Marilynn Taylor's Favorite Failure in interior design

Do you have a favorite failure? And this is something that I ask a lot of people when they come onto the show because it's so easy to talk about the positives. But as we all know, in business, not everything is a success. There are a lot of failures, and along the way. But do you have a favorite failure? Something that you learned?

This is something that I did kind of early on with my rental is as I improved it, I realized how important photos were. And so I don't think I did it intentionally, but the photos that I took made the house look really, really great. But then what ended up happening is people's expectations were set a little bit too high for what the home actually was. So while the decor was really beautiful, which in actuality, now, all these years later, as a professional designer, I look back and I cringe. I'm like, oh, God, it's embarrassing. But, you know, for Cape Cod back then, it was really beautiful. And when people saw the beauty of the aesthetics, their expectations sort of rose on the amenities as well. And I'm talking about things like appliances and, you know, and bedding or the quality of mattresses and pillows and all of that. And I was still using a lot of the original stuff that was there in the house. And so I started to get some negative reviews as a result. And that was, for me, a huge, huge learning lesson that you can't go over the top in making your house look like something it's not. And again, it wasn't intentional. But it's a very easy mistake to make. And you do have to make sure that as you improve the aesthetics of your home, you also have to improve the amenities and the things, you know, the experience in the house.

Was that the inspiration for the blog where you wrote about dealing with criticism, or is that something else that has happened during the time that you've been doing this?

Yeah, so this was actually just in the past three months. I had. This was kind of a new experience again after. You know, you just never stop having new experiences in this business, that's for sure. But I had a woman who, again, I think it was a similar situation, but where she didn't read everything, and she didn't read anything that I had sent her to help her prepare. So she. She seemed great the whole time she was there at the house. She seemed happy, her communication was great. I felt I was taking great care of her, and I got a horrible review from her. And I felt so sideswiped by this because she said nothing while she was there. But it was, I realized in this particular situation where she lambasted me in an email and nitpicked every tiny little thing about the house, and of course, I'm panicking because I'm a Virgo. Everything has to be perfect. Are you kidding me? And I've got another company that's currently managing the home, and I call them, and I lay into them. I'm like, how dare you present my home in this way? She made it sound like every everything's falling apart, nothing's new. And basically, long story short, once I really dug into it and I took a breath and stepped back from it and realized, okay, the two people right before her gave me five star reviews. Now we're a few weeks later, and I'm still getting five star reviews. I realized, you know, in this particular situation, this was about her.