88: 5 Hard Truths That Changed My Design Business in 2025 (And What You Need to Know Before Next Year)

88: 5 Hard Truths That Changed My Design Business in 2025 (And What You Need to Know Before Next Year)

SHOW NOTES:

In this episode of The McClain Method Podcast, John McClain asks: are you running a beautiful design business that feels chaotic behind the scenes? This year-end reflection episode is for interior designers who are ready to work smarter, not harder.

In this episode, I'm sharing 5 business lessons that transformed my interior design business in 2025 and the practical strategies you can implement right now to build a more profitable, sustainable design firm.

WHAT INTERIOR DESIGNERS WILL LEARN:

LESSON 1: Business Pivots for Interior Designers Why scaling back on design projects actually grew my business. Learn how to identify what you're doing out of habit vs. alignment, and why reinvention is strategic CEO thinking.

LESSON 2: Rest as a Business Strategy for Creatives How a 2-month sabbatical brought more clarity than years of hustling. Discover the "do later" list method that reduces overwhelm and protects your creative energy.

LESSON 3: Using AI in Your Interior Design Business Best practices for AI tools without losing your brand voice. Why starting with pen and paper matters, and how to blend AI efficiency with authentic communication.

LESSON 4: Delegation Strategies for Design Business Owners Master "diligent delegating" for team members and AI tools. Learn why poor results usually mean unclear instructions, and how to onboard effectively for better outputs.

LESSON 5: Sustainable Growth for Interior Designers Why quarterly goals beat yearly overwhelm. Redefine growth beyond revenue with systems, pricing clarity, client boundaries, and business confidence all count.

FREE BUSINESS PLANNING TOOL FOR DESIGNERS: Download my Start, Stop, Continue Guide—the quarterly reflection framework I use to stay aligned and profitable. 👉 https://www.mcclainmethod.com/free-download-startstopcontinue

KEYWORDS: interior design business, business coaching for designers, pricing strategies, design business systems, work-life balance for creatives, CEO mindset, sustainable business growth

Connect: Instagram @themcclain

_____________________________________________________________________________________

FREE VIDEO TRAINING DIRECT FROM JOHN:

Design feels natural.

The business side doesn’t.

Join this free 39-minute training for interior designers and learn the 3 secrets to building a profitable, stress-free design business without burnout or chaos.

👉 Watch the free training: https://ww

Transcript

The McClain Method Podcast with John McClain

88: 5 Hard Truths That Changed My Design Business in 2025 (And What You Need to Know Before Next Year)

I love a business that is so visibly showing your passion that your soul is living inside of that. And the heartbeat of your soul is the thing that's driving your business. Not money, not fame, not Instagram likes, but the soul filled business. If you truly have all aspects of your business orbiting the soul of you and the soul of what you want to accomplish, and your business is soul filled. Oh my gosh. Your success is going to happen monetarily because that just works automatically with that.

But the feeling that you're going to have when you run a business like that is one like no other. /

Happy New Year. You're listening to the McClain Method Podcast, episode number 88./

Welcome to the McClain Method, the podcast for interior designers who are ready to stop hiding and start shining. I'm your host, John McClain, designer, business mentor, author, and your branding bestie. This is not about paint colors or pendant lighting. It's about building a business that's both visible and profitable.

Inside and out. From marketing and messaging to mindset, systems and visibility, we cover the front stage and the backstage of your design business because your brilliance deserves the spotlight, and your business deserves to run like a dream behind the scenes. So if you're ready to be seen, get recognized, and get booked, it's time to let it shine.

Welcome to the McClain Method.

Hey friend, welcome back to the McClain Method podcast. It is so great to have you here, and it is the end of 2025 as I'm recording this and releasing this podcast episode for you today. And I wanted this to be a bit more casual, not an interview, not like a formal set agenda. I wanted to speak to you.

About things that affected me this year and things that hopefully will help you to either learn from what has affected me and the goals that I set for this year and the things that I accomplished this year, and also the things that I didn't accomplish and the things that I had to work through and the things that I had to analyze.

But I really do want to give you a lesson from all of that. So that's why this episode is titled What This Year Taught Me and What I Want You to Take With You. I would love to hear what successes you had this year, what learning experiences you had, what growth you had, what changed in your business and changed in your life?

Love, love, love to hear that. So please send me a DM on Instagram or shoot me an email at hello@mcclainmethod.com. But I really would love to hear what is working for you. And if I could, I would bring you all in and have a podcast episode where you all gave us lessons of what you learned this year.

But unfortunately, that is impossible. But I did want to do something a little different today, and this is not a highlight reel of my year. I hate those. This isn't one of those. Hey, look how much I crushed it this year, because honestly, those make me tired just thinking about them.

But what this is, is a reflection on what actually worked this year, on what didn't work this year and what changed me. Because here's what I've noticed, we spend so much time pushing forward that we rarely stop long enough to look back and say, Hey, wait, what did I actually learn from all that?

Because we're trying to move forward, and this year has asked a lot of me personally. It asked me to think like a CEO, not just a creative. It asked me to make hard calls. It asked me to let go of things that I thought I needed to keep doing, but really didn't.

Growth showed up in a very quiet way for me this year, and I loved it. It didn't show up with a bunch of fanfare and fireworks and not some big, like, Hey, look at me dramatic moment, just kind of steady, intentional because I really tried to make it work and really it was a little uncomfortable with myself in dealing with those at times. So today I'm walking you through five lessons this year taught me, and for each one I'm giving you something practical that you can take with you into next year. Not a bunch of theory and fluff, just me talking to you in real simple language.

Okay? Okay? Are you ready to dive? Are you ready? Let's 📍 go.

First one, reinvention is CEO thinking, not failure. Let me say that again because I think you need to hear it. Changing direction is not the same thing as quitting. It is refinement. This year I scaled back on interior design projects, and I did this in an intentional way, and I'm not going to lie.

It felt a little weird at first because I do love design. I do. It's in my heart, it's in my soul. It's been my passion forever and I'm good at it, and I could keep doing it as I have done in the past. But here's what I had to get honest about. Just because I can do something doesn't mean I should keep doing it.

So I asked myself some hard questions. I wrote these down and I'm kind of old school when it comes to asking myself questions, I use pen and paper or a pencil and paper, but I ask myself, why am I feeling unhappiness here? What is not sitting well with me in this area of my business? And why does it feel heavy instead of energizing me?

And also what actually brings me joy right now. Those questions were hard to answer because it was going deeper into something that is part of my DNA, design, but when I asked myself, why is it feeling so heavy and what will actually bring me joy right now, the answer was pretty clear.

Helping other designers build better businesses. Simple, truly, and it means so much to me, teaching them pricing, walking them through systems, having honest hard conversations about what it actually takes to run a successful design firm that doesn't burn you out. That is where my energy is. So I made the call, fewer design projects, but ones that matter.

I kept doing those and I love doing those. And those did come out beautifully. I did a lot more coaching, however, with clients and with that, I really wanted to give you all a clear understanding of where you are in your own businesses and how you can move forward from there. So that clarity was not only important to me, but I found out also important to so many other designers too, and guess what happened? I did not lose momentum. I gained it because when you have clarity and transparency, and if y'all have listened to me ever speak anywhere, you know that I'm big on being clear and being transparent with yourself, with your clients, with your family, with your life.

It will solve so many problems, but when you really analyze, but that clarity and transparency still reign supreme. And here's what I want you to ask yourself. What am I holding onto out of habit, not alignment. Ooh, that's a deep question. That's a hard one too, right? What are you holding onto that you're doing out of habit?

That you just feel that you have to do. This could be personal or business, but ask yourself, what are you holding onto because of habit and not holding onto it because it aligns with where you are in your business and your life. What are you doing because you think you're supposed to, not because it actually serves you or your business.

That is your work, not next year. Right now. So that is lesson number one. Ask yourself, what are you holding onto out of habit, not alignment? And then ask yourself what pivot or reinvention might be necessary for your business and your life. 📍

Lesson two. Rest is not optional. It is a business strategy. That is a big one. And this might be to me the most important one because rest is not optional if you want to excel as a business owner. Now, listen, I didn't take a week off this year. I took almost two months. Sounds extravagant. And it was, and we did not live like kings, I promise you.

But it was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful experience that I will never forget and has brought to me true love for Thailand and for the areas that we visited. And my husband's mother is Thai and his dad's American. So there are connections to Thailand of course.

But we had just the most amazing time. And I know, I know when I say this that it sounds almost braggy, and I don't intend it to be that way. I want to tell you this because I want you to know that you too can do this if you just plan ahead. This took a lot of planning. We didn't just do this on a whim.

This was years of planning and the execution turned out pretty closely to what we had planned. But what did come from that was a lot of learning. It was a full sabbatical, a full sabbatical with my husband in Thailand and it wasn't some like Instagram perfect work from the beach situation. It was actual rest.

I had early mornings that I love so much if you've heard me talk about that. They were my favorite. I learned about single serve pour over coffee, and I made that part of my ritual. I journaled every morning. I listened to the ocean sounds. I listened to the birds.

There was a koi pond right below our patio where I could hear the fish splashing. It was ideal, right? It was the perfect place and the perfect time to sit and be with my thoughts. I had no agenda. I had no forced like productivity on the list. I had no, I should be doing something, guilt. I did not have that.

What I had was space, and here is what surprised me. Ideas came to me without forcing them. I wasn't sitting there trying to brainstorm or strategize. I was just kind of present and my brain understood that and it had room to breathe and it told me, thank you for letting it do that. So I started journaling freely.

I had no pressure to act on anything immediately. This wasn't like, Hey, I'm going to do this and implement immediately. It was not that. I created a do later list, things I wanted to implement when I got home, things I wanted to implement after I was out of this idyllic, almost perfect situation I was in.

But this do later list allowed me to not stress around them. I just let them sit there. And when I came back, I applied those ideas with clarity. I applied them with intention and not from a place of scrambling because forced growth is rarely sustainable. It really is not. When you force something, it's hard to keep that momentum going. Spaciousness invites clarity. And you know, I love clarity, so I need you to stop asking, How do I work harder?

And start asking, where can I create more space? Because rest is not you being lazy. It is how insight and thoughts and growth and new ideas, it's how they find you. And if you're like me, you're inundated. You're having so many thoughts every day about what to do for your business and how to change this in your life and what you can do to get more clients.

And maybe what you're not doing on Instagram or I haven't sent out a newsletter this month, and oh my gosh, I haven't sent out a newsletter in years. So it's all these things that come into your mind and it can feel overwhelming if you try to accomplish them all at once. If you create a simple do later list instead of a to-do list.

That do later list will give you security in the fact that you've recorded that you needed to do this task or this objective or this part of your business that really needs help. But it doesn't mean that you have to do it now. What it's going to do is tell your brain like, okay, good. I've acknowledged the fact that I need to do these things and I'm going to do them later.

There is no pressure to do them right now. And once you have that list solidified and you know that it kind of sits there, and this can be a notes section in your phone. It can be an email that you send to yourself, whatever method you do to keep up with that. I've been using Google, I've been using the Google LM Notebook.

I've been using Notebook LM with Google a lot, and you can just pick up your phone and speak into it if you have something that you need to throw into that, and then it will keep those for you to access later. But don't make this complicated. Once it gets complicated, you're not going to do it.

But this do later list is actually a pressure valve release. It feels like you've released pressure on your brain and on your business to not have to do those things right away, but you know that they're there and then you can go address them in a systematic way when the time is right to do that.

But give yourself a do later list, not a to-do list, and ask, and then ask yourself, and then look at how, and then I, and then I hope that you're going to feel the same release that I felt when I started to list those things out, and then go back to find them later.

Remember, a to-do list is much different than a do later list, and that do later list will still give you more productivity and more peace of mind 📍 today. Lesson number three, AI is essential, but your voice matters more than ever. Okay. This is. Okay. Third lesson, AI is essential, but your voice matters more than ever.

2025 was absolutely the year of AI, not because it was invented this year, mind you, but because more people started actually using it this year. I can't even believe how much conversation was around AI. At first, you know, we all kind of dipped our toes in very cautiously, kind of light. And then some people went deep like, like myself.

I really did. I went into using agents who were running behind the scenes of my business. And the thing is, AI is no different than anything else in your business. The output is only, and the thing is, AI is no different than anything else in your business and your life. The output is only as good as the input.

If you put in half effort and you're half-assed with what you put in, you're going to get subpar results. Same thing with client work is the same thing with AI. If you put yourself half into a project or you take on too many projects where you're not giving your clients enough attention, those projects are going to suffer because you put in subpar input and then the outputs are going to be subpar.

You're going to feel rushed. You're going to feel like you can't give this client enough attention. And I know many of you aren't even charging enough for all that you're giving to these clients. But back to the point of this lesson, the output is only as good as the input.

And this encompasses so many things. So now I have a personal rule. I actually don't start with AI. I start with pen and paper or notes typed manually, not dictated every time because I like to type them. Something about that connection between my fingers and the pen and the paper or my fingers and the keyboard and seeing it come out.

There's something about that connection that gives me a direct line to understanding what I'm actually typing. Now, if I am in a hurry, or somewhere where I can't write or type, of course I'm going to speak into my phone or whatever.

And there are times when I just speak right into my computer because I don't think I can type anything else today. But if you can find, ask. But if you can. But if it works for you the same way and maybe that connection with writing something out is actually magic to you like it is to me, try that. I even invested in these large scale oversized, I think they're 25 by 30,

huge pieces of poster paper. And I write on these with my big ideas, and I just find that those are great to start the process and then you can bring AI in later. But there's something about connecting with yourself before you bring AI in

that keeps you from listening to AI 100% and allows you to actually listen to yourself. So I actually sit with the idea first. Why? Because I need to decide what I actually believe before I let a tool help me say it. AI is there to help you kind of facilitate things sometimes. It's not necessarily meant

to come up with the original ideas, those should come from you so that they're not being pulled from some online source. I actually read somewhere that most of AI, most of the comments that we're seeing and the responses that we get are trained on Reddit threads, which is a little scary to me because if you've ever been into a Reddit thread before, my gosh, those Reddit forums can get crazy.

Now, a lot of them have great information, don't get me wrong, but I don't want the direction of my business to be based upon what someone said in a Reddit thread.

And that is a bit scary to me to know that I could be changing things in my business based upon what some comment was in Reddit. But anyway, back to the point I had to decide what I actually believe in before I wanted to let ChatGPT or Claude help me with that.

So if we jump straight to AI to write our emails, our posts or our newsletters, we risk losing the soul of our business, and I love a soul filled business. And listen, I'm not anti AI, like, not even close. I use it. I teach it. I'm building a whole AI team feature for designers to help reduce your workload.

That'll be out next year, but it should support your voice, not replace it. And one last little bee in my bonnet with AI. If you're looking for a way to say, I wrote this with AI, you just copy and paste it.

If you look for a way to make it sound like you, you're actually taking that output and tweaking it. And the pro tip is those em dashes are a dead giveaway. Blend your style back in before you hit 📍 publish. Fourth lesson, you cannot do it all and you should not try to do it all. Let me say that again. You cannot do it all and you shouldn't try. We should put that on a t-shirt. This year really hammered that home for me and I'm talking to the solopreneurs mostly right now.

The ones in year 2, 3, 5, and you're still wearing 20 hats because quote, that's just how it goes, or that's just how I have to do it.

No. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Your role as CEO, it is vision, it is strategy, and it is direction. It is that 30,000 foot view that I mention a lot of times, everything else. You're going to delegate, you're going to delay in that do later list, and you're going to systematize your business so that it runs on autopilot.

Now, the key is you must understand the task before you delegate it. I hate asking someone to do something that I do not know how to do myself. So if I buy a new piece of software, I want to know that that software is right for my business. So I will really dive into that. When I ask them to do that, I can tell them exactly what I'm looking for in the output. Now, this refers to a human person and it refers to AI. Both of those need you to understand what you are asking it before you get the output. You need to understand the results that you were looking for, because if you get subpar results from someone or something, it's because you did not give it enough input.

I call it diligent delegating. When you delegate in a way that you overshare, you give all the information. I liken it back to when you're choosing a sofa. I liken it back to choosing an area rug. If you ask a team member or even AI to help you find an area rug for a client's living room, what are you giving it for information? That is not enough information to give a great output.

You must say the size of the rug. You must say what you are looking for as far as colors and patterns and material makeup. All those things are so critical to giving you the result that you're looking for. So if you get a bad result from a team member, so if you get a bad result from someone on your team or an AI agent or an AI bot that you're chatting, that you're typing into, it's probably because you did not give it enough information.

When you're diligently delegating with your team members who are sitting right beside you in your office, or even if you have a VA or someone who's working across town or across the country and you're communicating through Slack and Asana, whatever, you still have to give them all of the information to give a great output.

Now, of course, once they get trained in that, they're going to understand your voice better, and they're going to understand your style better and they're going to understand what you are looking for. But even now, to this very day, if I ask someone to do something, I'm very, very, very specific in what I'm looking for so that I know what they bring back to me is not completely off base.

It's almost like when you try to present to a client a design plan, and you've only asked them five questions about what they need in their lives. When you come back with that final design plan and they look at it and you're so far off base because you failed to really dive into what that client needs.

This is the same thing for your business. So when you are asking someone or something, or some AI bot or agent in your business to do something for you, your output, that final result that it brings back to you is only going to be, it's only going to be as good as what you asked it to do and how much you trained it to understand who you are.

So the lack of clarity on your, and so really what it is,

think about onboarding AI. It's no different than onboarding a team member, a new team member. If you skip the onboarding part, don't blame the output. If the result is bad, it's often not the assistant's fault, human or AI. It is usually your fault, the lack of clarity on your end.

So get clear on what you're looking for. Then you can hand it off. 📍 And the final lesson, growth looks different for everyone and for every season. Social media will have you thinking that there's one finish line, one version of success, one big timeline that we're all on. Nope. No ma'am. You're comparing someone else's finish line to your middle of the race.

Stop it. Here's what I do instead. I skip the yearly goal overload because that is a lot to look down at a list of things to accomplish for an entire year when most of us don't even have our month or our week planned out.

So what do I do? I set quarterly goals, then I break them into monthly actions. Why do I do this? For me, it's faster momentum. It's a clear progression to get to the finish line, and there's less overwhelm. There's less feeling guilt about what I didn't do and more feeling happy and accomplished for what I actually did do. And let me redefine growth for you, by the way. Growth isn't always revenue. It's not always tied to a dollar amount. Sometimes it's those systems that are running in your business that finally work in the background, knowing that you can bring a client on and that client goes through the same process every time you bring them into your business.

That is growth. It could be pricing clarity that stops the undercharging cycle. Oh my gosh, I know y'all are undercharging. I see it every day in the students that I coach one-on-one and in my group coaching calls. Y'all are undercharging and once you get pricing clarity and really know that what you are presenting to your client

is something that you can stand behind, a number that you feel proud of, a number that you know constitutes the work that you're going to do. That pricing clarity is growth. What about confidence in your client conversations? Confidence that you are communicating to that client clearly, that you're not hiding anything, that you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something that you said to a client because you were hiding something from them or you weren't telling them the entire truth.

Confidence in those conversations with clients is true growth. And I ask you to ask yourself, are you having confidence when you're speaking to clients? Boundaries that protect your time? What boundaries do you have in place that keep your time protected, that keep the time protected with your family, your weekends, your off time, you should not have a client

reaching out to you at night when that is your time to reset and regroup and come back to be a better person and a better business owner the next day. Have those boundaries that protect your time and ask yourself, what now could you implement in your business to give you more boundaries?

And understanding your numbers so that you're not guessing anymore. You should know how much money your business is bringing in. You should know how much money is going out of your business. You should know how much profit margin, you should know the profit margin on your projects. A lot of you don't even know what profit margin is.

I'm not putting you down. I'm just saying these are things that we could all work on to get better and to grow in our businesses. Because if you've never heard that, you need to get better at these things. It's not your fault that they didn't teach us in the world and in design school that we need to worry about the business part of our companies.

They just told us about mood boards and commercial building codes, but all these things that really help the growth of your business, it's not your fault that you don't know them, but it is your fault if you don't bring them into your business now and start to change them.

For instance, I've had designers use my designer calculator and realize that they have left $30,000 on the table. $30,000, that's a lot of money. And then not only do you feel good about bringing more money into your business,

you know that you sat down with that calculator or with whatever method you use to calculate your design prices for your clients. But I love my calculator because it has full transparency and I know that I'm not leaving anything off the table of what I'm going to do for that client. But when you do that, it allows you to present in a more confident way.

You can stand behind those numbers. You know that they are accurate, and you know that it is a fair price. And when you have that rest in your brain,

your nervous system calms down. Your nervous system is calm when you are presenting because you know that those are factual things that you are presenting to that client and that that price was made just for them. That is growth as well. It's just a little quieter growth. It's not like, again, those fireworks that we talked about, this is growth that you just feel intrinsically great about inside.

So here's what I want you to do. Write down how you actually grew this year, not how you think you should have grown, not what looked good on Instagram. Write down what really changed because sometimes you have to be your own cheerleader. Those of us who run our own businesses must be our own cheerleaders. Sometimes if we don't always have a spouse who understands, we don't always have a spouse or a partner who understands what we go through on a daily basis. I remember having conversations with my husband about what situation was going on with a client's project.

And even though there was sympathy there, there was not that empathetic manner of understanding what I was going through. And at the end of the day, and at the end of the day, we all need a cheerleader. So if you're having a rough day, sit down, write down three things that went great today.

Write down three things that you feel proud of. Write down three things that may not be sitting there at the top of the mountain, but they're buried a little lower and you're not giving them enough credit. Those things can bolster you up, and then you should pat yourself on the back, especially at this end of year review time where you stop and say, Hey, wow, I really

did do great at that or, wow, that project did turn out beautiful. I just never gave myself enough time to appreciate it before I moved on to the next big thing. I remember that with my book when my book came out, my coffee table book. I was so proud of it and I still am, but I was so involved in what was going to happen next that I didn't stop to really pat myself on the back for what I had accomplished. 18 months of collecting photos and photographing projects and actually coming up with a text to put into that book, some of it in the middle of a pandemic,

was a huge undertaking and a huge accomplishment, but I did not stop to say, great job, John. You did a great job. I just moved on to the next thing. Now I'm looking back and realizing that I need to do that now, and I want you to do more of that now. In those little accomplishments throughout the day, those little things that you just brush off and you're like, okay, that turned out great.

You forget about those. But then we start to dwell on the things that turn out badly or a comment that someone posts on Instagram or something that doesn't sit well with you. Those tend to take precedence over the positive things. I want you to reverse that. Honor those proud moments that you have and give them the credit that they deserve.

Write them down. Put them somewhere where you can find them. If you need to put a Post-it note, a literal Post-it note on your computer of three things that you should be proud of every single day, then do that. If that sounds simpler to you, do that. Take a Post-it note out at the end of every day. Write three things on that Post-it note that you were proud of, that you feel are a great accomplishment for that day.

Put that sucker right on your monitor and then guess what? You wake up the next morning. You sit down at your computer and you look back on what you accomplished the day before. That feels good. Because sometimes only you know what it took to get to where you are. So being your own cheerleader, and being your own cheerleader is, and being your own cheerleader is not a negative thing.

It is an essential thing 📍 sometimes.

All right, so if you take nothing else from this episode, I want you to take this. You are allowed to evolve, you're allowed to rest. You're allowed to redefine success for you. So before you dive in to next year, I want you to reflect on a few things and write these down. What are you proud of? What are you ready to release and let go?

What season are you stepping into next for yourself? When you answer those questions, they might be difficult. They might feel a little uncomfortable. That's good. When you feel uncomfortable, that is growth. It's like I say, sometimes if you're presenting to a client and you're not a little on edge about the price that you're showing them for the work that you're going to do on their project, you have not charged enough.

The same thing with your business and your life when you're going through these things. If you've not pushed yourself to that certain level of being slightly uncomfortable, then you have not dived deep enough into that. And I ask you to really dive deep and ask yourself, what are you proud of?

What are you ready to let go of and release, and what season are you stepping into next? And I have a guide for you. It is a lovely guide that I created. It's called the Stop, Start and Continue. It asks yourself what you should start doing, what you should stop doing, and what you should continue doing, what is working for you.

And you can find that on my website, mcclainmethod.com in my designer vault, as well as I, and as well, I will put that into the show notes here. So if you're listening to this on your podcast platform, just scroll down to the show notes and you'll find the link to click on that, but it's completely free.

I love it. I do it every year and I love it. I do it every quarter actually. But at the very minimum, I want you to do it every year and just stop. Ask yourself what you should stop doing. Ask yourself what you should continue doing. Ask yourself what you should stop doing. Ask yourself what you should start doing, and then ask yourself what you should continue doing.

So grab that free download right now. But thank you for being here this year. Always thank you for listening. Thank you for absorbing it and applying it to your life and to your businesses. And thank you for growing alongside me. This is a journey that we are all on together. You know that I'm transparent about what goes on in my business

and my life and how I bring those two pieces together, and I'm so thankful that you and I can walk this pathway together. As cheesy as that might sound, I truly, truly, truly believe it. I love a business that is so visibly showing your passion that your soul is living inside of that. And the heartbeat of your soul is the thing that's driving your business. Not money, not fame, not Instagram likes, but the soul filled business. If you truly have all aspects of your business orbiting the soul of you and the soul of what you want to accomplish, and your business is soul filled. Oh my gosh. Your success is going to happen monetarily because that just works automatically with that.

But the feeling that you're going to have when you run a business like that is one like no other. So I invite you today to ask yourself these questions now, especially now, and if you're listening to this podcast episode even, and if you're listening to this podcast episode later than the end of a year, who cares?

Stop and do these things. Now we're just talking about it because at the end of the year, we tend to bring these big picture things up, but you can bring big picture things up throughout the year and throughout your month and throughout your week, and feel the same level of accomplishment as you do in doing them once a year.

But when you ask yourself these questions, you're going to feel so much more at ease. And then when you have that do later list that we talked about and your do now list, it's going to compartmentalize those in your brain so that you don't feel you're missing out or leaving out anything.

So try those things out. Let me know how they work. Send me a DM, comment on the post on Instagram, comment on the show notes, and if you loved this episode, share it with someone who might, and if you love this episode, share it with someone who might need those same benefits. Someone who might need to stop and just do a little, you know, pressure release test on themselves and on their business, and find out what's going right and what's going wrong.

I love it when you share the episode, and I love it when you let me know how the episodes resonate with you, because if it resonates with you, I will bring you more of those. Again, thank you for being here this year. Happy New Year, and I cannot wait to see what you build next because I know your design talents are insane.

You have beautiful design work and I want your business to be as beautiful as your designs because I know this, running a design business is hard work

and I want to help you make it easier. I cannot wait to see what you do next, and I am very interested in how you build it. Happy New Year, my friend. We'll talk soon.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of the McClain Method Podcast. I'm so grateful you made it all the way to the end because that tells me that you're ready to do the work that truly transforms your brand, your business, and your life. If you want more tools, trainings, and behind the scenes looks at what I'm building next,

head over to mcclainmethod.com and don't forget to follow along on Instagram at the McClain Method for even more drops of brilliance. And remember, my friend, your brilliance is your brand. Don't dim it, design it. I'll see you next time.