Listen to the Podcast Episode for a deeper dive

Leveraging AI and Communities to Grow as a Small Business | AI for Interior Designers™

AI for Interior Designers™ Podcast

Leveraging AI and Communities to Grow as a Small Business

Krystal McNaughton brings 15+ years in luxury plumbing and tech — and a perspective on AI that is rooted in operations, client experience, and the role of community in sustaining small business growth.

Ep. 28 ✦ Jenna Gaidusek ✦ Krystal McNaughton September 2024

This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording, then edited by the author for accuracy and details.

Key Takeaways

Krystal's background — from founding a luxury plumbing showroom to leading go-to-market strategy at a construction tech startup — gives her a perspective on AI that is grounded in the operational realities of businesses that work with design professionals every day.
AI reduces onboarding time and creates more consistent team training by documenting processes, storing institutional knowledge, and making it accessible to new hires at their own pace — a significant benefit for growing design firms where every hour of principal time is expensive.
Chatbots for client communication serve the same trust-building function as immediate human response — they answer questions, guide clients through processes, and maintain engagement when the designer is unavailable, without sacrificing the sense of being supported.
Decision fatigue is a real productivity drain for designers managing complex projects with many simultaneous choices. AI tools that organize information, surface relevant details, and reduce the cognitive load of routine decisions create meaningful capacity for the creative decisions that matter.
Community is not just a networking amenity — it is an operational resource for small businesses. The shared knowledge, collaborative possibilities, and mutual support that a strong professional community provides are genuinely difficult to replicate through solo practice.

Episode Guest

Krystal McNaughton

Director, Go To Market — OnOrder

Krystal McNaughton brings 15+ years of experience in the plumbing and construction industry, combining deep knowledge of the luxury design space with a tech-forward perspective on how digital tools can transform the building process. She is currently Director of Go To Market at OnOrder, overseeing sales, marketing, and product, and was the founder and operator of Aquavato — a luxury plumbing showroom in Toronto — from 2018 to 2024.

OnOrder Aquavato Luxury Plumbing Construction Tech Toronto

AI for Interior Designers™ ↗

The Showroom-to-Startup Trajectory — Why Krystal's Perspective Is Useful

Krystal's career path is not the usual design industry arc, and that is precisely what makes her perspective valuable. Running Aquavato — a luxury plumbing showroom in Toronto — for six years gave her direct experience with the operational challenges facing the businesses that design professionals work with every day: vendor relationships, product specification, client education, complex transaction management, and the specific friction points in how designers and showrooms exchange information and coordinate on projects.

Moving from that showroom experience to a Director role at OnOrder, a construction tech startup, shifted her focus from operating within those friction points to building technology to address them. That combination — deep operational experience and tech-building perspective — produces insights about AI and design-adjacent business that are grounded in actual operational realities rather than theoretical potential.

"Relationships are at the heart of the design industry — whether it's with clients, other designers, or contractors. AI isn't here to replace those connections. It's here to enhance them."

— Krystal McNaughton

Where AI Makes the Biggest Operational Difference for Design Firms

Krystal's operational background shapes how she frames AI's value — not in terms of creative potential, but in terms of what it actually eliminates from the list of things a designer needs to personally handle. The result is a perspective that is more specific about high-value applications than the general "AI saves time" framing.

Client Communication Automation

AI-powered CRM tools and chatbots handle routine inquiries, follow-ups, and process guidance — maintaining client engagement and the sense of being supported even when the designer is unavailable or focused on project work.

Onboarding and Team Training

AI can document processes, store institutional knowledge, and create training materials that new team members can access at their own pace — reducing the oversight burden on principals when adding staff.

Project Timeline and Milestone Management

AI-driven project management tools track details, surface relevant information at the right moment, and reduce the cognitive load of keeping complex multi-phase projects organized across vendors, contractors, and clients.

Decision Fatigue Reduction

Designers managing multiple simultaneous projects face enormous cognitive load from the volume of decisions required. AI tools that organize information and surface what is immediately relevant preserve creative energy for the decisions that actually require design judgment.

Krystal's framing: AI gives designers more time to focus on the parts of their work that require their specific expertise — the relationships, the creative decisions, the client experience. Every hour AI saves on operational administration is an hour available for that higher-value work.

Chatbots and AI for Client Engagement — The Practical Case

The conversation around chatbots in design practice often stalls at "it feels impersonal" — a concern that is understandable for a profession built on deeply personal client relationships. Krystal reframes this: the alternative to an AI chatbot is not always a designer personally responding within minutes. It is often no response until business hours resume, which is also impersonal and significantly less effective.

An AI chatbot that answers common questions, guides prospects through an inquiry process, and captures contact information at 10pm on a Sunday is actively serving the client relationship — not substituting for it. The human connection happens when the designer follows up; the chatbot creates the conditions for that follow-up to land well.

💬

Lead capture at non-business hours. Potential clients often research designers during evenings and weekends. A chatbot that can engage, qualify, and capture information in those windows converts interest that would otherwise dissipate before business hours.

❓

FAQ handling without designer time. Questions about process, pricing structure, geographic service area, and timeline expectations are asked repeatedly. An AI system trained on these answers handles them consistently and immediately without taking principal time.

🔄

Process guidance for existing clients. Guiding clients through steps in the design process — uploading materials, completing questionnaires, reviewing proposals — is repetitive and does not require designer judgment. AI handles it while keeping the client moving forward.

🤝

Freeing designers for deeper relationship work. When routine interactions are handled automatically, designer capacity shifts toward the conversations that build lasting client relationships — the design conversations, the vision-building, the problem-solving that clients actually value.

Community and AI — Why Both Matter for Small Business Growth

Krystal's experience running a showroom reinforced what most design professionals already intuit: community is not a nice-to-have for small businesses, it is an operational resource. The shared knowledge, vendor introductions, collaborative opportunities, and mutual referrals that flow through a strong professional network are genuinely difficult to replicate through solo practice — and the absence of them creates real competitive disadvantage.

AI and community serve complementary functions. AI addresses the operational efficiency layer — what can be automated, organized, and systematized. Community addresses the relationship layer — knowledge sharing, mutual support, collaborative problem-solving, and the professional trust that generates referrals and partnerships. Neither substitutes for the other, and strong design businesses tend to invest in both intentionally rather than treating them as optional.

🌐

Community accelerates knowledge. Designers in active professional communities learn from each other's AI experiments, tool evaluations, and workflow discoveries — compressing learning cycles that would take years of individual trial and error.

🔗

Collaboration on larger projects. Community relationships create the trust infrastructure that allows small design firms to collaborate on projects at scales they could not handle independently — expanding capacity without full-time hiring.

📣

Referrals and professional reputation. The professional trust built through consistent community participation generates referrals that no amount of social media marketing can replicate — because referrals carry the weight of one trusted professional vouching to another.

"While AI can handle many operational tasks, it's our human relationships — our clients, collaborators, and the community we build — that truly define our success."

— Jenna Gaidusek

Frequently Asked Questions

OnOrder is a construction technology platform focused on streamlining the building and design supply chain — addressing the coordination and order management complexity that affects designers, contractors, and the showrooms and vendors they work with. Krystal's role there as Director of Go To Market means she is working on the product, sales, and marketing strategy for a tool designed to reduce the friction in how the construction and design ecosystem exchanges information and manages orders. For designers who work frequently with plumbing, electrical, or other trade suppliers, this category of technology is directly relevant to procurement efficiency.

The practical workflow: start by writing down your most common processes as you do them — client onboarding steps, project kickoff checklist, proposal review process, procurement workflow. These do not need to be perfect; they need to be specific enough that someone new could follow them. Feed those documents into a tool like Notion (which has AI assistance built in), a custom GPT configured with your practice's processes, or an AI-powered knowledge base tool. New team members can then query the system for specific process guidance rather than interrupting the principal for every question. The investment is in the initial documentation; the return is in reduced oversight burden and more consistent execution across team members.

At minimum: the firm's service offerings and geographic coverage, the general pricing structure or how pricing is determined, the typical project timeline, the onboarding process (what happens after someone reaches out), and answers to the five to ten questions that come up most frequently from prospects. Beyond that: the designer's design philosophy, portfolio highlights, and the types of projects they take on or prefer to focus on. This information can be fed into a chatbot platform (many website tools including Squarespace have this functionality) or into a custom GPT configured as a client-facing assistant. The key is that the chatbot is trained on accurate, current information about the specific practice — not generic design answers.

Decision fatigue is the degradation in decision quality that occurs after making a large number of decisions in a short period — a well-documented psychological phenomenon. For interior designers managing complex projects, the volume of decisions required on any given day is genuinely large: material selections, vendor communications, client questions, scheduling calls, email responses, project timeline judgments, and the design decisions themselves. When cognitive resources are depleted by routine operational decisions earlier in the day, the quality of creative and strategic decisions later in the day suffers. AI tools that handle or simplify the routine decision layer — what to say in a follow-up email, how to organize the project timeline, which vendor to contact about a delayed order — preserve the cognitive capacity that the high-value design decisions require.

The mechanisms are specific: referrals from peers who trust your work and recommend you to clients who need what you offer; vendor introductions that provide access to products and terms not available without professional relationships; collaborative opportunities on projects larger than your firm could handle independently; early information about industry changes, new tools, and market shifts before they become widely known; and the mutual support structure that makes solo practice more sustainable over time. These are not soft benefits — they are structural advantages that compound over years of active community participation. The designers who invest in community consistently report that referrals from professional peers are their most reliable source of high-quality new clients.

Daily AI Training for Designers

The DAIly — 20 Minutes Every Weekday, Actionable AI for Design Practice

The practical AI training program Jenna built for designers who want to integrate these tools effectively — covering the operational applications Krystal describes and the full range of creative and business uses beyond them.

Join The DAIly AI for Interior Designers™ ↗