Approval delay is the most expensive thing in a design project that nobody puts a number on. A design frozen three weeks late pushes procurement three weeks late, which pushes a site team you have already booked.
The instinct is to blame the client. Usually the cause is on our side of the table.
Ask for one decision at a time
The most common mistake is sending a package that contains four unrelated decisions — layout, palette, lighting and a joinery detail — and asking "let us know your thoughts".
The client cannot approve that. They will approve the parts they are sure about, go quiet on the rest, and the whole package sits unresolved.
Send one decision. State what happens next if they approve, and what it costs if they change it later. A client who knows the layout freeze triggers a ₹4,00,000 modular order behaves very differently from one who thinks they are looking at a picture.
Three options, not seven
More options do not read as more value. They read as you have not decided either.
Three is right: a recommendation, a safer alternative, and a more adventurous one. Say which you recommend and why. Clients hire you for judgement, and withholding it to seem accommodating makes the decision harder, not easier.
Find out who actually decides
In residential work the person in your meetings is often not the person who signs off. A spouse who has not been in a single call, or a parent funding the project, has veto power nobody mentioned.
Ask in discovery, plainly: "who else needs to be comfortable with these decisions before we proceed?" Then get them into the approval, or accept a built-in delay on every single one.
Put a date on it
"Let us know when you get a chance" is not a request. It is an invitation to defer.
Every approval should carry a respond-by date and a stated consequence: approve by the 14th to hold the site slot; after that the next available start is the 3rd. The consequence must be real. Invent one and clients learn to ignore all of them.
Make the record automatic
Even when approvals come fast, the record is usually terrible — a "yes go ahead" in a WhatsApp thread, on a message that does not quote what was being approved.
Then the client changes their mind, and you cannot show what they agreed to. You end up absorbing a variation you were entitled to charge for, because reconstructing it costs more than the variation is worth.
What a defensible approval record contains:
- The exact artefact approved, stored with the decision
- Who approved it, and when, to the minute
- For a change request, the reason — not just a rejection
- A trail the client can see too, so it is shared truth rather than your word
Get this right and variation conversations become administrative instead of adversarial. You are not arguing about what happened; you are both reading it.
Do not make them sign up for anything
If your approval flow requires the client to create an account, remember a password, or install an app, you have added friction to the one step you most want frictionless.
A link that opens, shows the drawing, and takes a decision. That is the whole requirement. Anything else is your convenience at the cost of their response time.
The measurement
Track days-from-sent to days-to-decision, per approval, per project.
Most studios discover two things immediately. First, the average is much worse than they thought. Second, it is dominated by a small number of catastrophically slow approvals rather than a uniformly slow client — and those slow ones almost always share a cause: too many decisions bundled, or the real decision-maker absent.
Both are fixable, and both are on our side of the table.
Related: the five phases of an interior design project and why your interior projects lose money.