[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hey, welcome back to a bonus episode of the Interior Collective. I'm your host, Anastasia Casey. And if you've ever felt like running the business side of your design studio is harder than the actual design work, you are not alone. That's why I'm so excited to be joined today by Mary Beth Chow, co founder of Materio, the first end to end project delivery system. Designed specifically for interior design and build teams, Materio brings together visual first, project management and real financial clarity in one connected workflow. From concept to client, presentation, procurement to install. In this conversation, we're digging into what makes Material different from clunky legacy platforms, how it helps designers make smarter decisions faster, and what it looks like to finally have one beautiful, intuitive system that handles both the creative and the business side of your projects. If you have been stuck between tools that feel overly corporate, overly complicated, clunky, or just not built for the way your brain works, this episode might just change the way you run your studio. That's why I'm genuinely excited and super proud to introduce you to Material.
We are so excited to invite you to dive deeper into the Interior Collective. Podcast episodes now on Patreon unlock access to in depth analysis, helpful downloads and worksheets created with each podcast episode. Subscribers gain behind the scenes access to additional resources like examples and screenshots of guest spreadsheets, construction documents, and so much more.
Your subscription also gets you immediate access to our private community of interior designers and our team of industry experts ready to answer your questions. Subscribe
[email protected] the Interior Collective or linked in the show notes. Join the Interior Collective Patreon community and let's continue this conversation.
Hello Mary Beth, and welcome to the show. It is so fun to get to be talking to you live because we have been chatting so throughout this entire season as we are so grateful for you to have been our presenting sponsor in season six and spoiler alert to be back again for season seven. And so we're ramping that up, but I'm just so honored and excited to get to talk about a software that I think suits so many designers in a really digestible way.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah, hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
What a great intro.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Well, let's go ahead and get started. So if you haven't, you know, clicked over and taken the time to look up Materio, let's go ahead and Mary Beth, have you start by just telling us what Materio is and who did you build it for?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, so Materio is really a tool that is Built for interior designers and design build teams to deliver projects on time, on budget, and just reliably. Right, like that sounds insane and it sounds like no brainer, but that is what we are. And so we were a system made for design operators, really.
So that does include interior designers and that includes teams that are doing both design and build. But anyone who's trying to operate and run a design project is going to be the person that it's built for.
So, you know, if you're running, I like to say you're spread across five to 10 tools, right. That you're trying to consolidate, that you're trying to make your team more efficient. That's really who this is built for.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
What do you feel like was the aha moment that led to the creation of Materio? And was there like a particular pain point in the design industry you were trying to solve?
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yes. So there was a very distinct moment actually. And I have to give my a little bit of credit to my husband Thomas. So he's a co founder with me at Materio and we got married in 2015 and we did a small sort of renovation project at our first place. And it was very, you know, back of napkin casual. And we thought, okay, there we're gonna go move to Manhattan and it's going to be, there's gonna be a real process. The GC is going to have the tools that they need and it'll be more legit. So we buy our 500 square foot tiny Manhattan apartment and we had a great architect to work with us. We had a great GC on board. But the truth was they didn't have the tools that they needed to execute. And even in the design process, we were going back and forth, of course, it's New York City. You have to have an architect so stamping plans. So we're going back and forth with the architect about this very particular staircase in our apartment. We were grandfathered into the staircase, going into the living room. Let's all visualize this. And we wanted to flip the staircase so that we could have a landing in our basic, you know, studio apartment for a dining nook.
Well, we were not able to do that without putting a wheelchair lift in our apartment. That was what the building code was saying and it was just insane. And so Thomas and I are sitting there one night, we're both working full time. I'm trying to run the design at the same time, he's trying to make sure I don't spend too much time.
And we're on like the 30th email thread with the architect about the stair. And he's like, per line 21 about the stair. And he's like, oh, I just want to point to the floor plan and say this stair right here, like, and ask the question. And he was. And I was like, you're so right. Like, why can't we just communicate on this drawing set? And, you know, design teams, you know, probably have that in some capacity, but as clients, really in this situation, we didn't have that and we felt very out of control with the process.
And so that was in 2018.
Thomas is an engineer, so he whipped up a prototype of what this would look like. And material actually wasn't started then, but that was sort of the seedling of it. And we started to really pay attention to the rest of the process. Right. So we started going through the design process and during that design of our apartment, which took way too long. And through the construction, I was continuing to get text message after text message.
Mary, what's the paint color? You know, I'm like, well, there's only one paint color in the 500 square foot apartment. And now I'm searching my text to try to remind you what the paint color is in the finish. And so that was really the moment that we realized you can have really good craftspeople and you can have really good architects.
And yet there didn't seem to be a tool that worked as well as what we were given in the technical world and sort of technology.
And so that was sort of the moment.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: What was your professional background up until that point?
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. So I started off in graphic design, actually. So that was. I know you can relate to that. And I started off doing graphic design work for an architecture firm here in New York City. So I got kind of a taste of what was happening at a really large global firm. And then I actually pivoted into product design and user research. So I'm someone who loves to talk to people. I still talk to lots of our customers. It's my greatest joy. And so I moved into a path that allowed me to kind of connect the two. Right. Design and storytelling and communication is a huge part of graphics, but then also into product, where I was able to take research from customers and shape new products kind of completely from that. So I was working in product design in the startup environment before launching Materio. Yeah.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Okay, so who makes up the Materio team today?
[00:07:19] Speaker B: That's a great question. So. Well, first and foremost, there's my husband and I Were co founders and I think just a highlight. Thomas is very much the technical side of the business. So he's a software engineer. He's an amazing, brilliant systems designer. And he is. He should have been architect, maybe in a different life, but he really leads the technical side of materio and has built it. I think. Fun fact, I think we didn't hire on a second engineer until we had at least 75 customers. You know, we were like, well on our way to having customers. I mean, that doesn't sound that big. But before we even hired anyone, a lot of teams do that in the opposite direction.
And then of course, myself, I just talked a little bit about background. I really lead marketing, sales, and really anything comms. I would say if you think about us two as kind of the leading team, he really is the structured side, the technical side, the part that makes us really not stop at surface level. He wants to know really, really deeply what's going on.
Which then really pushes me because I'm talking to customers or talking to people in the industry and saying, we just need to do this, but we have to get very specific.
And then the rest of our team is really made up of just fantastic, curious, smart individuals. So we have, you know, some marketing folks. We've got support, we've got really, really, really amazing engineers that Thomas has sort of brought in from his previous world.
And I love that our team has no ego. Right? Like, we have some people who've been in the industry and know the industry really well and have been in it for 25 years. And then we have some who have come in to material with just a desire to fix this because maybe they experienced it as a client or maybe their parents did something and they experienced the heartache of going through a design and build project together. So everyone's just really curious and really good at solving problems. So I don't know if that answered your question, but yeah, definitely.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: I want to talk about visual interface and like user experience. Let's get into the nitty gritty about your software. One of the things that stands out to me when using material is just how visually driven the interface is. And knowing your graphic design background, that makes so much sense.
Why was this such a priority in your development process?
[00:09:41] Speaker B: That's a great question. So as much as this actually may seem intentional, especially given a graphics background, the sort of funny part of this whole thing, if you will, is that I didn't have a ton to do with the initial design of the tool. I say that and I just actually yesterday looked Back at graphics from 2018 that I did of the interface. So that's not a hundred percent true. But side note, I had my first and only in Covid the year that we actually quit our jobs to start Materio. And I always say I was a little bit worthless for the first year. So Thomas did pull a lot of the Pixel Perfect sort of design implementation. But what I think I wanted to call out is really, it may seem intentional that we sort of shaped this to be a visual product, but I think it was really a natural evolution given the way that design and build teams operate. So if you think about what a design team and a build team are looking at, right, they're looking at a drawing set, they're debating it, they're changing it, they're pulling it up on the site, they're, you know, drawing on top of it.
I don't know actually how a tool that serves this industry could not be visual. And so one of the core differences, if you've never seen Materio and this is your first time sort of hearing about it, I would say one of the core differences is that when you're inside of a project, that project is primarily that project screen or UI is primarily taken up by visuals. And that can be a drawing set, that can be boards that you've created in materio, that can be boards you've uploaded or a presentation. But the idea here is that you're working with one core set of visuals throughout a project. And that does evolve, but that's the core of it, right? So everything is built on top of that. And now, of course, we have, you know, our selections workspace, which is also incredibly visual.
And I think those types of.
Those elements of the product are really visual because designers are working with visual things. Again, product, right. Imagery that they're pulling in.
We wanted to create a space for that. And so as much as it is not intentional, I think it just naturally sort of happened that way. And I do think that when we studied how firms were working, right, if you. If you kind of go way back and we talk about how they were working, what we noticed is that they had a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet had financial data and maybe links, and then they had other visual assets where they were trying to represent that financial, or those. Those text, those letters, right, In a visual way, but they weren't connected. So in order for us to successfully deliver a project and do it in a way that a designer can come into the tool and feel organized and structured, we had to kind of Marry the two. And that's sort of how I think the scope of work was born. And over time, that scope of work has become more visual.
So looking back in the day, there was no images on the scope. Now we have images. It represents the options. You know, you see the statuses right there in the scope of work. So a lot of that has even become more visual over time. And that is truly built off of customer feedback.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Amazing.
Designers are obviously naturally visual thinkers. And I think what you said is like, I don't know how something could exist in this industry and not be visual. However, the tools that are out there that we are also big fans of and work really well for a lot of designers, they aren't visual. And like you said, there are different places that all these things are housing.
Can you walk us through what it looks like to build and present a proposal or design board within materio? And how was that different from other tools in your during your research, like Studio Designer or Ivy or House Pro?
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think too, just quickly going back to the visual aspect, I think one thing that we've really tried to do is take something that's really complex and just simplify it as much as we can. Again, I kind of said that with the spreadsheet example, but I think it's really important to note how difficult that is. So it's not these tools fault, right, that they aren't visual. To actually take something really complex and drill it down to be something simple visually, from an information architecture perspective, that's really hard to do. And you have to kind of remember that Thomas and I came at this with really three years of research before we ever got a customer. And that was intentional. That was something that we had the, I want to say, the luxury of doing. I think the determination to do right. So we had the time to do that. And so it's not always easy for every business or software to take the time to be that thoughtful. So I think that's sort of like a blessing in itself.
But. Okay, back to your question of just how we can build a proposal in material versus some of the other tools. Okay. So to be honest, I'm not super familiar with how proposals are built in things like Studio Designer at nivy. And I say that just to say I've never been inside of them. I've briefly seen those tools when people come to us and tell us, you know, sort of what's not working for them. So let's talk about what it looks like to do it in materio, and I think that's where I can best kind of help. So when we're thinking about building a proposal in materio, what we're really thinking about is that early process of budgeting and planning. So first and foremost, we want to get organized and we want to identify what's going into the project.
I'm a firm believer in planning early. Although it's something designers don't love to do, it's something that I hope that our tool gives them, like, an easy way to do it. So what we're going to do first is start by planning what's in the project and building out our scope of work. That can be loose at the beginning and things can be added to it, but it's going to give you a really quick way to know what's going to go into this project and how much it's going to take.
And in material, you can actually do a few iterations of proposals. So I think when everyone thinks of proposal, they probably think of that moment you send selections for approval. Is that what you're.
Is that what you're visualizing in your head?
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Well, yes, but also I'm thinking about the actual. The initial proposal. How long is it going to take you to do this project?
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Okay. Okay, great. So we'll go. We'll go there first. Okay. So either way, you're building out a scope of work. So whether your scope of work is just including services at the beginning, like, here are the things it's going to take for my team to get this done, whether that's by phase, whether you've just spelled out a flat fee, whether you're estimating hours. You put that in your scope of work, and then you're going to generate a contract using our share button. You share a contract, you put your design agreement terms in there and you send it off. Client signs it, they agreed to start working with you. Fantastic. We collect a retainer and we start working. So that's the initial proposal. Yes.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Okay, real quick. So generating the contract, sending the contract, collecting the retainer fee, that all happens within material.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Yes, that can all happen in material.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: So essentially already that's eliminated the need for DocuSign, Dubsado, other softwares that we are always teaching to include.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Yes. I didn't say it. You said it.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Just kidding.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. So, yes, you're going to be able to.
And. And again, it's so hard for me to talk about something. I'm a very visual person. I'm so used to showing and not telling. So y' all bear with me here as I try to explain visual things with words. But, yes, you can kind of spell out again, whether it's services or products, you can put that into your scope of work. And that scope of work really is a living, breathing document. I mean, it's not a document, it's a software, but it's a. It's a. It's a thing that evolves, right? So you can start with just your services, get that signed off or ready to go, collect that retainer, and then we can start building out what actually goes into the project.
And so with that, what you're going to do is start spelling out, okay, do we have a kitchen? What goes in that kitchen? Do we have a dining room, a living room, a full, you know, all the spaces in the home? You're going to start to spell those out. And you can use what we have we call kits, which is templates, and you can insert those very quickly. And that's going to be line items with budgets. So you could really quickly say what it might take to do a standard kitchen. And. And you're going to be able to plug that in really quickly. So you could even include that. I say that to say you could even include that in your initial proposal with, hey, here's what I'm thinking it's going to take. Without any design work, at minimum, we're looking at 500k plus my design services. Right? So give or take, certain designers like to share that information up front, and certain designers like to hold it till later.
And then, because we have this nice, clean scope of work where. I had a designer recently, I talked to say she creates ghost items at the beginning of a project. And I was like, I love that term. So you've got all these. I will take that term. I think it's brilliant. And.
And you kind of build out the skeleton of your project, right? And then in material. The next step towards actually doing a proposal, we're skipping a lot of the design in the middle for this, for the sake of this, but we're starting to populate options onto those items. So let's say I have a sofa in this project, or I have backsplash tile in this project. Right now I can go and I can use our clipper to pull in products and onto that tile and have 3, 4, 7 options that maybe my team wants to filter through. And then eventually I'm going to send that over, you know, via more. What a lot of designers think is a proposal to get approval from My client.
I don't know that follow up. Are you following?
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yes. No, that totally makes sense. That is so clear. But what I think is really magical there is the fact that you are able to build out that initial design fee proposal, that initial, whether it's flat rate, hourly estimate, range of hours, that can all still be built out and you can have that legally binding contract sent within material. Because as far as what I have found across all of the options, there is always a need for an additional software to help more. So with that onboarding side of things.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting how as the product has evolved and as we've learned more, there is always sort of these shocking moments for me where I, again, because I've not been in these other tools to be 100% transparent. And so, because I like to focus on, you know, we as a company really like to focus on what do our users need. And so over time, you start hearing more and more things like, oh, well, I can't. I can't send a design agreement in here, or this is what a design agreement is. And this is what I'm trying to do. And so I become just sort of shocked at these moments where I've learned that they aren't any other tools. And every time that happens, of course, it's really cool because we learn that we're able to do something else that maybe we didn't even realize was a big deal.
We're just kind of listening to what our customers want. But yeah, I maybe was as shocked as you were at some point that it was. It was solving that problem that, you know, other designers are having to pay for for outside tools for. So.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Well, it's so interesting to me, like, your approach of development and market research was to just focus on what the customers actually are needing and not necessarily what potentially.
Sorry, potentially, what competitive softwares are offering. Because this is a fun fact. I don't know if I've ever said it on the show, but before I launched this podcast, I had never listened to any podcast and I still do not listen to podcasts. And I just am running it based off of what I actually want to hear and what I'm curious to learn about. So I think that it is interesting in the sense of the end product can vary so differently if you're working from the initial problem and not seeing any of that other noise. And I think that that is so fascinating about material.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually something that I've found Recently, I've been able to give to new founders. I joined a women's founders group. And it's really cool to be able to just say to them, look, you're telling me you're worried about competition?
Just don't think about it. Just focus on what, you know the person needs. And over time, I mean, sure, make sure there's not something out there that, like, is just. It's. It's silly that you're doing this. Right? We didn't, we didn't, like, hide under a rock and go, oh, is no one solving this problem? But there's tons of people solving the problem. But what we found was we went to talk to the customers of those tools or the people that were in our network and they were going, well, this doesn't work for me. And this doesn't work for me. So, again, I think it's. It's really important that in life, I think this applies to anything that you're trying to do. Just like the podcast, right? Is just listen for what people want and what they need and solve for that, and you will build something valuable.
And that in itself is the right direction.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I'm going to start hitting you with kind of heavier questions now because historically there have been certain programs that are incredible when it comes to financial management and the finance side of things. And there are others that are maybe more visual, but they really lack the financial side of things. And interior designers need more than pretty visuals. They need real financial financial control. And part of my mission with Design Camp, with Ideco Studio, with the product collab we just launched with Renee from Tandem and Brook Stoll is making designers more comfortable with their finances and truly understanding their profitability.
How does material help designers track budgets, margins, and purchase orders in one place? If it's capable of doing so?
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Yes. So I think I feel like I've said it, so hopefully this isn't being too redundant. But to explicitly say it, I guess, you know, designers can't feel comfortable with their profitability if their profitability metrics are spread across multiple tools. So if you have your budget in a spreadsheet and then you have what you're sourcing in studio, and then you have your. You happen to. Well, studio is not a great example, but maybe you also have your invoicing in another tool or you're sending an invoice via Canva, which I have actually heard, which shocked me also.
How can you look at profitability? Because the money coming in, the money going out, your expenses, your time Maybe you're tracking your time in Harvest or Toggle or something like that. Right. They're in four different places. So it's too much to ask a designer in that moment to be good at knowing their numbers. I think it's kind of unfair. And if it were me, I would want to cry and crawl into a hole. So I think that one of the things that is really important about material and how it does give designers the look into this, into their profitability and sort of just financial control, is that you have all those things in one place. So the budget is created initially in materio, and with your initial budget, you are planning profitability into that because you are planning a projected markup and margin on your items. So when you create a scope item, you can set a default markup. And then now in our scope table view, you can also view the margin on that item and you can customize that. If you're like, I want 60% margin on this or only 20%, whatever that is, or I want to mark this up 80% or 100%, you can do that very easily in materio. So there's that. And then actually having the purchase orders and the payments on those purchase orders tracked through materio, it's also giving you the other side of that. Right. So this is what it's going to cost my client. Here's my projected profit on this item. I'm actually billing the client in material for that product with said margin. And then I'm actually tracking my actuals. So I'm tracking my purchase order. Oh. And then I'm also tracking the additional shipping or white glove delivery that happened with that item that otherwise I wouldn't know where to put it. Do I send it to my bookkeeper and put it in QuickBooks? Right. But in material, that is all tracked on a line item basis. So in your performance tab, in a project, you can look at, you know, what money has come in from your client and what money has gone out and what you've committed to and what you've collected deposits on. And so we kind of have a very easy way to see both sides of the equation, because it's all in one tool.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah. No, that's brilliant. I am curious just thinking of the things that I've heard clients ask us about or guests at Design Camp ask about. What about, like, if you wanted to create a line item for procurement, let's say you're just doing a flat percentage of that, or you, you know, you're in California and you have to charge for Procurement, and those are hourly or you're wanting to do a flat percentage. Hourly makes more sense. We're going to get into how you can track your hours in material. But like if you did want to add certain things as flat line items, is that an option?
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Yes. So there are again, I'll try to explain this. So you can add service items and that can be an hourly estimate or a flat fee. If you were doing something like a percentage on a project. So a procurement fee, let's say it's 15% procurement fee at the bottom of your project, near the grand total, you can add in custom fees and those can be flat fees or those can be percentages and then those can be turned off and on when you go to send an invoice. So if I'm going to bill my client for product, I'm going to keep that procurement fee turned on. If I'm going to bill my client for my hourly time that I've tracked, I'm going to that procurement fee off. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in showing your client that there is a fee and how much that impacts the grand total and then also gives you flexibility when you go to invoice for certain things in a project.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Okay, that's amazing. And then I just gave the example in California, you have to charge sales tax for procurement. Is there an option in those line items that you can also turn on and off sales tax?
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Of course.
I'm like, do I, I don't know. Yes, I hope yes. In, in, in percentage fees and in flat fees that are added at the bottom of your project, you can add sales tax. And then same goes for of course, any scope item as well.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Okay, great. Talk to us about real time margin visibility and how that works in supporting more profitable design decisions.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I'm not sure like, I feel like this is Brooke's area. I don't want it. She's going to come get me for this. But. So I, I don't want to say that I'm like the number one person to an will sort of.
Say again. I think the only way I said this again, I feel like I'm repeating myself. But the only way to know if you have sort of like get a good look at real time margin is if you have all those things in one place. So one of the things that I think material does in supporting that is again in that scope table view, you can see your margin across the project and then in your performance tab, there are these little Charts that show you your planned profit versus your actual profit.
And so those are just like easy to read indicators on a project level because you can track your actuals in the tool, right? Like you're planning and then you're tracking actuals. It just gives you the ability to look at it in the tool. Now I definitely think this is something that we could be better at. It's something that we are continuing to learn about as the tool has become more and more robust and sort of takes in more and more of the, you know, design, build projects. I think this will only get better as we grow and as we sort of focus on this. But I think because we can do really solid invoicing and, and really solid, you know, order tracking in the platform, it just gives you the ability to.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: See that is there an opportunity or maybe you guys are thinking about adding it if it doesn't exist, to see all of your projects profitability. Like can you look at the money that you are projected to have coming in versus the money you've already spent? Can you be looking at your studio as a whole?
[00:30:06] Speaker B: That's a great question. And at the moment, no. So at the moment material is very project focused and that is because our number one mission is to just like make that fast and make that reliable. But I do think, you know, when you, when you've been in business, you know, for four to five years now with customers and they have all of these projects that they're running and they're taking on more projects because this tool is enabling them to do that. This is obviously sort of one of the next pieces of feedback I think that we've been receiving, which is I want overall, you know, company wide profitability. And I think one thing I would love to do is sort of take that information about which projects were really successful and what went well on them and then give you that, that data and that information to sort of inform future projects. I think I would say some of it is there. Right. So we didn't get into time tracking yet, but, but if you're tracking your time and you know how long it takes you to do part of the work and you know how much it costs you to do part of that work, then you do have a glimpse into that at one project that you can, you know, use to inform the other. Um, but I would love to have like more robust reporting and metrics across all projects.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Amazing. Let's, let's go ahead and pop down to time tracking and hourly billing. Those continue to be just major pain points and as I've interviewed at this point now over a hundred designers in the industry here on the show, I do hear frequently that charging hourly is the best, most guaranteed, safe method in billing. While just as many people say it is such a pain in the ass, I am not going to track this. I cannot get my team to do it. I have an idea of how long it's taken me. That's what I'm basing my proposals off of. How does material handle time tracking, tracking for billable hours or fixed fee projects? And also we talk a lot at Design Camp about hybrid pricing models.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So both are possible in materio, and I do think a lot of designers are running hybrid models, at least the ones that I'm talking to. So oftentimes you might have flat fee at the beginning, so in that initial design phase, and then you might later move into an hourly rate for something like project management or procurement. Right. So you can absolutely have both what you're going to do. And again, I feel like if you haven't seen material, maybe none of this is going to make sense. I keep going back to the scope items, but what you can have is your flat fee scope items spelled out right. Those can come first and you can say, okay, my design fee, or for schematic design, or you know, the initial design, conceptual design, however you want to break it down, those design fees can be there and they can just be a flat number. Then you can have project management, procurement, and you can list those out with, you know, times 100 hours at $100 an hour, $200 an hour, whatever the rates are, and you can spell those out. So both of those in the scope are going to be giving your client an estimate at what it's going to take to do that work. But then when it actually comes again to tracking time, we have a time tracking widget that kind of can follow you around the application.
It has, you know, a start, stop, timer, pause, you know, all that. And then it has manual time entry as well. And then on that little time tracking widget, you can also set up specific activities that you want your team to track towards. So some designers might set this up where they name the activities, certain phases. Some of them may have very specific activities. You can also do company wide activities. So you know, training, social media, whatever it might be basically non billable work. And then you can use those to track against it. Now inside that time widget, you can also choose to track that time against your scope of work. So if I said I'm going to spend, you know, I'm going to bill my client $40,000 for the design fee.
You're actually having your team track against that design fee so that when it comes down to it, you can look and say, well, where are we at? Are we over?
Are we over on what we estimated? Because if so, we're definitely not making money, you know? And so you can kind of put those two side by side. And again, in your performance tab, you can have itemized, we call it itemized time. And you can see where you're at with that itemized time. And so that really gives you the structure that you need to see where you're at on a project.
And then for billing your clients that flat fee or that hourly rate, there's two ways. For the flat rate you would just bill. You would go to collect a deposit or collect an invoice, and you would drag the percentage of what you want to collect. So if you want to collect 50% of it, great. For the hourly, you actually use the time that your team has tracked, and you drop that onto the invoice in a click, and you can select a date range and go, okay, I want to do, you know, August time billing. And you send that over to your client through there. So. So both methods are possible. And what I will say unsolicited advice here is I think even if you're doing a flat fee, you should be tracking your hours. I feel like that has to be probably something everyone believes at this point, even though we don't love to do that. It's time tracking is not fun. But I think at least for some amount of time, knowing how long it takes you to accomplish a certain phase of work, how long it takes you and how much it costs you, you have to do that work at some point as a designer, or you can't properly decide what those fees should be. And maybe that's something I'm sure you guys have advice on, like how often you might want to revisit that. But I think that it's something that, you know, if you're a new designer coming into materio and you're talking to me, I'm going to encourage you to do that.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: Okay, so two other questions when we're talking about financials, because to be totally honest with you, Mary Beth, this is like, probably the top three things most important to me or like, that stand out to me most when it comes to material is that in our experience, if a design studio is working with studio designer in particular, they need a bookkeeper who specializes in studio because they are doing all of their financials within studio Designer.
What makes materio so much more accessible in my opinion is the fact that it does integrate with QuickBooks. Allowing you to work with a, an accountant or CPA or bookkeeper that is familiar with working in QuickBooks. They don't need to be specifically trained in material in order to be an effective bookkeeper for you.
So talk to us about what the sync with QuickBooks looks like. So we have all this information. What exactly is, is getting pushed over to QuickBooks for your bookkeeper?
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think first and foremost, just kind of high level, the reason we decided to integrate with QuickBooks and continue to work on that integration is because it's, it's common, it's accessible. Like you said, it's approachable. There are tons of people who know how to use QuickBooks and I think it can do the tax reporting and things that you need. That material is going to give it. Right. So you know, time is an asset. Like we don't want to be spending in money, right? So we don't want to be spending money to have a bookkeeper that can only work in a certain system that may not work for us. And also we don't want to replace QuickBooks. It's been around and it's good at what it does for the most part. So I would say that your question was exactly what does what Syncs over to QuickBooks from Material. So when you go into set up your QuickBooks connection in Material, it's actually going to kind of walk you through it. It kind of tries to auto populate a lot of the information.
But in short, what's syncing are your invoices that you're sending to your client, your purchase orders and the bill payments on those purchase orders, your expenses.
And so that seems really simple. But basically that's sinking over and we have it broken down by products, services, subcontractor or third party labor. The transaction fees on your purchase orders, those sync over in a certain way. And I'm going to, I'm not a QuickBooks expert so don't, so don't quote me on all of this.
And then I'm trying to think the one thing that I think I really enjoy and I like nerd out on and think a lot of designers really love is when you are tracking your purchase orders and let's say you place the order online and you're going in and you're saying okay, I use my amex for this, you can have those purchasing methods synced over. So when you track that in material, so whoever's doing procurement is saying, oh, okay, use the Amex 1, 2, 3, 4.
Well, that is actually going to reconcile on the QuickBooks side. And so that part is really huge for designers who are doing lots of orders and really need that to be up to date and in sync.
So I don't know if you have a more specific question that you would.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Like for me to cover, but I am wondering what about things like is there a place to input your rent, like other expenses like that, or would that be something that your bookkeeper is adding directly into QuickBooks?
[00:39:11] Speaker B: So for now, that's something that your bookkeeper would be adding directly into QuickBooks. I will get. I might get in trouble for saying this, but you could.
I have had some firms who do like a studio project, so they name it their studio name and then they track expenses there and that goes over to QuickBooks so that they don't ever have to really do that communication side. So work around, work around. Heck, didn't say it. Don't come for me. Teddy, he knows her QuickBooks. He's gonna be like, marybeth, what are you doing saying that? But I do think, I really think it's like, not that bad. Like, the idea is that you as a designer, you don't want to have to leave your tool and you want to be able to have your information sync over all that. To say again, that comes back to material continuing to grow and continuing to listen to what our customers want. And I think full, you know, studio level accounting and at least expense tracking at a minimum, to get a good gauge of overhead is something that people really want. Want.
[00:40:07] Speaker A: Lastly, talking about financials from your vantage point, what financial metrics should designers really be tracking on a weekly or monthly basis to be running a healthy business?
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Yes. Again, I feel like this is not, this is not my area of expertise and I'm going to feel like I'm repeating myself over and over again.
So how do I put this? I think that, yeah, I would like to say, like, just restate. I think that there is. There are more people better equipped to talk about this than me. But from my vantage point and just my perspective of what I see, oftentimes firms are coming to us when they are scattered across those tools and they have no idea about baseline financial metrics. So if you want to be successful in knowing just like, am I going to survive another month? I think you need to get really good at Project level profitability. And that's really simple, actually. It's just, how much revenue am I planning to bring in, how much did I actually bring in, and most importantly, how much time and what is the cost of that time? So whether it's your time or your team's time, I think that often designers don't really think, and I shouldn't say designers, business owners don't think about the time it takes to go between steps. Right. And so, you know, sometimes people might look at material and go, oh, that's, you know, that's more expensive or that's a premium product. Well, it is, because what we're doing is bringing the work to you, and your team is not having to go search for the work or do that work multiple times. And I think from a, you know, a financial metric and what you should be tracking is time, and no one likes to do it. Right. It's really hard because you don't want to.
You don't want to be at the end of the week going, well, why didn't you to your senior designer? Why didn't you Bill 40? Didn't you do 40 billable hours this week? Well, that's impossible. That's their whole work week. How could they possibly do everything billable? Right? So I say this to say, I think if you can understand specifically the revenue that is planned on a project, where you're at with that, and that is also how much of it is left to be invoiced or billed for and how much you've actually collected and your team's time, those are key things. I'll also say that I've been surprised by the amount of designers who feel nervous to send an invoice or don't know if they've missed something. And so I think, like, I don't know if that counts as a financial metric, but I would say knowing how much is left to be invoiced on your project and how much of it you've either collected a deposit for or have, you know, sent that out and when you expect it to be paid, I think those are just really important, sort of of very baseline things. But if you haven't gotten into one tool or one to two tools yet, that's the first step. Then you can really start to think about those key financial metrics.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: Okay, great. Let's talk about client experience. Like, how are clients interacting with materio? Is there a portal or presentation layer that helps streamline communication and approvals? I know, based off of your moment, it feels like there should be. And what if you really like to do your design presentations in Canva or Google Slides or Keynote? How can those be brought in?
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So first off, absolutely. Client experience is one of the number one reasons that anyone comes to Materio. And it's something that we have prioritized from day one. Like you said that aha moment, we were sort of clients in that moment and we felt like we were lost. And I think that's actually something that we observed when we really did a lot of research was that this is the biggest investment a client is typically making, like sometimes in their life. And it's an investment on one of their biggest investments. So like our biggest assets. And so they care deeply about the money that is going into this, the decisions that are being made. You know, it's rare that you have a client that says, oh yeah, okay, here's a million dollars, I'll see you in a year or whatever. So it's very important that the client can be engaged with the firm if the firm wants them to and if the client wants to be there. And so in Materio there is a client portal. There are definitely a few things you can do pre inviting your client in. So you can send them an invoice if you need to. You can send them that contract or design agreement we talked about without them having to have a login.
But when it comes to presentations and approvals on that work, that is something that they're going to be logged in into the platform for. They're going to have their own login. And the reason they love this is not only for making approvals, because that's not even the most exciting part. I think it's about the communication. It's about having a place to go to have peace of mind that the project is moving forward.
So instead of calling your designer and saying, did that thing ship and is it coming to my house or is it going to the site or you know, they have a place to go to see that information and to get real time updates by just logging in. Which means that they can do it on their own time as well. Right. Most of these people are professionals working. They're thinking about this when they get home at night and they've put their kids to bed and they're sitting there at 10 o' clock at night and when they have time to think about it, which usually isn't when the design team wants to be hearing from them. Right. So I think that's one of the biggest things is the Communication that can be handled inside the system and having a client be able to log in and see, oh, you have some action items, you have an invoice you need to pay, you have some things that needs to be approved, you have a change order that needs approval. Right. Those can all be done through the portal. So that's really, you know, a big selling point for most designers. I actually talked to someone who said that before Materia, they were getting 400 to 500 text messages a day that they had to field. And now that's down to about 40 to 50, which to her felt very manageable compared to 400 text messages she was having to field. So I thought that was, like, pretty incredible because it just means that they had a place to go. Right. And it wasn't the designer's phone. And then your second. The second part of the question was around, you know, if you like to do your presentations in Canva or Google Slides or whatever it might be.
I think that there's a lot of designers who feel that they want to keep doing that, and I can tell you all day long that that is absolutely fine and that you can import them into Materio. But what I wouldn't be telling you is how much it's kind of going back to the time spent.
You're paying your team to take things from spreadsheets to Canva, from Canva to invoicing, from Canva to design files, whatever it might be. Right? You're paying your team, who cost a lot, who you want to be able to keep and pay well and have them do valuable work. You're paying for them to duplicate their work. So I think one of the really cool things about how you can present in Materio is that, you know, we talked about our scope of work, we talked about pulling in product to that scope of work. You can actually build out boards and presentations with that product in a click. So add all the kitchen items, add all the living room items, and you can kind of compose that into a nice presentation inside of the tool. And so you're not having to do that process of pasting a link here, grabbing it there. Where did that come from? Right. It's all there. And that part of our tool is getting better and better.
So I think you definitely could. And I still tell teams, especially when they're onboarding, you know, feel free to import all that work. Don't redo the work if you've already done it. But as you start to move forward with projects in Materio, make sure you're exploring that as an option so that you can cut that cost.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: What about. I mean, obviously at idego, we sell design presentation templates in Canva and that sort of thing. What about for someone who like, wants it to feel really branded? Can you add text to those boards? Can you bring your logo in? Can you. Do you have the creative freedom to make it feel more romantic that than just, you know, here's the Clipper tools initial, like their primary images that it's all getting dropped on. Can you make it feel a little bit more romantic or designed than that?
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's also a great collaboration opportunity.
So I think that.
Yes, so I will say probably from. If you've logged into material today, and I don't even want to say this because I don't know when this is going to air, but what we're doing right now, we're about to go into early testing of design presentations. And with that design presentation tool, you'll have the same capabilities of the boards that you have today, which is you can add text, you can size the text, you can add backgrounds. Your logo is actually on there by default, but you can add your logo in there. You can add images from your product library, you can, you know, screenshot something and drag it in. All of that is there. But what I think is coming next in that presentation is that templating of your branded deck, I would say. Right. So we want to. Or our presentation, we want to have the Chal Studios, you know, brand, and we want that to repeat on every single slide so we're not having to do it.
I think, you know, definitely, probably your customer base and your fans are going to be looking for, you know, they've paid for a specific font, right, that they are incorporating or you're telling them to use. They're looking for line work, maybe different sort of arrows, I don't know, different sort of elements that they want to add in.
So all of that, like, you can very much get creative with how you drop it in. Like, if you really love this certain arrow that you always use on your presentation, take a screenshot, remove the background and drop it on and just duplicate it seven times and rotate it. Right. But it's not going to be as easy as having something like a Canva template. And again, it's where firms right now, and I hate that I have to say this right now, make the decision of how much time does it take me to duplicate all of the work.
If I'm doing a project that is really Small. Maybe it's just a couple rooms. Okay. Maybe I can duplicate the work. But if I'm doing a full 20,000 square foot house, I need to operationalize my business and I need to make sure that I can get those designs out the door. And they may look 70% as good, but I'm saving thousands and thousands of dollars of team time.
So it's, it's something that I would love to work on and love to sort of make better for the designers that are using our platform.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: Perfect. We'll talk offline about how to make that happen.
Okay. Next, I'd love to chat about, honestly, kind of like market comparisons and there's so many platforms out there for interior designers. We hear nonstop about House Pro, Studio Designer, Ivy Design Files, Mydoma, and more. What do you think truly makes Materio different in your opinion?
[00:50:49] Speaker B: That's a great question. So I would say, and, and it's honestly like, hold on, let me think about this one because it could be really long. I, I tend to go long. So hold on, maybe I start over.
Okay.
Will you ask me the question one more time? Just so I like mentally hear you ask it and then I don't sound like I'm just reading off something.
[00:51:12] Speaker A: So I know that you have put so much research into, like not comparing material into other platforms, but we do hear all day about designers using everything from Houzz Pro to Studio Designer and Ivy Design Files, Mydoma. There's. There are so many programs out there to choose from. In your opinion, what makes Materio different?
[00:51:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. So I think the thing that really makes Materio different from these other tools is Materio is not just a project management tool. It is truly a standard way of working. Like, it is a process from beginning to end. And like I kind of mentioned before, with us bringing the work to you, what we want to do is give you rails to run on. When one thing happens in Materio, there's a ripple effect.
So, you know, okay, my client has approved an entire presentation.
Great. Now, all of those items are auto drafted by vendor and can easily be, you know, kick off the order process.
So. Or my client has paid for 50%. Okay. Now we're showing you in the visual workspace, these items are paid 50%.
So we're actually giving you a standard way of working and we're moving you through the process rather than asking you to try to develop that process yourself.
So I think if you're someone who's trying to hire on a new team, Member and you realize, well, if I'm using one of these other tools, I'm also using spreadsheets. I'm also using, you know, some other kind of like design presentation tool. I'm using time tracking and then I'm having to onboard a team member to all those tools. This is going to allow you to sort of be efficient in the way that you work and give you really one project delivery system.
And so I think that's really the difference. I mean, apart from just being intuitive, I hear a lot like it's intuitive, you know, it's easy to use. And I think too when I, when I hear from others that you know, oh well, I'm using X software and it's clunky to me, it tells me that they didn't set up that structure at the beginning and that's again not their fault. It's not something that I think maybe even they realized that they did. I think they were oftentimes built by, you know, a designer or a builder who wanted to build a tool for themselves. But when you know so much about an industry, sometimes it's hard to step outside of that and, and take a different approach to sort of organizing how you do work. So I don't know if that helps.
[00:53:50] Speaker A: But yeah, it definitely does. I'm curious what who you guys are experiencing are really thriving in materia. What types of firms? Is it solo designers or larger teams? Or is there a sweet spot of a team of like three to five people?
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. I would actually say that there is no like one size team that really thrives. I think we have designers who are solopreneurs and we have designers who are running or maybe more of the design build side who are running 30 people, you know, on their team. All of those people are going to be successful. I think what makes makes someone thrive in materio is when they realize that they can no longer work in their business. They need to be working on their business and they need a tool that can enable them to do that.
So the ones who are going to thrive have that mindset of I'm really good at one thing, but I'm not good at everything. And that's okay. If I want to do what I'm good at, I need to operationalize what my team is doing and how I run these projects. So I think it's, you know, it's, it's not always about the team size. I do think when you think about type of work. So if you're listening to this and you're wondering, is this good for me?
Is this a tool? Should I consider making this, you know, jump? I think that it is important to think about the type of work you do. So are you full service design? Are you going all the way from start to finish? Are you usually there when construction is happening and you're sort of coordinating with trades? This is a great tool for you. If you're running your projects right now on 5 to 10 different systems and it involves things like budgeting, sourcing, approvals, procurement, especially procurement, you know, billing, all that, this is a great tool for you to consider.
So I think it's if you're also maybe if you're about to hire an operations person or you feel like you need that person on your team right now, this is also a great tool for you to consider.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: Just a couple follow up questions that I've been collecting throughout our time chatting a.
If you do have a large team, how is material built? Is it like per seat? Does it suddenly like this software suddenly $8,000 a month, like how does that happen? Because I know that that is a big consideration for a lot of people.
Why they aren't going to other.
Other platforms, for instance?
[00:56:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. And actually I believe we have a blog post on seat based pricing that Thomas passionately wrote. So we actually are a tool that is priced per project. And so in materio we believe that every person who needs to collaborate on a project should be able to collaborate on a project without penalty. So whether you have 10 trades involved and an outside PM and a GC and a whole design team, they should all be there because that's the only way that the project is going to be successful is everyone is on the same page. So you will never find seed based pricing or at least there's none right now. And I don't think we have plans to do that because we believe that everyone should should be involved. But what we do price on is project count and functionality. So if you are a designer who is doing lots of procurement and you are doing a lot of work with trades, you're going to be on our systematized tier because you're really a professional business doing professional work and that's where you're going to end up.
And then that comes with a standard amount of projects. But then if you need to go above that, it's you can buy individual projects or packs of projects at a discounted rate so you can sort of scale up your operations and again find that that's needed because when you come into materio, you may only be able to take on four or five projects and keep your sanity, but if you implement the tool, you most likely going to be able to double that amount of project or scale up the size of that project significantly. So it's kind of in line with a revenue model in a way. Like if you have big. It's really not though because if you, you can be running a $5 million project and you're still paying, you know, the same amount as others. But the idea is that it's capacity based based and so should probably like not say it's revenue based because it's really not. It's really about if you can take on more work without hiring more people, then that is kind of the key value metric there.
[00:58:08] Speaker A: Okay, another follow up question.
Can you turn on and off what a client's able to see in the portal? Like if, like you said, I think you gave an example of like your team sourced five sofa options and you as a team are going to decide what actually gets presented. How are you able to kind of shield that from a client before they get to see it in their client portal?
[00:58:35] Speaker B: Yeah, so actually as you're sourcing options, those are not visible to the client. You have to send those to the client for approval for them to be published. So by the time you send them for approval, you would have sort of deleted some of them or gotten rid of them internally. You may have had discussions and you can actually communicate as a team back and forth on product. So. So you know, if you had a junior designer pull in four sofas, but you, you as the principal come in and you want to communicate about what, what you don't and do like about those, or if you wanna go ahead and delete some of them, you can do that before you send it over to your client.
[00:59:08] Speaker A: Is there any other internal communication options like I'm thinking about A lot of designers like to use Asana for like their project management.
Is there in a perfect world, do you see that also being absorbed by material or for general project, you know, chit chat back and forth. Is something like Slack or Asana still going to be used?
[00:59:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So at the moment if you want to chit chat, that definitely has to happen outside of material, we're very like streamlined in the communications department. Meaning you can communicate on floor plans, you can communicate on scope items and you can communicate on product. You will also be able to communicate on the presentation. So you can add, add notes and documents as you're presenting, that being said not to like share anything too big, but I think that communication, I'll say communication is something that we are working on. It's something that we believe should be really integrated throughout the system.
And it's something that we're in sort of a very deep research phase of right now.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: That's exciting. Okay, so let's talk about how material supports designers both like for onboarding and also off onboarding. Because moving everything from one platform to another just feels super overwhelming. And I know that there are people listening that like this sounds amazing, but I'm already, you know, chin deep in X, Y and Z. Is there like live customer support? Is there a community? Are there templates to help teams get started? Started?
[01:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So when you subscribe to material right now? Well, I guess I should back up. When you trial for material right now, you should be invited to a basics training session that trialers get invited to. And that's a group session where you can come on and learn sort of the ins and outs and the kind of foundational elements of the platform.
After you subscribe to materio, if you are on that middle tier or above, you get a complimentary one on one onboarding session.
Everybody does get a quick 15 minute assessment prior to that onboarding session. If you're, even if you're on the lowest tier, I mean, that's just to set goals and expectations about what you want to get out of the tool. And we can either send you video resources from our extensive library of tutorials or you would then move on to get your one on one onboarding session.
And then on top of that, we do have live customer chat or support from 9 to 5 Central Time. That's a real human that you can engage with and solve really hard problems with. We do have an AI chat as well, which is really helpful for just easy, quick things. Or if you have questions that you want to explore and you don't maybe want to ask a human. But we do have humans there who are ready to sort of dig into deeper questions and sometimes that might end up in, hey, you need a coaching session with Mary Beth or you need a paid training session because this is like a very specific use case with Lindsay and that will point you in the right direction. So I think in general our sort of philosophy is just ask, just reach out, just let us know what you need and we will find a way to get you some support.
We also have a very, I mentioned like a very extensive YouTube library. Of tutorials which we're continually sort of updating and we're sort of doing a big push to create now. And we're also trying to work on what we call material school, which is, is just an onboarding course that you can kind of go through on your own as well. So, you know, if you, if you're wanting to do this at night or if you're wanting to do this, get your team to just watch the videos and understand what's needed. That's also very much an option. And one more thing I'll say, when it comes to thinking about when is the right time to transition to a tool, I usually like to tell people and if you can find a time where you're winding down a few projects and you're getting ready to start a new project and anything that you're starting, make sure that you're putting it in materio. And if you sign up for a trial, don't use a test project, don't waste your time, use a real project because you'll love it and you'll want to keep going and you don't want to be doing this with test data. So I always try to encourage teams like you don't have to transition everything at once.
First get organized, first get your scope in there. We do have an AI import tool so you can import your spreadsheet and that will try to build out your scope of work for you. And that sort of helps you just get started and sort of understand the system and then, and then from there, you know, watching the videos, joining those training sessions. Oh, and then we also have bi weekly, what we call ask material, anything. So those are usually on new features that have come out as well as some free time to just sort of jump in, ask questions and get those answered in a group setting as well. And we did just launch a community. I kind of forgot about that. So very excited. We just launched our community and probably by the time this is out, that will be for everyone. Right now we've got some of our early, most excited users in there sort of telling us what they want again, listening, trying to understand how we can make it the best possible place. And we hope to open that up to the industry as well eventually and just give it, give everyone a really solid place to sort of come and connect with others that are doing good work. Work.
[01:04:21] Speaker A: Okay, here's a really hard question because I, I just want everyone to know that like this is just such a genuine conversation. I just so genuinely appreciate and believe in material. Before I ask what feedback? You know, what great feedback people have provided who have switched over from another platform.
In full candor, what is one thing that you are hearing from people who have made the switch that you're like, this is something I want material work on. Is this something that I think we can improve upon?
[01:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think the biggest thing I have a lot that I want always, I'm. I'm known on the team as the person who's like, like always being like, guys, we gotta make this better. So I would say my biggest goal for the next year for material is to truly remove Asana ClickUp Monday. Like, I want to not have to have those tools. I think people still have those tools or designers still have those tools because they're running outside of projects, work in there. So teamwork, like, oh, we have this company initiative we need to run, or we have our company Playbooks living here or whatever it might be that they have those for.
I would love to allow them to put that in material. I think they want it. I think the more anyone gets into material, the more we get asked, can this go here, can this go here, can this go here? And so I think they see the potential to put all of their work there. So I think that's probably the biggest.
[01:06:01] Speaker A: Thing.
[01:06:04] Speaker B: And maybe second would be branding. I think we have designers who are designers. I say that I'm smiling because, like, obviously I think that as designers who have invested in our brands and in the way that we communicate about ourselves, we want to make sure that our tool, especially client facing, is presented the way that we want it to be presented and represents us and our brand. So I think those are two big things that I would. I would kind of love to do for our customers that they keep asking about and that I think we have the potential to deliver. Deliver.
[01:06:41] Speaker A: Okay. And then on the flip side, for those who have made the jump and I, I do just want to double down on what you said, Mary Beth. I always, always, always encourage our clients to. When you're ready to switch platforms from whatever platforms, whether that's from ivy to material or ivy to studio or anything else, start a new project in the new software, close out old projects in the existing software. It's like you were explaining you're paying your team to do double the work if you move projects over mid project.
So for those studios who have made the shift over to materio, what do you. What are some of the feedback that you're, like, most proud of?
[01:07:23] Speaker B: Gosh, I love talking to people that have Switched to material and have loved it. I've actually. So we do have a bunch of case studies on our website. Those are 100% real. Like, I could show you that. I think we have videos of all of them and I did some of them myself. So that was really, really exciting because I firsthand got to see how material has literally transformed people's businesses and lives. I mean, I mentioned the one earlier about the text messages, which I don't even think that's in the case studies. And we had someone just yesterday say, like, I love material. This is exactly how I think. So I think that's one of the most rewarding things is when people say, say it's like you read my mind or this is how I think. Like, that is just incredible to me that one, we have a tool that somehow thinks like designers and two, that they found us. Like, they get so excited because a lot of people say, I've been looking for something like this for years, or I was thinking about building something that would solve my problems and here it is. And so I think that's really cool.
I get really excited when moms tell me that they have like gotten more time back with their family. That's something that I'm very passionate about. I have a almost five year old and I want to have time with her. And so for me, if I can have a mom that says, like, I don't have to look at this at night, like, I'm not getting texts or I'm knowing that my team is running smoothly, or I can go on vacation for a month, like, whoa, that's awesome.
I also think, think honestly, just like profitability or like numbers say a lot. So I know there's someone who mentioned that they're like 300 more what percent more than what they were the following year, which is just insane. Someone told me that when they first, you know, started using Material or prematero, they had about seven projects that they could manage sanely and now they're able to do about 20.
And so for teams to just, just, you know, really, sometimes it's individuals like you meet someone who is running 10 projects on spreadsheets by themselves and then they get into the system and they're able to relax. Like, they're able to seriously not have to think about that at night, that's really cool. And I think also like, personally, my. So I'm. I come from a family of design build. I don't think I said that at the beginning. My parents ran a design build firm and they've been on material since the very beginning.
And to be able to see my parents not have to sit up at night and argue about project details or talk. It's like 10 o' clock at night. My dad's the contractor, so he's exhausted. He's been up since 4:30. And then my mom has a design question and they're having to have a place to talk about it. And for them to not have that I think is really cool. We actually lived with them in Covid for a while when we were doing a lot of research.
And so we got to see firsthand the types of conversations that firms were coming home at night and having with each other.
And then to be able to see that sort of shift and for them to be able to give that to their team, for them to be able to hire people into those roles to take care of things. I mean, at a personal level, I'm seeing my family literally improve their life. And I think when they started they were able to take on 12 projects and now they have almost 50.
Right. So just the scale of like how much you can take on is really amazing. And my sister is an interior designer. So I actually have. I actually have my parents who are design build who my brother and my. One of my sisters works for them. So that's four family members. And then I have an interior design sister also who is now using material she wasn't at first and she was working in commercial and then she switched over about two years ago and loves it. So it's just really cool. Like your family's gonna be the most honest with you. Sometimes I think I come from a family of also entrepreneurs and business owners. And so we're not gonna just like be fluffy about it. So that's really cool. And honestly, one of the most exciting things I know that's only a few people, but when you hear that coming, you see it firsthand from your family. And then you hear that similar type of feedback coming from people that you don't know or you're not, you know, privy to their conversations or stress at night. But you know that now it's wiped that away.
Really cool. It's just. It's just really. I don't know, it makes us want to keep going. It makes us want to show up every day and be like, okay, what else can we put in here? And how can we make it better? And what can we do to just like eliminate this other stressful moment we didn't think about?
[01:11:54] Speaker A: Mary Beth, last technical question.
One thing that I'm just envisioning getting pushback from is clients buy into being like, yes, I am willing to log in to this client portal and communicate with you here. Because even in my own, you know, graphic web design firm, there are some clients who are like, nope, I want to be on the phone. I need you to walk me through this. I need to do all of I. They need a lot of hand holding and they don't care to have another login. What advice do you have to designers to to facilitate client buy in and willingness to participate on the program?
[01:12:31] Speaker B: Yes, great question.
So I will say that actually in general, if you invite your client into material, they love it. Like they, I had someone telling me their client was raving about it and they didn't even ask. They weren't like, hey, how do you like my tool? They were just saying to them, this is so easy. I can do this, you know, when I need to and all this stuff.
So all that to say, I don't want to sound like I'm like being like business coachy, whatever. But I think sometimes as business owners we need to set standards for our clients and we need to hold them to those standards. So if you're a firm that values your time and you've chosen to use a tool like Materio to make you more efficient, it is totally acceptable to say to your client, this is the way that I work. This is a proven way of working. This is so I can get signed off validation on your $50,000 of countertops so that I'm not held liable for them. This is the way that we transact business. I think part of it. I mean you would never, you would never say to an attorney, no, thank you, sir, I'm not going to like pay your invoice because I don't want to log into the platform. Like if they told you that's what you had to do, you would do it. So I think one thing that I want to encourage designers to do is think about, I got a calendar notification. One thing I want to encourage designers to do is to think about how they are presenting themselves to their clients and creating standards that it is perfectly okay to hold your client to that. Now you may have someone who is very high end client who maybe it's an A list celebrity. Fine. You can use Materio, you can use a concierge login. You can create a concierge login for your team. You can make them sign something that says that anything that is agreed upon via that account is there saying that's okay. And then you can send them presentations or you can present with them in person and have material as a sidekick, that's totally fine. But I do think that if you're in the mindset of being efficient, I would encourage people to just try it, you know, and some clients will love it. Clients who have done projects before with other design and build teams will absolutely love it.
We know that. Right. If they've had to endure any other tool out there, they love it. If they're just not willing to use it, I think that you just need to protect yourself because we've given you a tool where they can be logged in and authenticated so that you are protected.
Because the last thing we want is for you to go in and approving things and then your client go, I didn't approve that. I'm not paying you for that. So I think that it's like, maybe this is like a chicken and egg problem. Maybe this is a business coaching problem. Maybe you have a good response where you can encourage people to do this. But I think ultimately both are options. You do not have to invite your client in. Am I going to tell you, I suggest that no, never. I will always tell you, protect yourself, yourself. And for me, having a client logging in and approving is protection.
[01:15:32] Speaker A: Great. I know you have to hop off. I know you have another call here pretty soon. You've given us a lot of teasers as to like, what's in the pipeline, what your big dreams are for materio. Are there any upcoming features or big updates that you can tease for us before we say goodbye?
[01:15:48] Speaker B: I mean, I think the biggest one will hopefully be be in early access when this is live. But I think this is our presentation format that we're sort of launching. I think this is like, like we're just talking about clients, right? And clients not wanting to click buttons or do things. This is a sign off in one click, you know, pay sort of situation that we are hoping to really bring in the branding elements to at some point.
And then, yeah, I kind of teased this earlier. I think the biggest thing is, is communication and sort of how we can re envision how that happens on a project and how projects are facilitated. So, you know, I think we're just getting started really. This, this is really just so much of this, of what we've done already is, is, is just the beginning. Like, like there's so much more work to do in the best way possible and I think our team is really excited to start tackling that so.
[01:16:48] Speaker A: Well, Marybeth, this was so informative. Thank you so much for explaining the platform even more to me. But also just being so open to like actually having a real conversation about where people are having pain points and how maybe it's material that's the solution for them. I hope it is, but it's really about finding what's going to work best for your team and what's going to increase your productivity level and essentially your profitability at the end of the day.
[01:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think too, like, I hope that everyone can take away some of these ideas as just principles to live by or to operate. It doesn't have to be material, it doesn't have to be our tool. But let's all be more efficient. Let's eliminate the waste in the industry, let's make people's lives better. Like, yeah, I hope all of you can do that. So in whatever way that is, thank.
[01:17:34] Speaker A: You so much and I'll talk to you soon.
[01:17:35] Speaker B: All right. Thank you, Anastasia. It was great.
[01:17:39] Speaker A: For more for an in depth analysis of this interview, including exclusive downloads, examples and more, don't forget to subscribe to the Interior Collective on Patreon. We are building an amazing private community of interior designers and industry experts open to candid conversations and answering questions. Join us on Patreon in the show notes
[email protected] the Interior Collective thank you so, so much for tuning into this episode. Producing this show has truly been the honor of my career and I cannot believe I get to have these conversations.
A big, huge thank you to our production team at IDCO Studio and Quinn made. Your contribution literally makes this podcast feasible and the biggest thank you to you, our listeners. Your sweet notes, DMs and reviews mean so much to us as we work to keep our show free and always accessible until. Until next time. I'm Anastasia Casey and this is the Interior Collective, a podcast for the business of beautiful living.
