PRESENTED BY
ATTENTION: Interior designers
The Art Of Being the Principal:
Be InThe Room
You built the firm. Now stop being the firm.
A one-day immersive for established interior design firm owners who are booked, respected, and still wondering why the business feels harder than it should.
Monday, August 24, 2026
HALL Arts Hotel · Dallas, TX
Co-hosted by Michelle Lynne and Katie Decker-Erickson, MBA, IACC-NA
Limited to 30 established interior design firm owners.
No replay. No virtual ticket. No beginner content.
You have clients who trust you.
You have projects worth talking about.
You have a reputation that makes other designers assume you’ve figured it out.
And still, behind the scenes, you know there is a version of this business that runs better than it currently does.
A version where you are not the answer to every question.
Where revenue actually shows up in your bank account the way you expected it to.
Where procurement does not feel like organized chaos with a markup on top.
Where your team, clients, vendors, and projects are not constantly orbiting around your personal energy.
Where you are not spending Sunday nights mentally untangling the week ahead.
That is what The Art of Being the Principal: Be In the Room is for.
Not another design event telling you you’re doing great.
This is The Room where we tell the truth about what is actually happening inside established design firms
- and what has to change if you want to lead the business instead of carry it.
Most Designers Don't Need More Inspiration
They need someone to tell them the truth.
You are not new.
That is what makes this so frustrating.
You already know how to get clients.
You already know how to deliver beautiful work.
You already know how to carry a project from concept to completion
But the business behind the work?
That is where most design firms quietly start to break down.
The marketing works until referrals slow down.
The client experience looks polished until every question lands back on your desk.
The revenue looks impressive until you look at what the firm actually kept.
The team seems helpful until you realize you are still the system everyone depends on.
And because the firm is “working” from the outside, it becomes easy to tolerate the parts that are not working behind the scenes.
You keep pushing.
You keep answering.
You keep absorbing.
You keep telling yourself this is just what leadership feels like.
But what if the issue is not that you need to work harder?
What if the issue is that your firm has outgrown the way it was built?
That is the conversation we are having on August 24, 2026.
This Is the Business Conversation Most Design Rooms Avoid
We are not spending the day talking about trends, GENERAL PROCESSES, visibility hacks, or how to “show up more consistently” on Instagram.
We are getting into the three places established design firms consistently leave money, time, and sanity on the table:
1 - Sales and marketing that depend on hope.
2 - Operations that depend on you.
3 - Financials that nobody has forced you to look at clearly enough.
By the end of the day, you will know where your firm is leaking, what needs to change first,
and what it looks like to operate like a principal instead of an overextended project manager with a better title.
This Room Is For You If:
You own an established design firm andyou are doing real revenue, but the profit does not feel proportional to the work you are putting in.
You have a client-facing experience that looks elevated, but a backend process that does not yet match the level of service you are selling.
You are at or approaching $300K+ in annual firm revenue: multiple clients, vendors, decisions, timelines, team members, and moving parts.
You are tired of being the person every question, decision, approval, client concern, vendor issue, and financial unknown eventually runs through.
You know your firm could be more profitable, more systematized, and more calm but you have not had the right infrastructure to make that happen. Yet.
You are not looking for vague motivation. You want the truth, the next move, and a room of people mature enough to talk about the real business of design.
This Is Not For Every Designer
This Room is not for designers just getting started.
This Room is not for anyone looking for a beginner business overview.
This Room is not for people who want soft encouragement, surface-level networking, or another event that tells them to raise their prices and post more reels.
This Room is for principals who are ready to hear what needs to change and are mature enough to do something with it.
If you are still figuring out your first offer, your ideal client, or how to land your first few projects, this is probably not your Room yet.
But if your firm is already in motion and you can feel that the way it currently runs is not the way it can continue, you belong here.
What We Are Getting Into
TTHIS Room is built around three areas where established design firms lose money,
time, leverage, and leadership capacity.
PILLAR 01: Automate Your Sales & Marketing
Referrals are wonderful. They are not a strategy.
Most established designers do not have a marketing system.
They have a reputation.
They have referrals.
They have an Instagram account.
They have past clients who may or may not remember to send someone their way.
And for a while, that can work. Until it does not.
In this session, we will look at what actually happens between someone discovering your firm and becoming a signed client.
Where are inquiries going cold?
Where are qualified leads disappearing?
Where are you over-explaining?
Where are you spending too much personal energy trying to convince people who were never the right fit?
Where are you making the sale depend on your availability, your mood, your memory, and your manual follow-up?
You will learn what a real inquiry and conversion system looks like for a design firm that wants to grow without the principal becoming the full-time sales engine.
We’ll cover:
The difference between marketing activity and an actual lead-generation system.
Why “I get most of my clients from referrals” is not a growth plan.How to qualify inquiries before they drain your time.
What your discovery call should actually accomplish.
How follow-up, nurture, scheduling, and CRM workflows can run without you manually pushing every step forward.
How to build a referral system instead of waiting for referrals to happen
The goal: Stop hoping the right clients find you and start building a system that makes qualified clients easier to attract, track, and convert.
PILLAR 02. Manage Your Operations Before They Manage You
Your firm either runs on systems or it runs on you (and you probably already know which one is happening).
Every client question.
Every vendor delay.
Every team clarification.
Every install detail.
Every approval.
Every exception.
Every “quick question.”
Eventually, it all finds its way back to you.
Not because your team is incapable. Not because your clients are impossible.
Because the system is you.
In this session, we will hold up the mirror to how your firm actually operates day to day, not
how you wish it operated.
You will identify where the firm depends too heavily on your memory, your inbox, your
approvals, your presence, your standards, and your emotional labor.
Then we will talk about what needs to be documented, delegated, automated, or
redesigned first so the business can function without requiring you to touch every moving
part.
We’ll cover:
Where principals unknowingly become the bottleneck.
Why client communication needs a system, not open access to your phone.
What your org chart actually needs at your current revenue level.
How to create a smoother client journey from signed contract to completed project.
What has to be documented before it can be delegated.
What happens when you are not there — and how to make sure the firm still works.
The goal:
Build a firm that does not require you to be in every room, on every thread, and behind
every decision.
PILLAR 03. Own Your P&L
Revenue is vanity. Margin is sanity.
This is the part most designers avoid until they cannot afford to avoid it anymore.
You can be booked out and still not be profitable enough.
You can have beautiful projects and still be subsidizing your clients’ homes.
You can have high revenue and still not know what you actually kept.
You can have a markup strategy that sounds fine in conversation but quietly collapses
under real project complexity.
In this session, we are going to talk plainly about the numbers: pricing, markup,
procurement, project profitability, cash flow, and what your P&L is trying to tell you.
Not in accountant language.
In principal language.
Because a firm owner who does not understand their P&L is not really in control of the
business.
We’ll cover:
The difference between revenue, profit, cash, and what you actually pay yourself.
Why “cost plus 30%” is not a complete markup strategy.
How procurement becomes either your biggest profit center or your biggest liability.
Where designers lose margin without seeing it.
How to read your P&L like a CEO instead of outsourcing your financial clarity.
How to build profit into the business instead of hoping it is left at the end.
The goal:
Stop celebrating top-line revenue while ignoring what the business actually keeps.
The Day
This is a full-day, in-person intensive designed for depth, candor, and implementation.
No giant ballroom.
No generic keynote.
No beginner-level business content.
No pretending that everyone in the room is at the same stage.
You will be in a curated group of established design firm owners who are past the startup
stage and ready for the harder conversation.
SUNDAY, August 23, 2026
TIME
4:00 - 6:00 PM
SESSION
Check In & Welcome Reception
Monday, August 24, 2026
TIME
8:30 AM
9:00 AM
9:3O AM
11:30 AM
12:3O PM
2:3O PM
2:45 PM
4:45 PM
5:45 PM
6:00 PM
SESSION
Welcome & Coffee
Opening: The Gap Between a Busy & Profitable Design Firm
Pillar I: Automate Your Sales & Marketing
Plated Lunch & Structured Table Conversations
Pillar II: Manage Your Operations
Break & Connections
Pillar III: Own Your P&L
Q&A & Hot Seats
What's Next: The Integrated Firm
Close, Q&A and Farewell
The Venue
HALL Arts Hotel
Part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, HALL Arts Hotel is a 183-room luxury boutique hotel in the vibrant Dallas Arts District. Experience artful comfort in spacious rooms featuring curated artwork, sophisticated décor, and luxurious amenities. Savor locally inspired cuisine at and unwind in the rooftop pool overlooking the city skyline. Designed to celebrate creativity, the hotel showcases stunning contemporary art throughout its spaces and offers a curated collection of meeting and event venues ideal for gatherings and celebrations. Just steps from the Performing Arts Center and the city’s leading museums, HALL Arts Hotel immerses guests in the culture and energy of downtown Dallas.
We have a block of room set aside for those who are traveling to the event, or locals who wish to stay onsite. A booking link will be sent upon registration.
Your Seat Includes
A full-day immersive business intensive at HALL Arts Hotel in Dallas.
Direct teaching from Michelle Lynne and Katie Decker-Erickson.
Three focused content blocks on sales and marketing, operations, and financials.
A room of established design principals ready to talk honestly about the business behind the work.
Hot seat and open Q&A time for real business scenarios.
A plated lunch, snacks, beverages and an optional welcome reception.
Custom workbook, prompts, and implementation notes.
First access to the Sidemark 2.0 conversation before public release.
Meet Your Hosts
MICHELLE LYNNE
Michelle Lynne is the founder of ML Interiors Group in Dallas and the founder of Sidemark, a business platform built specifically for interior design firms.
After more than a decade of building, running, and refining her own design firm, Michelle has seen firsthand where talented designers get trapped: in the inbox, in the procurement details, in unclear margins, in undocumented systems, and in businesses that look successful from the outside but depend far too heavily on the principal behind the scenes.
She has coached hundreds of designers on the operational and financial side of running a firm at a higher level, with a focus on the systems, processes, visibility, and infrastructure that most designers were never taught to build.
Michelle brings the perspective of someone who has lived the gap between beautiful client-facing work and the messy backend required to support it — and then built the tools she wished had existed sooner.
She is not here to motivate you.
She is here to show you what has to change if the business is going to support the life, profit, and leadership role you actually want.
KATIE DECKER-ERICKSON, MBA, IACC-NA
Katie Decker-Erickson is the Founder and Principal Designer of Color Works Design, a national commercial and multifamily design firm. She brings nearly two decades of experience spanning exteriors, amenities, sourcing, procurement, budgeting, and project management.
In addition to leading Color Works, Katie serves as a business coach and brings a rare combination to this room.
She is a designer.
She is a firm owner.
She is an MBA.
She is an IACC-NA certified Architectural Color Consultant.
And she understands that beautiful work is not enough if the business model underneath it cannot support the principal leading it.
Her perspective is especially relevant for designers who are ready to stop treating operations, procurement, and profitability as backend headaches and start treating them as strategic levers.
Katie is not coming into this conversation as a theorist.
She is coming into it as someone who has built a national design business, managed complex projects, led teams, navigated procurement, understood the numbers, and turned design expertise into business infrastructure.
Together
Michelle and Katie are bringing two sides of the same necessary conversation.
Michelle brings the systems, software, coaching, and design-firm infrastructure lens.
Katie brings the principal, MBA, commercial design, procurement, and firm-growth lens.
Between them, this is not a day of ideas that sound good on a slide.
It is a day of what has been tested, gotten wrong, rebuilt, refined, and proven in real design
businesses.
This is the conversation designers usually only have after the event is over, behind closed
doors, with the people they actually trust.
This is that conversation.
In The Room.
On purpose.
A Note About the End Of the Day
We will spend the final part of the afternoon examining what happens when sales, marketing, operations, procurement, and finance are not treated as separate problems.
Because they are not separate problems.
Your inquiry process affects your revenue.
Your operations affect your margin.
Your procurement process affects your profitability.
Your financial visibility affects every leadership decision you make.
Your backend either supports the caliber of work you are known for — or it quietly undermines it.
That conversation will lead into a private first look at Sidemark 2.0, before it is publicly available.
This is not a pressure pitch. It is context.
After spending the day identifying where design firms lose control, you will see what it looks like when the backend of a firm is built to support the caliber of work happening on the front end.
You can decide from there whether it is relevant to where your firm is going.
READY TO join us?
The Details
Date: Monday, August 24, 2026
Location: HALL Arts Hotel, Dallas, TX
Format: Full-day, in-person immersive
Time: 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM
Registration & Welcome Reception: Sunday 4:00 PM to 6PM
Stay: We have a block of rooms set aside for those who are traveling to the event
Capacity: Limited to 30 established interior design firm owners
Best fit: Interior design principals at or approaching $300K+ in annual firm revenue
Hosted by: Michelle Lynne and Katie Decker-Erickson, MBA, IACC-NA
PRICING
Choose Your Path
FOUNDING RATE
$997
Available for a limited number of early seats.
No refunds.
STANDARD RATE
$1295
Once founding seats are gone.
No refunds.
LATE REGISTRATION
$1495
Available only if seats remain.
No refunds.
Your seat includes the full-day intensive, plated lunch, workbook, hot seat/Q&A access,
welcome reception, and private first access to the Sidemark 2.0 conversation.
Only 30 seats are available.
This event will not be recorded.
By registering, you acknowledge that this event is intended for owners of established interior design firms and agree to the event Terms & Conditions.
Why This Room Is Intentionally Small
This day only works if the right people are in it.
We are not trying to fill a ballroom. We are curating a room of design principals who are established enough to have real business problems and honest enough to talk about them.
The point is not more people. The point is the right people.
The kind of people who know the difference between being busy and being profitable, who are ready to stop being the system.
The kind of people who understand that a design firm can be beautiful, respected, and stillstructurally underbuilt.
If you already know your firm has outgrown the way it currently runs, this is the room you have been waiting for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this for new designers?
No. This is for established interior design firm owners who are already generating meaningful revenue and are ready to address the business infrastructure behind the work.
If you are just getting started, this will likely move too quickly and skip too many basics.
What if I have to cancel?
Due to the limited nature of this event, all sales are final.
Will this be recorded?
No. The value of this day is the candor of the room. The conversations, hot seats, and examples are intended for the people who are there live.
Is this a Sidemark event?
The day stands on its own as a business intensive for interior design principals. At the end of the day, Michelle and Katie will introduce Sidemark 2.0 as one possible solution for designers who want their sales, marketing, operations, procurement, and financial visibility to work together.
Will there be a sales pitch?
There will be a Sidemark 2.0 conversation at the end of the day. It will be direct, relevant, and contextual.
No pressure.
No awkward hotel ballroom pitch energy.
What should I bring?
Bring your current questions, your actual business realities, and a willingness to look honestly at what is and is not working.
You do not need to bring perfect numbers. But you do need to bring the willingness to stop avoiding them.
Oh, and a sweater. These spaces are often chilly.
Can I bring a team member?
This event is designed primarily for principals and firm owners.
If you want to bring a business partner, COO, integrator, or senior team member, a limited number of duo seats may be available.
Where is it?
HALL Arts Hotel in Dallas, Texas.
We have a block of rooms set aside for those who wish to stay onsite.
Why is this priced at $1,295?
Because this is not a casual lunch-and-learn, and it is not a beginner workshop.
It is a premium, in-person, full-day business intensive for established firm owners, priced below multi-day designer business retreats while still requiring enough investment to protect the quality of the room.
The goal is not to make this the cheapest design business event available.
The goal is to make it the most necessary one-day room for the designer who is ready to stop outworking a business model that needs better infrastructure.
You Do Not Need Another Year Of Outworking Your Business
You need to see the business clearly.
You need to know where the leaks are.
You need to stop being the system.
You need to build a firm where sales, marketing, operations, procurement, and financials are not separate fires you keep putting out — but connected parts of a business you actually lead.
That is the work of being the principal.And that is what we are doing in this room.
Copyrights 2026 | The Art of Being the Principal™ | Sidemark, Inc. | Terms & Conditions