To-The-Trade S3E32 Kat Oldershaw on the Back Office Side of Interior Design

To-The-Trade Episode Summary

A client is suing their interior designer. Furniture has been backordered for a year, pieces were canceled, and now the client wants to see the vendor invoices. Laurie Laizure opens this episode of To-The-Trade with that story, pulled from a TikTok making the rounds in the industry, because almost every part of it is normal. Long lead times, discontinued fabric, overseas freight. What turned it into litigation was trust, and trust is where Kat Oldershaw does her work.

Kat founded kat&co, a creative operations consultancy for interior designers, and Back Office Design Support, which provides flexible procurement, time billing, and project administration help. She also co-owns a custom furniture company in Napa, California. Her short version: everything besides design, she’s your girl.

Educate Clients Before the Problem Shows Up

Kat’s read on the lawsuit is that the client was never brought into the designer’s world. Designers speak a language of lead times, freight, and customs that clients don’t. Someone has to translate it, early. Getting ahead of the long-lead conversation preserves trust. Explaining it after the fact erodes it. Laurie’s worst-case advice: make sure you carry insurance. If you’re not sure what yours covers, start with Business Insurance for Interior Designers: What You Need and When to Get It.

Kat offers two fixes for the smaller, everyday versions of this. First, if something has happened that you never want to happen again, put that boundary in your service agreement now. Second, look at your onboarding. If clients keep asking the same question at the same stage, your onboarding needs to cover it. Documenting client approvals along the way also helps, as covered in Client Approval Documentation: Protecting Your Design Firm From Disputes.

Laurie adds the “Amazon world” context: clients expect delivery in two days, so a one-year wait feels unreasonable to them. Part of the designer’s job in early conversations is gauging a client’s tolerance for custom work and long timelines. She shares the story of a client who met with her in September and wanted his project finished by Christmas. She told him plainly it wasn’t going to happen. A year later, the project is wrapping up, and he is a convert. People can be reasonable when you prepare them to be.

Consistency Is What Makes the Contract Mean Something

Kat’s sharpest point: your contract, welcome guide, and how-we-work document mean nothing if you don’t uphold them. Make an exception once, and the client learns the boundaries are flexible. That’s when the Saturday texts start and approved proposals get reopened. On projects that run for years, consistency is what keeps the relationship going.

Don’t Hire Yourself

Laurie raises a trap she hears designers fall into: hiring someone because you like them and think alike, when you need someone with different skills. Kat agrees. Hire a copy of yourself and you end up competing for the same tasks. She also warns against the “I need help yesterday, I’ll define the role later” hire. Without clear roles and a delegation plan, that hire creates more confusion than relief. Sometimes the processes need to come first.

Laurie extends the warning to AI. AI tools can create expensive mistakes for your business, just like people can. Kat’s response: there is an art to proofreading that has not gone away.

Why Industry Experience Matters in Support Staff

Kat’s Back Office team is US-based and spread across Pacific, Central, and Eastern time zones. She isn’t against offshore help if it fits a firm’s model, but she values people who already speak the language of quotes and purchase orders and may already know your reps. Laurie notes that a long-standing rep relationship can pull strings a strongly worded email never will.

What Designers Want From Brand Events

The conversation turns to brands. Laurie keeps a list of events designers won’t hire a babysitter for, the ones that feel like infomercials, a list she and Nile dug into on To-The-Trade S3E31 Laurie and Nile: Why Designers Are Done Being Sold To. Kat and Laurie agree on what would actually draw designers out after work: open talk about procurement, pricing and markup, tech stacks, and onboarding templates. Laurie calls designers a brand’s unpaid sales force. The more skills they gain, the more they sell.

Take the Smallest Possible Step

Both share a tool for overwhelm. Laurie’s: when anxiety hits, take one action, one email, one call. Kat asks her clients, what is the smallest possible step toward this giant task? Action reveals the next step. Kat says she’s been described as a mirror: clients get everything out of their heads, sort it, and put a plan to it.

Laurie also pushes designers to weigh where their money goes. Being in a magazine feels more exciting than SEO, but SEO may bring in more projects for the same spend. The community’s take on that tradeoff is in Is Getting Published in Print Magazines Still Worth It for Interior Designers?

Your Inbox Is a Record of Your Work

Kat pushes for end-of-project reviews: what went well, what went wrong, and what belongs in the next service agreement. Laurie shares how she spent a weekend with Claude working through 18,000 emails from a single year to build a timeline of every event Interior Design Community has produced. Designers can do the same to surface case studies and buried testimonials. Those case studies matter for SEO, since Google can’t look at a photo and understand the problem you solved. They also matter to prospective clients who want proof you can handle a big project.

The Value Problem

IDC polled its audience, and 95 percent of more than 1,000 respondents said consumers don’t understand what designers do. Kat calls it a hill she’ll die on: this is technical, logistics-driven project management. One of her favorite questionnaire prompts asks clients to imagine their perfect morning in the room, then uses that image to settle decisions later in the project.

The episode closes on burnout and isolation. Running a business alone is hard, Kat says, and nobody is meant to solve everything by themselves. To keep the conversation going, find Kat at katandco.org, backofficedesignsupport.com, or on LinkedIn.

00:00 Introductions: Kat’s Three Businesses
01:14 A Designer Lawsuit and Where Client Trust Breaks Down
03:27 Translating the Industry for Clients Before Delays Hit
05:49 Service Agreement and Onboarding Fixes for Recurring Questions
06:38 Amazon-Speed Expectations and Gauging Client Tolerance
08:46 The September Client Who Wanted It Done by Christmas
11:14 kat&co vs. Back Office Design Support
12:38 Why Hiring Someone Like You Can Backfire
14:28 Costly Mistakes From Employees and AI
16:08 Consistency: Your Contract Only Works if You Uphold It
19:52 How Kat’s Team Is Structured, and Why US-Based Matters
23:48 Brand Reps, Designers, and a Personality Assessment Idea
29:22 Events Designers Won’t Hire a Babysitter For
31:27 Beating Overwhelm With the Smallest Possible Step
34:52 Magazines vs. SEO: Weighing Where to Invest
38:11 End-of-Project Reviews
38:38 Using AI to Mine Your Inbox for Case Studies and Testimonials
43:42 95 Percent Say Consumers Don’t Know What Designers Do
49:47 The “Perfect Morning” Questionnaire Prompt
52:03 Burnout, Isolation, and Getting Outside Support