Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you can expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success.
Today's episode is for all you tech nerds out there a little bit like me. I wanted to bring you, I have a master list inside of the framework are all around AI and tech support and what different programs achieve different results quickly. I have a workshop coming out on the 26th of October. That's all around productivity and using AI inside of your interior design business. I have one seat left for that, by the way, if you are interested.
So if you're interested, come and see me at oleander underscore and underscore Finch. We are going to do a three hour half day workshop and I'm just going to show you all the little tricks and shortcuts to let AI take 10 hours off your hands each week, which is mind blowing. There's nothing more to say about it except.
There are so many things on the market right now or available to us, be it through free trials, paid subscriptions or just free platforms in general, that it, the mind boggles at how much time we could be saving if we actually knew what was out there, what was the purpose for the platform, and what does it actually achieve, and then you can make a more educated decision about which of these platforms you show up for inside of your own business.
Okay, so if you would like a copy of the master list for AI and tech support tools, please drop into my DMs in Instagram over at oleander underscore and underscore finch and just write the word master and the master list will pop up straight away. So I don't have time to go through all of them and you wouldn't want me to, it wouldn't make a very interesting video. engaging podcast episode to listen to 50 different platforms and what they do.
But I'm going to pick out some of the main ones that I use inside of my own business and that I see framework is using and having success with inside of their business and that I actually really see the value of how much time is saved with these particular tools. First and foremost for me, the one that I cannot live without is definitely Notion. I use Notion for the business side of my business. So I use it for operations, for CRM to organize tasks to host meetings.
The resource libraries of my courses. I use it to, I have pages that are for my annual Christmas advent calendar with the kids. I have one for that tracks my makeup and what's, what needs to be replaced and what do I use? And I just use these spreadsheets and pages and templates for absolutely everything in my book. Business in my life, I should say, and business. But I love this for that sort of thing. So more operationally minded.
So thinking about operational excellence and how can I have systems and processes and hubs? I use it for different types of things within my life with social media, CRM, scope of works, that sort of stuff all sit inside of Notion. However, more and more recently, specifically with my private clients, I have been using Trello so that they can track their boards track their cards. We can collaborate really quickly together. I find that easier for collaboration than inviting people in.
And even though I do have live active Notion pages where some people type and I type and we can both see the edits. I am leaning more towards Trello and I'll talk about why for some specific things in my business. I love Notion for gritty tough work. It's better than Excel. It's prettier than Excel. It has a lot of formulas, capabilities. It allows me to see the one suite of data in five different ways. So in a table, in a gallery, in a board, drag and drop, all sorts of things.
It's pulling it all from the same piece of data, which I really like and which I don't get through other things. Anyway, I could gush about Notion. If you're looking for a really good tutorial, I will put a link inside of the show notes today to one that will take you from absolute beginner, know nothing, never even seen Notion to an intermediate to advanced user of Notion in 20 minutes. So it shows you exactly how to use Notion.
You can be up and running and using it almost the way that I use it in a day rather than trying to find a whole bunch of different five minute tutorials that teach you different little elements. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. Notion is free. I pay about 8 Australian a month for Notion because I like to have unlimited data uploads and images because I run my videos. So much of my courses and so many different things.
Half day workshops, private coaching, so many things through notion. I like to not say, Oh, you've hit your capacity for images for the month. Like I'd just rather pay 8 and never run into that problem. But I use Notion for free for a really long time and I would suggest that you don't need to upgrade at all unless you have a really large amount of uploads you're going to be putting into the system.
And just before I finish gushing about Notion, I also wanted to let you know that Notion AI has entered the room. So Notion AI has been around for almost 12 months. It's been there a really long time but it's been quite clunky if I'm honest and I haven't really used it because it doesn't really even give me that great of an experience. the, of an output. I'm not really that interested. But on the 25th of September 2024, they dropped the brand new version of Notion AI.
And Notion AI in the bottom right hand corner, there's just a circle with a squiggly face in it. And the face is there for you to talk to as an AI assistant. But unlike other integrated AI platforms. I really like what this one is doing.
You can click on that and you can say, Hey, take this information and build it out into a table, build it for me into a gallery make it, build it so that I can track the project start times in a timeline, like just tell it what you're interested in doing and it does it for you. And then you just create a page from that or insert that into the page.
I also love that you can click on that and say, for example, in the resource library, there are over 2000 pages of information for interior designers starting a business. You can go to that little face and say, I'm looking for support with my first in home consultation, and it will bring you a list of just the pages that have relevant content about an interior designer's first in home consultation. So it's a really great finder tool. You can ask it.
To create or find a template that matches whatever it is. It's in your mind. Hey, I want to build this page for my business. It's a marketing calendar. I want to track Pinterest, Instagram, and and my podcast all in one place. You could just talk. to it and it would show you a template for a social media marketing calendar that you could use for free. So it's really helpful. Is like a little VA in your pocket. We should absolutely be using this Notion AI.
Jump on YouTube wherever you can, find out what else it's doing, read little five minute articles, Reddit forums, what are the best uses for Notion AI. This is something you should be putting into Google every day. Transcribed What one thing do I not know about Notion AI and learn something new about it every single day. It's blowing my mind. I'm loving it. I now, I was using Notion obviously every day and absolutely obsessed.
But now I have someone sitting right next to me basically in my office that I can say, hey, teach me something, show me something or I'm a little bit stuck on this. I'm not the Notion Oracle. I don't know everything about it. I learn about it every day. So having that Notion AI support, if I don't know how to do something, I can ask it to do it for me, and then explain how it did it. So that, let's be honest, we never have to go back and learn this stuff anymore.
This is a whole new revolutionary lifestyle using AI and not having to learn the coding or learn the science in the back end. So for once in my life, I don't have to go and find a way to do it by learning and reading and yeah, knowing how to do that stuff. I can literally go to the squiggly face and say this is the outcome that I want. Provide it for me. It's heavenly. Okay, the next platform I'm going to talk to you about is Style Sourcebook. You guys know I'm a fan of Style Sourcebook.
I work a lot with them. I have been using them to create my own mood boards for So many years now since 2018 and I just love how it's evolved and how that platform has improved. And so many new things there. Every time I log in, I'm like, Oh, I didn't know you had this button or I didn't know it did this now. And I'm always feeding back how excited I am whenever I do anything. Go in and do some client work. But recently I've been privy to having a test version of project studio.
It's in beta at the moment. It goes live this month. This is a non client facing area where you can pull together all of your mood boards and it instantly creates the schedule for you so that the FF& E is all there with lots of products that didn't exist in Style Sourcebook that I uploaded. I just needed to upload that information in the top end and then it's all there. available to me going forward. It's very quick, which I love.
And then you can have, you can build other little blocks like text and image blocks where you can talk about the client brief. You can add in all sorts of things, the about us and the project overview. It's a really nice client facing email when you do go and send it off, where they can just click between the tabs and see the different rooms. It's a free platform, which blows my mind. This is the sort of stuff that, I sell my CRM version of this, which isn't really free.
Just client facing mine is a complete solution because it also harbors all the highly confidential floor plans and the iterations of concepts and it's a little bit more involved, but this version is for free. It's available to you and it's really good and it looks really professional, especially if you're starting a business and you don't have that FF& E schedule just even on an Excel or whatever this happens. Instantly. So it's no more just data entry.
There's so many great things I can say about it, but just our source book in general, having somewhere that you can create mood boards, manage your furnitures, fixtures, equipment knowing you can search by pricing. So search by budget, you can do all sorts of things and you can discover a lot of new brands that your clients could be shopping that have trade programs, all sorts of things. So it's definitely one to check out if you don't already. It's not really an AI tool as such.
It doesn't have AI capabilities and it doesn't need them, but it's a really good support platform that I do definitely use in my business. So it's worth mentioning. I know there are a lot of people out there that still use Adobe or Canva or all sorts of other programs to pull together mood boards. I do this specific platform because of its capability to shoot out the shopping list from whatever I'm designing.
So I definitely know that's not a functionality that we're going to be seeing in Canva anytime soon. So check out Project Studio when it's released. As I mentioned a hundred times, it's a free app. Free platform, so this is not going to cost you anything. And it's worth learning. It can feel frustrating in the beginning, like all new software, you feel a bit frustrated that, Oh, I can't get it to work.
But once you get moving and you force yourself to learn how to do it and start See what the prep, what the client sees that they can click in and approve or deny the items if you want them to, there's a lot of cool functionality pieces made for interior designers that you haven't used style source book yet, it's definitely worth a look in and just having a play with it can't hurt you and you won't cost you anything to try. Okay, another one I'm loving that I will share with you now is Trello.
In Trello, you can have a free plan and that's fine. You can have up to 10 boards and up to 10 collaborators, so you can definitely do lots of things, and Trello organizes your tasks under boards and it allows you to have a bunch of lists.
It's very hard to explain on an audio platform, but effectively, for example, in my podcast Trello board, I might have pitched Booked, recorded, edited, and I just drag that one person from the first time I reached out to them, or they've reached out to me into they've booked their appointment, then drag them across when they've booked their appointment into we've recorded the interview, then I've edited the interview's gone live, and then post prod, have I done any Any social media posts, et
cetera. And then I might drag it into six months later, send out an email, revisiting the episode. I don't know, I'm just making this up, but it walks you through a workflow, which is really great for clients as well. If you have a particular project, you want to move it from it through the phases, each task into the phases inside of the framework collective, we've built a master library of standard operating procedures.
There's 120 different standard operating procedures that these five designers now have in a master library so that they can always have that on hand and they can hire staff and their staff can access their HR library of what exactly is expected of them. So there's some amazing ideas that I have of how we can collaborate better. I'm now using it with my private coaching clients because. It's something that's very intuitive.
And I was finding I was doing a lot of tech support teaching people how to use Notion in order to meet me on Notion and share together. But with Trello, I don't need to do that because as soon as you log in, you know how to use it. It's a bit like the first time you picked up an iPad. Nobody really has to teach you how to use it. You just have to have a little bit of time to play.
So Trello, if you're looking for a really easy way to access and organize tasks and really something that's visual, something that's easy, then start there. If you're not a Notion girly, if you've tried and you're really overwhelmed, here's something that will also work for you. It does not have the same capabilities. It is not as business minded and technical as Notion, but it is a really great start.
And if you're looking for something that To just get things organized and to feel like you have a better system than you currently have, or that systems and processes is something you need to work on and you would like to explore. Trello is Absolutely a recommendation from me. I'm really enjoying it and I'm enjoying. I have, for example, a private coaching client that I've worked with for over 12 months, maybe 18, and she has been really resistant to notion. She struggled.
She tells me every time we box together. I can't work it out. I hate it. It gives me anxiety. Every time I log in, I get it. Don't know what to do. I don't like it. And I suggested Trello to her a few months ago and got her on there. And I still get voicemails saying, Oh my God, you don't understand. It's so easy. I'm in love with it. It's so, the answer to everything. I'm starting to love my business again. I can see a way forward. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Those are the sorts of messages that I'm getting from her. So you know what? Square peg, round hole. I'm never going to force people to use Notion. Notion isn't for everyone. Just like you're not for everyone in your business. Sometimes I look at some other people who help interior designers and they're very black and white and very has to be this way, has to be this thing. And I just am always looking for the solution that will move you forward.
And that's not always the same solution as it is in my business, just because I love Notion. That's because I also love data. I also love spreadsheets. I can be like a super, as much as I can be creative, I can also be a super nerd. Duh. I built AI support bots. Like I, I like that sort of stuff. I recognize not everybody does and I'm always looking to meet the people that I coach where they're at.
If you're a creative and you are super visual and you just really pushback on things like financials and all those sorts of things that I'm going to put you straight onto Trello and I'm going to work with you to find the pretty easy solution to your problem. Okay, can we even go forward without talking about Canva? Because I swear every time I ask anyone if I took one thing away from you and you couldn't use it again in your business, which one would be the biggest disaster.
Everyone's like Canva. I need Canva every day. I need it for everything. If you're not on it, get on it. If you're not on the pro version, get on the pro version. This is the one thing that I will always say is absolutely worth the money from the beginning. Even when you have no clients, start as you mean to finish, get building a brand kit, get on there, get started learning how to use it. It is a everyday thing. I use this in my business.
It's an absolute, I just can't imagine a world where we had to do all of this. I would have had to pay thousands of dollars to a graphic designer to have someone on staff who could produce the sort of things that I can do in seconds in Canva. Canva has just there's so much hidden functionality and when I say hidden functionality, it's just really cool shit that you're probably not using properly. Or not using yet, I should say. So Canva has AI. Canva AI is amazing.
Magic Write is a functionality that will just write things up for you for blogs or whatnot, whatever you need. There's Magic Resizing. So if you have something that you're happy with, you can just click on the resize and you can have it in a website banner an Instagram story size, an Instagram square size. You can have it in 12 different things in five minutes. There's something that is magic transform. It's something like transform doc.
And basically you click on that and you can take what you've got and turn it into other things. So you can turn it into just extract all the text. For example, if I want to turn it into a blog. I would like to maybe turn it into a document so I can save it in my standard operating procedures. You didn't know already, you can pull in all of your Instagram content.
You can connect Instagram to Canva and then you've got all of your content, reels, everything sitting in one little tab that you can reuse. To create thousands of other things. So if you've had a reel and you pull it in from Instagram, you can change the text. You can change, it comes in with all the music, which you can't do. If you save it to camera roll, it saves without audio, but if you pull it into Canva, it saves with the audio.
So you can quickly just repost it onto TikTok or Pinterest or any of the other platforms that will take video content fully finished like that. Repurposing has never been easier. There's no excuse to me or no excuse that I'll accept when people say, Oh, it's just a lot of effort though to repurpose, connect your Instagram to Canva and then bang, spit it out onto other platforms. You can directly post to other platforms from Canva. So this should not be a problem anymore.
Canva allows you to post just like Plannerly or Later or other things Canva so you can actually do your scheduling in Canva if that's something that interests you. There's so much coming out every single day. It's a really exciting platform. It absolutely lends itself to creatives. My only warning to you is you should have a one hour limit on your Canva use per day.
There's no reason an interior designer should need to use Canva more than an hour a day, unless perhaps you're mood boarding and creating specific deliverables inside of there, then I would say, yeah, cool. You could stretch it out a little bit, but don't get caught up in the marketing fun, the pretty templates too much. In the early days because actually you are probably focusing on a little bit of busy work. Okay, I'm going to round it out with one more.
Obviously come to my inbox and drop the word master and I'll give you the whole master list of what the tool is, what kind of category it is, what is its purpose, and then a link to check out the pricing or check out what it is. So you can absolutely do that and get the full list. The last one I'll leave you is Gamma. Now Gamma is for presentations. So the AI. AI powered presentations and storytelling. So you give it the topics and it pumps out the presentation very quickly.
So if you've ever wanted to run a masterclass, do a little Zoom workshop get into the education space, even a presentation for your clients, you could use Gamma to do that. To pull together the final documents based on client brief results, mood board, et cetera. So gamma could be something that you might find if in your role or in your job, you do create a lot of presentations. It'd be worth checking out. I really like it because I'm more in an education space.
So I have little gamma presentations just available to frameworkers inside the resource library if needed. But it's been really helpful to pull those together really quickly. And then I said that was the last one, but I am also going to talk about Descript. Descript is an audio video editing tool. It's the one that I use to edit my podcast. It takes out all the filler words for me automatically. It has studio sound. It pulls the transcript along with Otter AI for transcription.
And Zoom as well has transcripts, a lot of programs now offer the transcriptions. Transcriptions are everything. If I have a one hour consult with a client, a Zoom consult, I will transcribe that consult into written word and then use that transcription in ChatGPT to pull out all the key takeaways to create the client brief, to write all the little blurb bits that go inside the client presentation.
It has shaved literal hours off my work because I'm no longer retyping the client brief, thinking about making sure this, that, and the other. Like I was in the call. I check it against my human notes. I make sure we didn't miss anything, but I'm moving much faster because I'm using AI tools to round up what was spoken. And sometimes the AI pulls out takeaways that I maybe didn't. Oh I'll go back. You're right. I think that's a great idea. Really good. Checklist instantly in Trello or Notion.
It's just really helped me in this smooth process, a day to day process of my business. And I hope that it will help you too. So that was using Descript or Otter AI. I don't know if there's a free version of Descript. I obviously pay for it because I use it. I rely on it so heavily with my podcasting and some other things. But definitely check it out. Zoom. The transcript inside of your Zoom call should be free.
I feel like I want to tell you all of them, but I'm not going to because I've been chatting to you for 25 minutes and that's enough for me today. Please come and ask for the master list, DM the word master, and check them out for yourself.
Go and have, spend a morning just looking at these different tools because employing one or two of these could save you a a lot of time in your business and really it is time to shake it up a bit just because you've always done something one way doesn't mean there's not a better way. Chances are in this new AI world, there is a better way. And if you want to learn to save over 10 hours a week guaranteed in your business, join me in my half day.
AI productivity workshop that is happening on the 26th of October. I only have one spot left because it's only in a couple of weeks. So if you're interested in that, come and chat to me, come and find out if it'd be a good fit. These are for people who are serious about learning how to use these AI support assistants to social media plan, write all the social media captions, make them keyword rich, make sure they perform, do everything. And all of that gets done in 30 minutes.
Which saves hours, and there are other things inside of this productivity workshop that I'm going to be teaching you that are just going to make sure that you're using AI correctly, you're getting great outputs, you're learning to do it right, and to save all the time. That is what we're here for. So I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. Please, if you did love it, if you want more AI content, please come and tell me I'm here to serve. If it's going to be helpful for you, I will share it all.
I am in that world on the daily and constantly learning and exploring, and I'm so happy to do little mini updates for you above and beyond what I already do in the podcast. So that if you are someone who's, If you guys are just wanting to get better at using AI in your business, you could listen to those little 5 10 minute midweek chats. I'd be super happy to do that, but I only will do it if it's something that you guys want. So you have to come and tell me.
Tap on the link at the top of the show notes that says, tell me what you thought of today's episode. It sends me a direct anonymous feedback. So just say, AI, give me more of it and I will. All right. On Thursday, I have an amazing interview to bring you with the lovely Sarah from Yuzu interiors. Sarah is a former framework and her business is just her Instagram account is one for the ages. You have to go and check it out. And her business is just really taking off in leaps and bounds.
And I'm loving having a front row seat. So I think you're going to really enjoy my chat with Sarah next week. I will chat to you on Thursday. Bye for now. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend.
Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business.
Now let's get out there and start designing your success.