Contractor VS ID's

Lets talk about HDB / Condos interior designers

Do you really need an ID to design your house? Or do you pretty much know what you want?

I can assure you that for many of us typical Singaporeans, we already knew what we want. We don't need an ID to design our house, and to propose the different mood, theme, colour contrasts or hold our hands to guide us in buying all the soft finishes. 

Unless you are really well to do with deep pockets or rich parents, by all means. But for most average Singaporean, your house renovations will likely be one of the largest purchase in your life.

Would you rather work with an 'ID salesman' whose ultimate goal is to squeeze as much money from you? Maybe because their income solely depends on it? Or would you rather get the best value for your money? 

I'm not denying that being profitable is necessary to operate and sustain a business, however if you only knew how easy it is to set up and run an ID firm, you'll be shocked. 

 
How does the ID industry works?

I'm not saying that all ID are structured and operates this way, but almost 90% of them are.

So basically, the boss registers a business entity, leases an office space, renovate the office kao kao macam hotel and allocate a monthly budget for their advertising, then sit back and chill.

Then they start going around hiring as many salesperson cum interior designers as possible to handle, run and manage all these sales inquiries that comes in. 

All these salesperson are hired with no base salary, no basic insurance or even CPF contribution. They are all like freelancers to say, they are paid purely via commission based and its normally 60% - 40% of the project profit. 

Just take a moment to let that sink in. Imagine you paid them $50,000 but the works you're getting are only worth at most $35,000 - the balance is their 'profit' for coordinating and managing your projects

And now imagine if that company has 10 'salesperson' and each of them just managed to close 1 x 50k project monthly, that would easily earned the company a whopping profit of $90,000 monthly

Now what is the company's monthly expenses? We presumed a 4k office rental with a 2k full-time admin and a 10k marketing budget monthly. With that they would easily have a net earnings of 74k monthly after deducting the salesperson commission and their monthly expenses. 

So now you know why ID's have been popping up everywhere like mushrooms for the last few years.  

 

Disclaimer

I'm not trying to condemn all these IDs, what I'm trying to condemn is all those companies masking to be an award winning design and build company, but the truth is, they are just purely salesman trying to squeeze as much from you

Yes, real interior designers still exists and yes we still do need them but there are not for the mass market

We need interior designers to help us design for office layouts, restaurants, retail shops, landed houses, especially those with deep pockets and have the additional budget. 

But most of these designers are purely designers, they don't care about squeezing the money out from you. All they want are for their designs and proposal to come to reality. 

And subsequently you will need a main contractor to coordinate all the jobs and different trades after the designs and drawings are ready.  

But for you and me, do you really think you need that service and pay that premium when our first question we asked is how much? 

 

Conclusion 

YOU don't need an ID to design the house for you unless you have deep pockets. Don't waste your hard earn money.