I don't wanna give a fuck....

I was clearing out my old client list a few days ago and it is really quite amazing how many clients I have actually been given.



Over the course of 3 months, the company has given my a total of 17 clients, excluding those who made an appointment and decided to flake on me without prior notice. I have been holding on to 17 different client's information in my file, so I decided it was time to remove those who were obviously no longer going to contact me ever again. Aggravating thing is with a lot of this clients, I have never even met them in person before because all they want is a free quotation.



My belief is this, if you are going to come to me and expect me to throw in a low figure right from the beginning, then I also do not want to deal with you as a customer. If you are not willing to fork out money to hire an Interior Designer from a trusted Interior Design firm, then by all means, go risk that $10,000 budget you have set aside with some shady Interior Designer.




Ironic how all this same cheapskates then start going to Interior Design forums to vent their frustrations about how the Interior Designer they have found is providing bad workmanship, how they are getting bombarded with a shit load of extra hidden cost or how their Interior Designer has ran away with their money, never to be contactable again.




You get what you paid for, simple as that.

So out of the 17 client's I have, only a few showed potential, and those few only amounted to roughly 3 different clients whom I have spoken to recently, if the client is someone I haven't spoken to in 2 weeks, then they are gonna get thrown out of my file, gotta save up file space for clients who actually matter.




Well, after clearing out almost everyone in the file and leaving those I view as potential clients, all of a sudden, one of my client whom I have stopped speaking to for a few weeks suddenly drops me a message, asking me if he could schedule a second appointment with me. At this point I have already cleared all his messages from my phone, so even though I remembered him, I couldn't remember his name. It took me probably 2 minutes of rummaging through my company email to finally get his information and when I replied and agreed to his request, I realized I might have thrown his information out during my client purge.

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Just yesterday, I had the "privilege" of serving a pair of walk-in customers, a husband and wife, while I was having my dinner at 7.30 pm, our Showroom closes at 8.30 pm, so I wasn't exactly in the mood for a consultation session with a client an hour before our shop closes.



As they entered the Showroom, I just looked at them from afar, hoping they would be follow up customers of another designer, that way, I didn't have to go and entertain them and can instead finish up my dinner and prepare to head home in an hour, but they just kept wondering about at the Entrance area, so I had no choice but to end my dinner prematurely and went up to them begrudgingly to serve them.



The moment I spoke to them, I was expecting for the consultation session to be a relatively quick one, preferably one that could end within 30 minutes, since they only wanted to take a look at the renovation packages we were offering, so I ushered them in and attempted to run through the package with them as quickly as possible.



As I was about to go through the items in the package, the wife reaches out and decides to take the renovation package pamphlet from me and starts going through it on her own, she also wanted the consultation to end quickly because she was aware we were closing in an hour and didn't want to take up too much of my time, so we spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke and suddenly she looks at her watch and goes...

"Oh no, I need to pick up my kid from Tuition soon. He ends at 9.00 pm."

... I was elated when I heard that because it was already past 8.30 pm and I wanted to go home, but then she looks to her husband and says to him...

"Can you go pick him up and bring him over?"

.... Why can't you go with him and let me go home?

I continued the consultation session with the wife while the husband went to pick their son up from the tuition center, only arriving back at around 9.30 pm. We were still nowhere near done because when he came back with his kid, he started sharing his vision of how he wanted his home to look like, it was so confusing even the wife couldn't catch what he was saying, so I had no choice but to bring my laptop over and attempt to do a quick 3D for him so all of us can get his drift.... his drift was quite ugly.

There were a lot of components in his vision that just made me want to go...

... because it just makes no sense?

He wanted to created a feature wall, but he also wanted the feature wall to have an L-Shaped extrusion on the side, and when I asked him why he wanted that, he told me it was because it gave the whole wall a balanced look.

This is an L-Shaped Structural beam in a HDB flat, normally, homeowners would fork out money to even out the recess area created by the beam so they can have a flushed surface to work with. 

This customer's home right now does not have that L-Shaped structural beam on his wall, in fact, he has a completely flat wall to work with, but for some weird reason, he is requesting his feature wall to be in the shape of that L-Shaped Structural beam.

I asked him if he wanted to do an L-Shaped storage cabinet instead and give that weird protrusion a function, but he rejects my idea because all he wanted was to have an L-Shaped extrusion as it creates a more "balanced" look, at one point, even the wife started question his taste and kept asking him...

"How is that nice?"

"Why do you want to put that there? It doesn't make any sense?"

... it really makes no sense to me at all.

My goal was to give them a quote on the spot, but after hearing all these weird ass designs from both the husband and wife, because the wife also had her fair share of really weird design ideas, I just couldn't. I kept telling them I had to ask the carpenter first and they kept talking about how they were going to compare my price with another Interior Designer they had sought prior to me. Upon hearing that, I knew for sure I was going to lose to the other Interior Designer in terms of pricing, which also made me not want to actually do their quotation for them anymore.

To give a fuck, or not to give a fuck, that is the question.

I have gone ahead and asked my carpenter about the price this morning and he told me he will give me an answer at night, it's already 11 pm and I still haven't gotten an answer from him yet. I kinda feel a bit bad bombarding him with all the costing questions because I know for sure the customer is never going to pick me as their Interior Designer, so I am sort of wasting the Carpenter's time by making him calculate the costing for me.