CEO and Founder of A Design Partnership, Natalie Norcross has over 19 years of work experience for Interior Design, Architecture, Builder, Developer, Hotel and Home Brands and has a demonstrated track record of driving exposure and placements.
Natalie started her career as an Interior Designer. After building and selling a highly successful Residential and Hospitality Design Firm in 2008, she was repeatedly approached by Interior Design and Architecture Firms to help them with marketing and business development…and A Design Partnership was born.
Since then, the agency has grown to a dynamic group of communication experts who are passionate about helping clients transform their brands and evolve their businesses. From content curators to data-obsessed experts, she leads a dynamic team of design-savvy experts who know the industry, love their craft, and are fanatical about helping brands grow. Natalie is an Official Member of Forbes Agency Council as well as a regular speaker and panelist in both the communications and design industries.
Natalie started her interior design business at 21 years old.
“I was a baby,” says Natalie. “The first year in business I grossed a few million dollars and had no idea what I was doing. It was a time when California real estate was booming and I was working with a big developer who couldn’t build houses fast enough. He introduced me to his developer friends and I ended up with 20 new projects, pretty much overnight!”
Only 2% of female entrepreneurs will ever have a business that makes more than a million dollars in revenue a year! Not to mention, the still prominent inequality in pay between men and women. Natalie confidently acknowledges the idea that if you can make $900K, you can make a million. It’s about which levers to pull and how to incorporate a leveled-up marketing plan.
For Interior Designers, Natalie has found that they struggle more with making a profit, then grossing a million dollars of revenue.
“Make sure your gross margin is wide enough to make a profit and make sure you and everyone in your
organization is tracking their time. Otherwise you are pushing cash around. If you aren’t making a net profit, then stop everything and change your business today” says Natalie.
She continued, “Thankfully, I realized this problem in my career fairly early on and after reading a ton of books like “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle and following successful entrepreneurs like Brendon Burchard, Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo as well as listening to my peers I realized, wow, I could be grossing a couple of million but how much am I making, how much am I netting and for what? On top of it I wasn’t designing anymore…so, I went from designing to hiring, I went from pulling color concepts together to meeting with accountants and bankers, I hired a business coach and transformed it all; contracts, fees, mark-ups, our design process and I started working on the business and not in the business!”
For years, Natalie made the mistake of self-sabotaging herself by taking her foot off the gas instead of pushing hard to the top of the mountain.
The fear of success has been a prominent topic that Natalie has come across via clients, friends, colleagues, and women and men in business who are truly afraid of success. With so many opportunities to grow and become successful in business, Natalie is diving into the nitty gritty of the fear of success and offering her expert advice on how to break the cycle and flourish in your career.
“The number one fear of success is the fear of change or fear of the unknown,” says Natalie. “The fear of the unknown looks like this…life hasn’t been that great, if only you got this in your business or you had this thing with your health, or your finances were different, or your relationship looked like this, then I would be successful”
Natalie understands that the idea of making changes scares most people, so instead most cling to the things they know and are comfortable with.
“If you want to level up in your life, you are always going to have to push yourself in an unfamiliar area,” says Natalie.
She soon realized that she needed to focus in on the reason she was doing it all. In part, this was due to the fact that she was afraid of the unknown.
“You may not know what life looks like on the other side of this mountain, but you have to be willing to take the climb. If you have a fear of success because of the unknown, you have to be very careful, because you will unintentionally self-sabotage,” says Natalie.
Now with over 19 years of work experience in the industry, Natalie is building the brands and identities of successful interior designers, architects, lifestyle companies, and businesses in general utilizing her belief that each and everyone of them is worthy of success far beyond what they could have ever imagined.
“What keeps me moving forward is encouraging people to reach for more,” says Natalie. “I know how hard it is to build, run, and maintain an interior design business. I know, I did it, it is hard work. Managing the employees, the projects, the teams, the marketing, accounting, the list goes on and on.”
She continues, “For me, I achieved a level of success and I built a business that was bigger than me. My success surpassed my vision in my first year of business and I truly believe it was because I was so naïve and young there wasn’t any fear to stop me. Fear came later when I got my first lawsuit, or clients weren’t paying on time and we had to either float or cut it off. Believe me, telling the CFO of the largest healthcare network in California that we were pausing his project until he paid his bills was not an easy conversation for a 23-year-old to have, not to mention the guy was at least three times my age!”
Natalie emphasizes the first step is to jump, what got you here, will not get you there.
“You don’t reach success because you were happy staying where you were,” says Natalie. “Stop buying into the fear, do the work, be afraid and be successful anyway! All you can do is win, win, win!”
