- July 9, 2026
- LuAnn Nigara
We were upstairs getting dressed during the break.
It was Power Talk Friday in New Jersey. A full day. Good energy in the room, good conversations, the kind of event that reminds you why you built what you built. Nigara came in and asked how the day was going.
I told him it was a great day.
He looked at me and said: no, I mean profitability. How are you doing on profitability?
And here is the thing. I did not deflect. I did not say I think we’re fine or I’ll have to check with my bookkeeper. I looked at him and I said: the profitability today is good. But if you want to talk about where I am year to date against projection, I am off by $160,000.
He just looked at me.
I said: so yes, today is a great day. And LuAnn has more fish to fry when she wakes up tomorrow morning.
Now here is why I am telling you this story. Because the point is not the $160,000 gap. Gaps happen. Business is not a straight line and anyone who tells you otherwise has never run one.
The point is that I knew the number.
For the first time in four years of running LuAnn Nigara Inc., I could name exactly where I stood against my own projections, in real time, at a cocktail hour, without looking anything up. I knew what the gap was. I knew where it was coming from. And I knew what I was going to do about it when I got back to my desk.
That clarity — not the gap, the clarity — is what Michele Williams gave me.
The Hidden Financial Disadvantage Most Creative Business Owners Don’t Know They Have
For forty years, I ran Window Works side by side with Vin.
I was the salesperson. He was the numbers guy. That was our division and it worked beautifully. Every month he would sit down with the data and tell me where we were — on target, off target, ahead by this much, behind by that much. I drove the top line. He managed everything underneath it.
When I built my own business, I replicated the part I knew how to do. I drove revenue. I brought in sponsors, speaking engagements, coaching clients, events. I was doing what I had always done.
What I did not replicate was the layer underneath. Because at Window Works, that layer was Vin. It was fed to me. I never had to build it myself.
So for four years, I was running a real business the way a lot of you are running yours right now. Revenue coming in. Expenses going out. A general sense that things were okay. A bookkeeper keeping records. A CPA handling taxes. And me, focused on the next sale, the next episode, the next event — trusting that the numbers were probably fine because nobody had told me otherwise.
That is not a business strategy. That is hope with a spreadsheet.
Michele Williams is the person who helped me see the difference.
The One Question That Separates a Business Owner From a Hobbyist
Michele Williams has been working in financial coaching for creative professionals for over thirty years. Designers, window treatment business owners, studio principals, solopreneurs. She has sat with people who are brand new and people who are twenty years in and people who are somewhere in the complicated middle.
And she says she can ask one question to know, within about thirty seconds, whether someone is running a business or running a hobby.
What are your total sales to date?
Not last year’s number. Not a rough estimate. Right now, today, this month, this quarter — what has your business actually brought in?
When she posed this question to a room full of designers and business owners, one in twenty-five people could answer her.
One in twenty-five.
I want you to sit with that. Because that room was not full of people who were failing. It was full of people who were working hard, serving clients, delivering beautiful work, building something real. And twenty-four out of twenty-five of them did not know, within a few thousand dollars, what their business had brought in.
That is not a judgment. That is a starting point.
You cannot manage what you cannot measure. You cannot make smart decisions without accurate information. And you cannot build a profitable business on feel, on hustle, and on hope — no matter how talented you are and no matter how hard you work.
Gross Profit Margin for Interior Designers: The Number That Changes Everything
If you know your total sales number, the next question is what it means. And that is where Michele introduces the number that stops most designers and window treatment professionals cold.
Gross profit margin.
This is the percentage of every dollar your business brings in that stays after you pay for the cost of delivering the work — your product, your labor, your direct project costs — before overhead, before your salary, before taxes.
Michele says a healthy gross profit margin for a creative business starts at 40 percent. Most people coming into financial coaching for the first time are sitting at 30 to 32.
I want to be straight with you here, because I think you can handle the truth and I think you deserve it.
At Window Works, at Exciting Windows, at LuAnn Nigara Inc., and in the businesses we coach, Vin and I do not celebrate until we are at 55 to 60. We are aggressive about that number and I will tell you exactly why.
Gross profit margin is the single number that changes your life from having a job as a business owner to creating wealth as a business owner.
Not revenue. Not bookings. Not how full your calendar is or how beautiful your portfolio looks. This number. This is the one.
So yes, aim for 40 first. If you are sitting at 30 to 32 right now, getting to 40 is a real and meaningful win and Michele will help you get there. But do not stop there. 55 to 60 is where the business stops feeling like a treadmill and starts feeling like it is actually working for you.
We know you can get there because we have watched it happen. We have watched designers and window treatment professionals who were grinding at 30 percent make specific, targeted changes and cross 50 within a year. Not by working harder. By knowing the number, understanding what it meant, and making decisions from that clarity instead of from exhaustion and hope.
Think about what that means in real terms. If your business does $400,000 in revenue and your gross profit margin is 32 percent, you have $128,000 left to pay rent, payroll, insurance, software, marketing, and yourself. If your gross profit margin is 50 percent, you have $200,000 to work with. Same revenue. Same clients. Same hours. $72,000 dollars different.
That gap does not come from working harder. It comes from knowing the number, understanding what it is telling you, and making decisions based on that information instead of on gut feeling and crossed fingers.
The question is: who in your business is tracking that number right now? And if the answer is nobody — what decisions are you making in the dark?
Why You’re Solving the Wrong Problem (And How to Find the Right One)
Here is a story Michele tells, and I want you to hear it because it might be your story.
A window treatment professional came in convinced he had a lead generation problem. He wanted more prospects. Better marketing. More visibility. His close rate felt low and his instinct was that the pipeline was the issue — not enough people coming in the front door.
One conversation changed that diagnosis entirely.
When Michele looked at his numbers, the pipeline was not the problem. The leads were coming in at a reasonable rate. What was broken was what happened once they got there. His ratio of consultations to closed sales was dramatically low. He was spending time and money attracting prospects and then losing them at the table.
He did not have a marketing problem. He had a sales process problem.
He restructured how he ran his consultations. Same leads. Same marketing budget. Same team. His close rate improved significantly, and the impact on his revenue and gross profit was immediate.
That is what happens when you know your numbers well enough to ask the right questions. He could have spent the next year and thousands of dollars on better marketing and made almost no progress, because he was solving the wrong problem. One focused conversation with someone who could read the data clearly changed the entire direction of his effort.
This happens with designers too. The designer who thinks she has a pricing problem may actually have a scope creep problem. The studio owner who thinks he needs more clients may actually need to fire two of the ones he has and replace them with better-fit projects at higher margins. The numbers tell you which problem is real. Everything else is guessing.
The Difference Between Knowing Your Numbers and Owning Them
I want to tell you something that does not come up in most conversations about financial literacy.
Knowing your numbers and truly owning your numbers are two different things. And only one of them changes how you run your business.
Before I worked with Michele, I understood most of what I was looking at. I had been in financial planning meetings with Vin for forty years. I could read a P&L. I knew what gross profit margin meant. I was not starting from zero.
But here is the honest truth about what forty years next to Vin actually looked like.
When I did not quite understand something, I did not fight for clarity. I did not need to. He was right there. I knew he knew. I knew the business was safe. So I let it go. Not because I was being lazy and not because he was shutting me down — he was not. But when you have complete trust in the person sitting next to you, the gaps in your own understanding become invisible. You do not feel them because nothing bad is happening. The business is running. The numbers are being watched. Everything is fine.
The problem is that fine is not the same as knowing.
When I built LuAnn Nigara Inc. and Vin was not in the room, I discovered that what I had mistaken for understanding was actually proximity. I had been close to the knowledge for forty years without fully owning it myself. And when I needed to stand on it alone, I found out the difference.
Michele said something to me early in our work together that named exactly what had happened. She said:
Your gut is 98% of the way there. But a gut that is 98% right is not the same as knowing. And knowing is what lets you stand your ground.
-Michele Williams
That distinction — between being near the knowledge and actually holding it yourself — changes everything. It changes how you show up with your accountant. It changes how you talk to your bookkeeper. It changes how you make decisions at 11 o’clock at night when you are trying to figure out whether you can afford to hire someone, take on a new studio, invest in equipment, or say yes to a project that stretches your capacity.
It is the difference between making a calculated decision and making a wish.
What a Session with Michele Williams Actually Looks Like
I want to be specific here because the Boardroom for Creatives is not a course. It is not a program. It is one focused conversation with someone who knows how to look at your specific situation and tell you what she sees.
When you sit down with Michele, you are not getting a lecture on accounting principles. You are getting her eyes on your actual business.
She is going to want to know your total sales to date. She is going to want to understand your gross profit margin and whether you have a goal for it. She is going to ask about your top two profit centers — the offerings or service lines that are actually making you money, which may or may not be the ones you think are making you money. She is going to ask whether you are paying yourself and if so how consistently.
And she is going to do what she did with that window treatment professional. She is going to look at what the numbers are actually telling her rather than accepting the story you have been telling yourself about what the problem is.
If you are a designer who thinks you have a pricing problem, she may find out it is a scope problem. If you are a window treatment professional who thinks you need more leads, she may find out your close rate is the issue. If you are running a business that looks successful from the outside and feels precarious from the inside, she is very good at finding the specific thing that is creating that gap and telling you exactly what to address first.
One session. One set of eyes that have seen thirty years of creative businesses. One conversation that may redirect the next year of your decisions.
Three Financial Questions to Answer Right Now — Before You Do Anything Else
These come from Michele. She starts every client engagement here because she has learned that where someone struggles to answer these questions is exactly where the work needs to happen first.
1. What are your total sales to date this year?
Not your best guess. The real number, pulled from your accounting software. If you cannot find it quickly, that is the first thing to fix. Set up a report in QuickBooks or whatever system you use and make looking at that number a weekly habit. Not monthly. Not quarterly. Weekly. Your business is happening every week. You need to know what it is telling you at least that often.
2. What is your current gross profit margin — and do you have a goal for it?
If your margin is below 40 percent, you are working harder than you need to for the money you are keeping. That is fixable, but only once you can see it clearly. If you do not know your gross profit margin at all, that is where your work starts. And once you get to 40, keep going. The businesses that create real wealth for their owners are operating at 55 to 60.
3. Did you pay yourself last month?
Not did the business cover its expenses. Did you write yourself a check. Michele writes one every week, from Scarlet Thread Consulting to Michele Williams, and hands it to her husband to deposit. She does this because the physical act of that transaction is what makes the business real. A hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars. Whatever the number is right now — the amount matters less than the consistency. If the business is not paying you, you do not have a business yet. You have a very demanding volunteer position.
If you answered all three of those questions clearly and confidently, you are in good shape. Keep tracking, keep pushing your margin targets higher, and keep paying yourself.
If you hesitated on any of them — that is not a reason to feel ashamed. That is a reason to make a phone call.
How Financial Clarity Creates a More Profitable Interior Design Business
You can build something beautiful and still not know if it is profitable.
You can be fully booked, well reviewed, genuinely talented, and working yourself to exhaustion — and still be unclear on whether the business is actually working for you or whether you are simply working for it.
Financial clarity is not something you either have or you do not. Michele said it to me and I am saying it to you now: you know more than you think you know. But knowing more than you think is not the same as knowing enough to run your business from a position of strength.
You do hard things every day. You calculate square footage and fabric yardage and labor costs and markup and project timelines and client budgets. You manage vendors, contractors, client expectations, and installation schedules. The idea that your own business finances are beyond you is simply not true, and I will not let you believe it.
What may be true is that you have never had someone sit down with you, look at your specific numbers, and show you exactly what they mean and what to do about them.
That is what Michele does.
She is in the Boardroom for Creatives because she is one of the people I would send you to without hesitation if you called me tomorrow and said you needed help understanding your finances. I have worked with her myself. I know what she delivers. And I know that the clarity she gives you does not just change how you read a P&L. It changes how you walk into every significant business decision you will ever make from that point forward.
One conversation. Her eyes on your business. A clear picture of where you stand and what to address first.
Come prepared with the three questions answered as best you can. Tell her where you are. She will tell you what she sees.
Michele Williams is the founder of Scarlet Thread Consulting and the creator of Metrique Solutions, a financial analytics platform built specifically for designers and window treatment professionals. She is a Profit First certified coach, a co-author in the Power Talk Friday Experts book series, and one of the original Board Members of the Boardroom for Creatives. You can hear Michele on A Well-Designed Business episodes 395 and 1014.
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