Tag: Architecture Business

BOLD Master’s Dinner at Liberace’s House!

liberaceheader

This year, we will be hosting the BOLD Master’s Dinner at the Piazza de Liberace! 

The owners of Liberace’s house in Palm Springs have graciously opened their home to us for dinner after the BOLD Masters Award Ceremony, Thursday June 25th. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the beautiful home that was remodeled by Christopher Kennedy in 2010.

After the first day of the Summit, you will be given time to relax and refresh before being whisked away in a limousine provided by BOLD. Once you arrive, you can mingle with the BOLD Masters and Speakers during an elegant cocktail party perfect for socializing and expanding your industry connections. This will be followed by an intimate dinner on the magnificent Liberace property. Kelly Hoppen, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Joan Behnke, Keith Granet, editors from Interiors Magazine, Traditional Home and Robb Report will be in attendance as well as many more.

We are capping attendance at just twelve attendees so call us now at (503) 208-2757 to reserve your spot at this exclusive event! This is a very special fundraising event. These twelve places are available at $1,000 each and are reserved for principals only. Let us know if you are interested in this up-leveled BOLD experience.

 liberacefooter

The BOLD Master’s dinner is sponsored by Interiors Magazine. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit Modernism Week, providing scholarships to local students pursuing college educations in the fields of architecture and design, as well as supporting local and state preservation organizations in their efforts to preserve modernist architecture throughout the state of California.

Release to the Press!

masters2

Internationally acclaimed interior designers Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Joan Behnke and London-based powerhouse designer Kelly Hoppen will accept BOLD Masters Awards at the BOLD (Business of Luxury Design) Summit, June 24-26, at the Riviera Resort in Palm Springs. This award, sponsored by Baccarat, is bestowed upon design and industry masters who have pioneered new ground, realizing a lifetime of noteworthy projects within a frame of strong business practices.

“The BOLD Summit, the premier luxury design business conference in the United States, is a transformative experience where attendees get to actually learn from and mingle with giants in the field of interior design,” said Julia Molloy, owner of BOLD.  Each master will share their wisdom and insights on entrepreneurship and the keys to building a thriving design firm.

In addition to exclusive learning experiences with the BOLD Masters, the BOLD Summit includes a packed agenda of talks by design business consultants and heavyweight media professionals, including design business-strategy experts Keith Granet, Kim Kuhteubl, Crans Baldwin, ASID CEO Randy W. Fiser, and editors of national design publications Interiors, Traditional Home, Robb Report Home & Style, MyDomaine.com, and more.

The event agenda takes the attendees through the key elements of a thriving business. “It is the most intense two days of business development and collaboration in the industry,” says owner, Julia Molloy. “Participants will experience a dynamic and powerful combination of tactical and strategic insights that will shave at least a year off the growth curve. There is nothing out there like this for luxury designers.” Attendees will benefit from an energizing and empowering agenda that includes streamlining workflow, team development, financial and growth strategy, media publishing and building a photographic portfolio. BOLD abounds with networking opportunities where designers can collaborate with each other and partake in intimate roundtable discussions with the BOLD Masters and expert speakers. They also have the benefit of taking home the presentation videos and 15 CEU’s. A detailed list of talks is available at www.BoldSummit.com and can be found in the Dropbox (see link below).

The event will kick off with a lively networking cocktail party sponsored by the publisher of Traditional Home magazine on Wednesday evening. Following a celebration honoring the BOLD Masters late Thursday afternoon, Interiors magazine is hosting an exclusive fundraising dinner at the Liberace home, redesigned by BOLD Speaker Christopher Kennedy, that will be attended by BOLD Masters, speakers, media and attendees who have selected the upgraded BOLD attendance package.

Below are additional details about BOLD 2015 Masters:

 Martyn Lawrence Bullard

Martyn Lawrence Bullard is a multi-award-winning interior and product designer, author and television personality. His work has appeared in over 4,000 publications worldwide, and his projects are featured in over 10 coffee table books. Martyn released his own bestselling coffee table book, ‘Live, Love, & Decorate’, with Rizzoli in 2011. Martyn’s A-List clientele include Tommy Hilfiger, Cher, Ellen Pompeo, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, Aaron Sorkin’s home and executive offices at Warner Brothers and Paramount Studios, and many others. Although known mainly for his high-end residential design, he has also lent his talent to commercial and hospitality, designing the Colony Palms Hotel and Purple Palms restaurant in Palm Springs, Red O Restaurant for master chef Rick Bayless, Castello Di Santa Eurasia in Umbria and the historic Chateau Gutsch Hotel in Switzerland.

 Kelly Hoppen

With 39 years’ experience at the forefront of the industry, publishers and businesses continually seek Kelly’s unparalleled expertise, resulting in the authoring of eight design books to date, product lines and countless commissions. Kelly shares her extensive knowledge in her popular Kelly Hoppen Design School and is currently a “dragon” in the BBC2 series of Dragons Den, helping new entrepreneurs to reach their dreams.

Joan Behnke

Founded in 1999, Joan Behnke & Associates, Inc. is rooted in the deep belief that interior design is both a fine art and a profound opportunity for interior sculptural self-expression. The office’s team of designers has currently completed over 130 high-end residential and commercial projects throughout the world. Notable commercial projects have included five private hotel villas at the famous Costa S’meralda, Hotel Pitrizza and Hotel Romazzino in Porto Cervo, Sardegna, as well as the 350,000-square-foot private hotel, the ‘MGM Mansion,’ in Las Vegas and the new iconic slump-glass building for Alec Gores’ private equity firm in Beverly Hills. Behnke’s extensive residential projects have included many high-profile celebrity clients including two homes for the athlete-model couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen. Besides projects gracing the covers and pages of Architectural Digest, Interiors, Traditional Home, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, Interior Design, Robb Report and Azure, Joan’s work has been selected for three Robb Report’s “Home of the Year” awards as well as Interior Design magazine’s, “Best of the Year” for corporate office design in collaboration with architect, Hagy Belzberg on the 9800 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills project. In 2013, Behnke was named “The Billionaire Whisperer” by Forbes magazine for her work with clients who have appeared on the pages of Forbes “500 list”.

About Molloy Management Group, BOLD Summit Owner

Founded in 2006, Molloy Management Group is the premier operations and luxury-branding specialist for the interior design industry. They are a trusted source for business tools, practices, training and consultation for interior design firms worldwide. Molloy Management is the catalyst that effectively leads firms into becoming more streamlined and more profitable.

About Vanessa Kogevinas | Vanessa K. Productions, BOLD Producer

Vanessa Kogevinas’s career in publishing and management has spanned over sixteen years, with a focus in the interior design industry. She is the founder of Vanessa K. Productions, which produces high-end interior design events including show houses, conferences and social events. Clients include Luxe Interiors + Design, The City of Beverly Hills, The Hollywood Reporter and BOLD (Business of Luxury Design) Summit. Vanessa’s resume also boasts positions with Architectural Digest, Veranda, California Homes and Western Interiors + Design, among others. She has written over 40 features for national design magazines and regularly appears on panels.

Passion. Purpose. Positive Expectation.

positiveexpectationquote

 

 

Believing in negative thoughts is the single greatest obstruction to success. Sometimes those thoughts can become overwhelming; it can be hard to see through the worry and fear and take the necessary steps to move forward. That’s why we are here to help you!

At the BOLD Summit, we connect you with the leading industry experts who have already confronted these doubts and overcome! They know how to do it and do it well and they are here to show you the way. Kelly Hoppen, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, and Joan Behnke are three Masters of interior design and at BOLD 2015 you will get the opportunity to hear their stories, ask them questions, and learn what you need to know to succeed.

You will leave the BOLD Summit not only with the tools but with the knowledge that it is possible and and it’s possible for you! 

 

 

BOLD Summit Attendee, Christopher Reebals of Christopher Architecture

After graduating Auburn University’s School of Architecture, Chris worked for a small commercial firm in Montgomery, AL. Chris took a hiatus from architecture for several years in the late 90’s and worked with people in a different capacity; directing ministries at a church and working with inner city communities developing affordable housing models.

chrisreebals1

For the past ten years Chris has been working with Christopher Architects. Having designed spaces to meet the needs of both corporate and residential clients Chris’ heart and passion is creating space which inspires both the occupant and the observer. Chris’ award winning designs have been featured in regional and national publications.

chrisreebals2
He has a portfolio of residential and commercial projects from the panhandle of Florida up the East-Coast and as far west as San Diego, CA

chrisreebals3

BOLD Summit Attendee, Nar Bustamante of Nar Fine Carpentry

Nar Bustamante established himself with his wife of 20 years and two children in the Sacramento area in 1999. Born in Mexico City and raised in the Bay Area, Nar began working on homes during his summers at age 14. By age 24, Nar had founded his first construction company in Santa Fe, New Mexico building many new luxury green alternative homes.

 

nar2

Homes crafted with adobe, straw bale, pumice crete, radiant heat, passive solar and many more alternative methods and materials. Through the years, Nar built a passion for quality craftsmanship and innovative design, bringing to the Sacramento area a new sense of style and design for the home connoisseur.

nar3

 

Nar has worked on kitchens and baths, full-home remodels, commercial spaces and showrooms, and multi-unit dwellings. As a nationally awarded designer, Nar is passionate about Sacramento, the people and the opportunity to serve you!

nar1

Transforming Dreams Into Action

One of the highly anticipated speakers we have lined up for you at this year’s BOLD Summit is the incredibly wise David Shepherd. David is an interior design business guru and is the mastermind behind the Business of Design Conference that started it all over a decade ago. From him you will learn how to identify and commit to the 15 action items that will have the greatest impact on your future goals for your firm. His presentation and workshop will once again help serious-minded design business owners to view their business in a new way and get clarity on their strategy for wealth creation and maximizing profits. He is absolutely brilliant and he is sure to open your eyes to the realities of your cash position, billing practices and approach to building a viable business. You will emerge with a wiser approach to creating a long-term wealth creating vehicle with your business, for you and your family.

ActionMap by David Shepherd

Practicing effective leadership. The first step to building a luxury design firm.

THE FIRST STEP TO BUILDING A LUXURY DESIGN FIRM

Whether you are a sole proprietor, have a part-time remote team, or operate with a large in-office staff, the methods of guidance you’ll find here will be instrumental in increasing your efficiency and profit margin.

With experience building an international business, running a luxury interior design firm in Beverly Hills and working with AD 100 Designers and small firms alike over the past two decades, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work in every type of design firm, large and small. I want to share with you eight powerful action items that will truly make an impact on your level of success in the coming year. You will not find a lot of theory or philosophical insights here. This is all about implementation and giving you actionable tools to immediately impact your business for the better. I’ll provide you with methods, examples, and guidance that will make these action items painless and easy to implement.

In this blog series I will lay out for you, my eight steps to building a luxury design firm. The first of which is practicing effective leadership.

PRACTICE EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

It does start with you, and being a leader can be tough. It requires a nimble mind, boundless energy, an unwavering focus and guts of steel. There are many facets to effective leadership, and I am going to discuss two that I find most principal designers have had to master, especially during the last few years. These are delegation and leading through change.

DELEGATION

Delegation sounds so simple, but the truth is, its a real challenge to do well, especially for predominantly creative personalities. As a principal interior designer, you need to be extremely good at delegating. To compound this challenge is the emerging prevalence of remote team members, which adds an additional layer of demand for seamless delegation.

There is a difference between delegation and abdication. Lets first define what delegation is. There are seven elements of delegation. A delegated task is: specific, time bound, agreed upon by both parties, ethical, recorded, realistic, and has measurable results.

There are six steps to effective delegation. Pay attention here because these will help you.

SIX STEPS TO EFFECTIVE DELEGATION

  1. First, define the task. This is before you even delegate it. Be clear about what it is you need done.
  2. Figure out what it is you need in order to accomplish the task. Determine what resources are required. This includes information. If you don’t know the back story on a fabric or upholstery piece that was returned, and there is a lot of complexity to that back story that a junior is not going to know, then sourcing a replacement might not be the best thing to delegate. There is an art to knowing what you are best at researching.
  3. Decide who is best suited for the task. Hopefully it’s not you, but sometimes it will be.
  4. Explain the reason for passing the task on, if its not already clear. This is not about justifying yourself; it is about inspiring delegates by letting them know how this task fits in the big picture. Give them a little bit of context, so its not just a task. Who wants to just do tasks all day? That’s boring. Give the task meaning and it becomes a mission.
  5. State the required results. Agree on a deadline and get your delegate(s) to say or write what they will have done by an agreed upon date.
  6. Support and communicate throughout the process. If you can give empowering feedback, it will hone your subordinates’ skills, and that’s important because you invest a lot in your team; time, energy, and money. At a certain point, you need it to start coming back to you. Empowering feedback is a great method to boost your team’s value to the firm. Tell them what could have been done better, or, to engage them further in the revision process or in future tasks, ask them what they think they could have done better. Be very specific about what did or didn’t work. If they did a really good job, let them know specifically what it was about what they did that was so effective.

 

A NOTE ON EMPOWERING FEEDBACK: What does it mean to give empowering feedback? First of all, remember that this is not about you. Come from the perspective of the company and what it needs to fulfill its purpose and run really well. Remember that it is not about them, either! Everyone has intrinsic value and you are judging their work, not them as a person. Phrase your feedback in terms of the task or objective. Try not to use the word "You." It is about the work product.
A NOTE ON EMPOWERING FEEDBACK: What does it mean to give empowering feedback? First of all, remember that this is not about you. Come from the perspective of the company and what it needs to fulfill its purpose and run really well. Remember that it is not about them, either! Everyone has intrinsic value and you are judging their work, not them as a person. Phrase your feedback in terms of the task or objective. Try not to use the word “You.” It is about the work product.

LEADERSHIP THROUGH CHANGE

Change: we’ve had a lot of it over these past few years, and I know it’s been a bit unsettling. However, it’s important for you to know that these changes a re just a natural phase of a company’s lifecycle. There are four general development cycles in any business. If we do a good enough job, they will cycle around like seasons.

There is a formative period. This is the phase in which external factors or internal forces are creating a need for change. This is where adaptation and development take place. Lots of moving parts, strategy and decision making will comprise a part of this period.

The next period is heavy growth. In this phase, you will be concerned with team development, capacity issues and the scalability of your company.

This is followed by a mature period where you’ve seen it all. It’s not new anymore. Business is pretty consistent and stable. All systems are in place and efficiency and profitability hit their peak.

Then, finally there’s the declining period. What was working well is no longer effective. What you were doing before does not produce the same results, so you see a decline. It’s your job to detect when it starts to happen and think, “Ha, we must be adaptive to survive. Who are we? Who are we now? What can we do differently? Who needs this? How do they need it?” There have been changes in the environment and your clientele that you need to detect. You will need to change and adapt in order to circle around to the formative period again.

In order to best adapt, you will need to identify the source of change as well as sources of new emerging opportunities, and identify possible strategies for capitalizing on these changes. The better you handle the declining period, the more likely your firm will thrive once again.

Leading your firm through change is especially challenging. The following is a list of things that can undermine your leadership your leadership efforts, so watch out for them. Would any of the following five pitfalls apply to you?

FIVE WAYS TO UNDERMINE YOUR LEADERSHIP EFFORTS

  1. Allowing too much complacency and failing to create a sufficiently powerful guidance principle. That really is just all about goals that you set, and one of them is developing the key characteristics. This is your guidance. This is your navigation system. You must be anchored in that. You must know it. If you don’t know it, no one else will. People pick up on that. Be the straight arrow, that pure, pure tension. Be that sword.
  2. Underestimating the power of vision and under-communicating that vision. Sometimes we take it for granted that everybody knows the vision. In fact, everyone does not have that list of key characteristics as goals, and there are lots of different ways that you can communicate them: with metrics, charts, or something similar that keeps staff in the loop and really builds that company culture. Think about it: all the big brands know who they are. Think of Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Starbucks; all those employees know who they are and can identify with that brand. It’s part of who they are. So it should be with your firm. You’ve got to give that to them. That’s your job.
  3. Permitting obstacles that block the vision. Practice persistence. Be that force in your business that tears down walls. That’s what that’s about. Don’t let anything stop you.
  4. Failing to create short-term wins. Some of these things take a long time. A lot of people need the opportunity to celebrate a small thing. Create that for them. In our office, we have a gong. Every time we do something that we feel in completely fabulous, whether its completing a project or meeting a major milestone on one of those projects, or signing a contract with a new client, or getting something really difficult done, we bang it. This is just one of a few things that make us feel that this is the best job and we are the person who does it best. We relish getting to take it off the wall, make our announcement, and gong really, really loud.
  5. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in a company culture. How many of you have implemented this great idea, learned this new thing, implemented it in your office, just to find that a few weeks later everyone is slipping back into the old routine? How many? Come on! Of course you have. It happens all the time, and why? Two reasons: either the system was not as well conceived or the change was not firmly anchored in company culture.

This implies that you have a company culture to begin with. You must reinforce your company’s key characteristics; everyone should know them by heart. Make it fun. A good technique is to talk about one of them for a little while at each weekly meeting. Perhaps your team can help you refine your company’s They’ll all take them to heart then!

This is the first step to boosting your efficiency and profit margin. Remember, you don’t have to be all alone on this journey. Aligning your firm for growth is the focus of this year’s BOLD summit, and we will guide you toward elevating your firm no matter where you are in the business growth cycle. See you at BOLD!!