You already know how to design. Our job is to help you design the business around it.

Design Business Lab is a business strategy consultancy for architecture, interior design, and design-build studio founders.

The Problem

The work is good. The business is not designed.

Most design founders are forced to run their firms on instinct and accumulated habit because no one ever helped them think about the business with the same rigour they apply to their craft.

Most say they want to grow. But a larger studio, better projects, higher margins, and more predictable revenue lead to very different businesses. The first question is not how — it's what you're actually trying to build.

What Strategy Actually Means Here

Strategy is the work before the work.

Business problems in design firms are almost always downstream of unclear strategy — not operations. Execution without definition is wasted effort. Systems built on an unclear foundation replicate the problem.

Your positioning affects your audience. Your audience affects your offer. Your offer affects your pricing. Your pricing affects your economics. Your economics affect your capacity. Change one and the others move with it. Our job is to understand those connections before recommending what you should do.

It is not a 70-page document sitting in a Google Drive folder. It is a set of choices: what to do now, what to stop, what to invest in, what to measure. A direction the business can actually act on.

What This Is Not

We don't offer quick fixes, generic playbooks, or a template of ready-made answers.

We don't come in and tell you to scale, post more, raise your prices, hire a team, or find your niche. Those are prescriptions. We start with questions — because the right answer depends entirely on your business, your market, and what you're actually trying to build.

What We Work On
01

Positioning & Market Presence

How the business is positioned, perceived, and branded — and what demand that attracts.

02

Client Acquisition & Conversion

How leads come in and turn into paying clients.

03

Revenue & Offer Architecture

The business model, how services are structured, and how money is made and protected.

04

Operations & Delivery Systems

How work is executed, delivered, and scaled.

Read our services brochure for more on scope and packages →

Who This Is For

Founders who have outgrown instinct.

Architecture, interior design, and design-build firms — technically excellent, credible in their market, running a business that is not yet built to match.

Right fit
  • You have 3+ years in practice and a real client base
  • You're making revenue but not growing it on purpose
  • You suspect the problem is the business, not the work
  • You want to think clearly, not be handed answers
Wrong fit
  • Just starting out — less than 2 years in practice
  • Looking for a short audit or a ₹5,000 review
  • Looking for templates, scripts, or a ready-made system
  • Not ready to examine how the business is actually running

Not sure where you stand? Take our pre-discovery diagnostic →

What Our Clients Have Built
Shilpa C
Sabi Interiors
Nagpur

Rebuilt her offer structure and positioning in a market that had undervalued her practice for years. Now works on fewer, better projects at fees that match her level of work.

Vaagdevi S
SVU Creatives
Hyderabad

Restructured positioning and built offer architecture that turned an overstretched studio into a disciplined, award-winning firm.

Mehak Bajaj
House of Mehak
Delhi

Clarified the business model and rebuilt the client acquisition process around the kind of work she actually wanted to do.

Hari Ravi
Integrated Design Studio
Sydney

Built the strategic foundation for a cross-border design practice — positioning, pricing, and offer architecture aligned across two markets.

Who We Are

Design Business Lab was founded in 2021 by Pallavini Patra — COA-licensed architect, certified business strategist (ISB Hyderabad), brand communications specialist (MICA Ahmedabad) — with twenty years inside this industry as a practitioner, educator, and business leader.

Start a Conversation

If this describes where you are, the right move is a conversation.

We don't run a standard sales process. Tell us where you are and what's not working. We'll go from there.

Our work is structured as 4–6 week intensive engagements. If you're exploring a quick fix or a one-day workshop, we're probably not the right fit for each other right now.

Book a call