprentice with an already established interior decorator.

The beauty of apprenticing with an established interior decorator is that besides the actual hard skills of interior decoration, you will also learn the business end of things. Knowing how to run and promote an interior décor business can bring you more success than being a great interior decorator. There are several great interior decorators out there. What separates the successful ones from the unsuccessful bunch is their business sense.

Putting a Plan Together

You need to figure out what kind of interior decorator you want to be before you start offering your services. Without clarity on what you will actually offer, it will be hard to communicate your offerings to clients and to differentiate yourself from other players in your area.

Do you want to work as a consultant whose only job is to come up with interior décor concepts and let the clients execute them on their own? Or do you want to offer a full package deal that includes coming up with the décor concepts and executing them?

Forming Relationships

Your clients will expect you to know the best stores to get what they want. They will also expect you to have formed relationships with those stores and that you will be able to negotiate discounts.

If you have already refined your style and know exactly what you will be offering, you should know which stores carry the items you will need for your projects. Building a long-term relationship with these stores will help you a great deal in the long term.

Building a Portfolio

Interior decoration is just like any other artistic pursuit. Your past projects will speak for you. Having a portfolio makes it easy for clients to gauge what you can do.

To build your portfolio, you can start by decorating your own space and your friends’ spaces. You should be able to convince a friend or two to let you decorate their space if you are ever going to convince random strangers to give you their business.

It goes without saying that you should have a personal or business website where you can display your portfolio.

Getting Your First Few Clients

Getting the first few clients is always the hardest part of starting a new business. Once you have a few clients under your belt, it will be far much easier to build momentum and attract new clients.

You can offer free consulting so that clients can get a feel of what you can do for them. The consulting work is part of the sales process and should be executed the same way a car dealership gives prospects a test drive of the cars they want to buy. Your conversion rates will be higher once clients are convinced that you can actually deliver.