This week on the Creative Genius podcast, Gail Doby welcomes Elissa Grayer, the founder of Elissa Grayer Interior Design, for a deep dive into her 25-year journey from educational administration to luxury interior design. Elissa shares how she “made it up as she went along” before finding the professional community and coaching that transformed her firm from a seat-of-the-pants operation into a highly profitable, well-oiled machine.

Listen in as Elissa discusses the evolution of her firm’s structure and the “transition mode” she is currently navigating as she looks toward the next decade of her career. She defines the critical importance of financial transparency, revealing how her business achieved a dramatic bottom-line shift by gaining the confidence to charge her true worth and track every billable hour.

The conversation also explores the unique challenges of serving ultra-high-net-worth clients who may be demanding or entitled, and how Elissa maintains boundaries while delivering an outstanding, sophisticated experience. Plus, Elissa shares her perspective on the current “stagnated” real estate market in the New York suburbs and why she is looking toward hospitality and senior living as exciting new frontiers for her firm.

In this podcast, you’ll hear about:

• The Volvo Project: How Elissa’s career began by managing a major renovation for her former husband, earning her a resale certificate and her first referrals.
• The $800,000 Realization: A candid look at the financial impact of “making up” design fees before learning professional billing and forecasting methods.
• Succession and the Next 10 Years: The special attitude required for a second-in-command to become a potential successor and the shift toward in-house design leadership.

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full show notes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s14e6-shownotes

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

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Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Alisa. I want to talk with your personal story and start there and tell us how did you get into design?

Well, it actually, I’m one of the ones who came to it very organically. I had been in education, had been teaching, and then was working on charter schools and decided, my then husband and I decided that we were going to combine two apartments on Riverside Drive in New York City. And so I was, taken some time off from work. I just had my second child and I decided to take on the project and I did.

It was a total gut renovation. There was a lot of work. took about a year. I was very involved in the design, the layout, everything, and getting the job done, which as you know is really most of the job. And at the end of it, we had a beautiful apartment, and it just felt really good and comfortable and warm and welcoming, and everybody loved it. I loved it. Shortly after, I got divorced.

which was a very mutual thing. So we both were in a really good place about it with each other. We are still great friends. And he asked me if I would design and manage the joining of two apartments for him, for him and the girls who were my girls. So of course I said, yes, this would be a great thing. I’d love to make a wonderful home for them and for him. And he said, okay, I’ll buy you Volvo. And I said, okay, done.

I did.

I designed and project managed and filled that apartment with beautiful things and it came out really, really well. And I had to get a resale certificate number to start buying things, so I had a resale number. And then the electrician on the job said to me, I have a client who’s down in the village and she can’t make up her mind about something, would you come and help her?

someone else said, I heard you might be doing interior design, would you come and help me? And it just sort of snowballed like that. So I had no idea what I was doing, but I just knew I loved what I was doing. And then I decided to go to school to see if that would help. So I went to Parsons for a certificate in interior design. I already had a couple of master’s degrees. I didn’t want any more. And I just…

just was working. started working and I never stopped and that was 24 years ago. It be 25 years in February.

So what were your other degrees? I didn’t know that.

Well, I had a degree in administration planning and social policy from the Harvard Ed School. Then I had a degree in elementary education and master’s from Leslie College, Graduate School of Education. And then I was ABD, which means everything but the dissertation at Columbia. I was getting a degree in educational administration at Columbia Teachers College. So that was…

A lot of schooling, I’m a big believer in school, but I just didn’t want to do anymore. So there’s a lot of stuff I did not learn and a lot of stuff you can only learn on the job. So it’s kind of a toss up. I miss not having worked for someone. I know that that’s an amazing experience and I always lamented the fact that I never had a role model or anyone to just look at and say, that’s how you do things.

So I just kind of made it up as I went along.

I hate to say it, but one of the people would probably not be good role models on running the business. Yeah. So it’s in some ways, I think it’s better to figure it out for yourself, but.

That’s true. Yeah, true.

Maybe if you have a background in business, which as you know very well, I do not. I’m a liberal arts person through and through. So I know we’re going to get to this, but it really wasn’t until I met you that I started understanding the business part of the business. Before that, I was just flying by the seat of my pants. There was no internet world back then to go to. mean, now you can basically buy a business plan.

on the internet for a couple hundred dollars and sign up for a coaching group. It just feels a lot more open and accessible than it did back then. When I would go to the market days at the New York Design Center and basically listen for crumbs of wisdom from one of the famous designers who were speaking and I’d try and figure out what they were doing. yeah, just had to figure it out.

Well, tell us about your firm right now. Who’s on your team? What are their responsibilities?

Well, we are in a transitioning mode. The ideal team is, and it’s not ideal right now, so that’s why I’m starting with the ideal. The ideal situation is to have a leadership team that is myself, my design director, who’s my number two, and then have an operations person as a third arm in the group.

We do not have that person anymore. We had to make some staffing changes. So I now no longer have a real operations person. And what we have done is we have brought in a fractional CFO from outside to be kind of our financial advisory arm. We have brought in a bookkeeper, CPA, and we have an office admin right now.

Mm-hmm.

We’ve also brought in an outside marketing kind of AI focused consultant to help us with marketing and especially as it relates to the new changes with what AI is doing to our market and our SEOs. I’ve also got a consultant who’s working on our website and I have an outside tech support person.

because the operations person that I previously had did a lot of those things, some better than others, but was really kind of responsible for a lot of that. So I have now created a team of different people to kind of partially, almost all the way make up for that third person. I also have a full-time designer in the office. I have a

part-time designer who is in Boston who works remotely. We have an office admin person. And then I have two very fabulous interns who are coming in a couple days a week who do all those things like, you know, drop off this sample, pick up this product, know, do, you know, open the door for this vendor. So we have a lot of hands in the mix right

Yeah, it sounds like quite a few.

Yeah, it’s quite a crew, but it’s working. We’re making it work. We do need another designer, but we are we’ll get there. We’re just not. It’s hard to find a good person, as you know.

Yeah, you have to your time with that and definitely wait for that right person.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, we are.

So let’s go back to the past and this has been quite a while, probably seven, eight years ago that you started working with us somewhere in that neighborhood. What was going on with your business at that time? Why did you come or reach out to us?

Yes.

Uh-huh.

Well, I had actually been following you from afar from, I don’t know, it must have been, when did you start doing those podcasts where people could call in? Was that like 20 years ago?

I just got 18 years ago. Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure. I was at home.

Actually, I think, probably don’t remember this, but I actually asked a question on one of those things and you said to me something like, very kindly, but like, think you need to get a coach to help you with some of this stuff. And I was like, yeah, you know what, you’re probably right. I had started, I’d done a year with a coach who’s still around.

This was probably like 15 years ago and just wasn’t able to follow through, didn’t really get the information that I needed. And so just kept on plugging along until I went to a dinner in High Point. You know, you get invited to these dinners, these small intimate dinners, and I think this was a trad home dinner. And a woman sitting next to me was named Julia Kirkendall. And she, we were having this great conversation and she was telling me about her business.

And I have a feeling that there’s one other person from that group there and I’m not remembering, because I was so focused on Julia. I just fell in love with her warmth and her honesty and her openness. And she was saying that she was running this great business, very successful, the kind of business that I wanted, which was busy working, doing great projects, kind of under the radar, not really out and about.

And she said she credited her success to this coach that she’d been working with named Gail Dobie. And I said, huh, interesting. And she said, there’s this thing called the boardroom, which is a smaller group for just high earning designers. And at that point, my business was doing quite well, in spite of me, I have to say.

And I thought, well, I could be in that group. That sounds like something I would love to have. I’d love to have a cohort and a group of people that kind of were facing the same problems, all led by a fabulous coach who was going to tell me to run my business, which was what I’d always wanted to know. So I went to one of your genius exchanges. It was in Denver.

I showed you my financials and you said, you definitely could be part of this group. said, yay. Then we had a one-on-one. guess what brought me, just to go back to answer your question, what really brought me there was that I knew I was leaving a lot of money on the table. I knew I was not running efficiently. I knew that I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants when it came to running my business.

have a great understanding of a balance sheet or an income statement. I didn’t really know what a PNL was. I knew I had money in the bank and I knew that we were using Studio, we were billing. I was a big step up from the old days when I would just be giving my credit card over the phone as I was driving down the West Side Highway to crab it and they would bill me for the fabric, send it off and I would forget to bill the client. Like that’s literally how my business ran in the old days.

So I was way past that, but I knew I needed more help. So went to the Genius Exchange, met with you, had a VIP, and to my great happiness and fortune, I was placed in a wonderful group of people, a new boardroom that you were forming, and we got to work with you and we got to share our experiences with each other, and it really changed my life, changed my business.

Well, and you’re all still really close friends. Yes.

We are. We’re very, very, very close, as are, I think, all the people in the boardrooms that you set up. I mean, you created a wonderful environment that got people trusting each other and talking about their problems and being vulnerable, and then getting help and solutions. you know, the first boardroom ever that you started is still incredibly close. They still do retreats every year. The second one, I think also, we were the third boardroom.

and we are very tight. And then there’s a whole nother fourth one that went on and then it just kind of expanded. And so now you’ve got a much larger group, but it’s really the same camaraderie and the same feeling. So it’s all good.

Well, I think it’s so important to have somebody that you can talk to and really feel comfortable. Yeah, and not worry that you’re competing with them. Right. Some people are in the same markets, but…

I know, but there’s no competition. You feel like when you’re part of a group like that, you just feel like, first of all, you understand there’s enough business to go around. And obviously, you don’t want to be doing the exact same marketing things, but there’s plenty to learn from and plenty of ways to tweak it and make it different. Tina and I are in the same market. both in New York and New York City. She works in Westchester. I work in the city. We’re very close and we share everything.

It just, you know, everybody has a different style, everybody has a different approach, and I think it’s the generosity of spirit that makes the people that you’ve selected for your boardrooms and for your Pearl Collective group so special.

Well, it’s been a lot of fun. for us, it’s really the fun part is the relationships with people. What are some of the biggest things that you’ve implemented that have helped you over the years?

Well, a couple things, many things. From a financial perspective, doing planning, like kind of understanding cash flow and what’s going to happen if you don’t get a client. What is your cash flow every month? What does that look like? And where are your ebbs and flows going to be coming? The other thing that I really learned from you that I think

brought me to tears the first time we ever talked about it was how to bill for my time. You are so good at giving people the confidence to bill for their time and you really insist on billing hourly and tracking that hourly time so you can really see how much time you’re spending on things. I was just making up design fees, pulling them out of my head like, this looks like a $50,000 job and this one I think they’ll like it if I say 80.

And it had no bearing on reality or what I was actually at the time I was actually spending on things. And so I ended up losing, I think you pointed out that it was $800,000 that I had left on the table. And I was like, my God. So tracking my time, which I’m still terrible at, but it is my goal every month to get my time in. Everyone in the office tracks their time. We bill hourly. We don’t feel bad about it.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

We bill for everything we do to move a project forward. I mean, that’s really kind of changed our bottom line in the way I look at my business. between the billing, the forecasting, of knowing how much money you should have in the bank, how much money you should be making before you can hire another person, just some very basic business practices along with the…

just the ability and the desire to dream big. think that was another thing that you really impressed on all of us is, what do you want? What do you want out of this life? What do you want out of this business? What can it bring you? And where can you go with it? And what are you gonna do with it when you wanna retire? So all those things are things that we got to talk about.

Yeah. And I think too that sometimes people don’t dream big enough and there is such a potential here. I think we’ve had 15 people so far that I know of that have hit a million dollars net profit. It’s a pretty dramatic number. have one person that hit 2 million and it is just so exciting to see that happen. And for me, what I love about this is I know that you all can have

So that’s.

financial security and have the kind of income that other people dream of. so interior design does give you that opportunity and it’s amazing.

It does. But it really needs, it doesn’t just happen. Like without a plan, it does not happen. And without a coach, it does not happen. So I think you used to share with us all those statistics about the interior design profession as a whole and where people in the boardroom and the pro collective kind of fell on that continuum. And we were always like, first of all, just to get into the group, you have to be at a certain level.

We were always higher, which just meant that, you can do it. There’s a way.

There absolutely is. In fact, this year, think the industry in 24 was a 3 % net was an average. our designers as a whole was 13, but we had people go as high as 40%. So, you know, we definitely saw people achieving different things. Yeah. And it really does mean that if you can focus on doing the business right, you can make a lot of money at this.

You can and you can also just the confidence to charge number one what you’re worth and number two to not give away discounts. Like when I hear people, designers say, well, I just give my clients the net price and you know, I just, and I’m like, why are you doing that? That’s just wrong. Like you don’t need to do that. It’s not, it’s not the way to make money in this business. Clients love it, but it’s really, it screws up the rest of us.

Exactly, exactly. I hope somebody listens to this and pays attention and does that because you’ve got to charge what you’re worth. my God. You do.

You do and we run two businesses. have a design business, is, you know, where the creativity and the project, well, project management is a whole nother business, but just the design is one business and then product is another business. We’re basically operating a store and you don’t walk into Bloomingdale’s and say, can I have this sweater at what you paid for it? Because I want that discount. Like, no, you just don’t do that. You just pay. Bloomingdale says the sweater $75. Do you want it or not? That’s your price.

And so I feel like we, you know, we have, we’re operating a store, and we get things at a special discount because of our relationship with vendors and because of our hard work and experience in the business. And, you know, we get to sell it at the price that the market tells us we can sell it at, which is, I mean, we sell at MSRP. And we do often for furniture, we do less 10%. So that’s how we do it.

So they are getting a little bit of a discount, you know, that’s just a, that’s being, that’s a kindness. don’t share the fabric and the wallpaper and everything else is always just MSRP.

Sure. Great. I love it. Well, you’ve done a lot of huge jobs over the years. What are some of the ways that you got those jobs?

Well,

So it’s interesting, we get our jobs in two ways. One is through relationships, which I would call relationship marketing, which is just having relationships with builders and architects and clients. You always taught us that your past clients are your best and it’s your best ROI is going back to those clients and seeing if they have anyone they can refer you to and that’s really how we’ve gotten some.

very nice big jobs, but we also get jobs from people just Googling us. very early on, I made sure I had a really good website that did not inflate who I was or what I did, but just showed the work and talked to and showed our team and pictures of the team. if you say you have a team, you have a team. You don’t just say you have one even if you don’t.

And so I always got a lot of great clients from just people who would move to the area. They would Google, you know, interior designer, Ryan New York and get my website would pop up and they would relate to it and then call us. So it’s a little crazy that I would get clients that way, but we did. And I think, you know, I paid a lot of attention to the website and the SEOs and how to make sure that

we were showing up in searches and now I’ve kind of turned my attention to AI and chat GPT searches and how do you make sure that you show up there? Because if they can’t find you, they can’t hire you. So you need to always be able to be found for however you’re going to do it. So both of those ways, but you know.

Well, and also, I didn’t mention this to you in our questions, but you have a place in the Hamptons too. I do. How fabulous. Yeah. Yeah. You still have green trees.

Here right now.

I know. Well, they’re greenish brownish and it’s really an ugly day outside. We had some for a minute. But yeah, I do have a place in the Hampton. So I am also, you know, actively out here meeting people and trying to I have a lot of friends who are real estate agents. That’s a very I forgot to mention that that’s actually one of my best sources of referrals are from real estate agents because you really they become a very trusted advisor.

when they’re working with someone and helping them find a house. So we get a lot of referrals from them. But yeah, I’m doing kind of the same thing out here. It’s a lot to always be out and doing things. But I have found that if you get involved with things that you really love, organizations that you really care about, then you meet people and they care about the same thing. And that becomes a common ground.

You know, often clients come from that.

That’s so fun. Well, and you did a show house there too, didn’t you?

I’ve done several show houses out here actually over the years. The traditional home used to have a show house that benefits Southampton Hospital and then it was taken over by cottages and gardens. So I’ve done that one I think three times and then this past summer I did one that was a holiday house which benefits breast cancer and those are always a lot of fun.

Mm.

Do you get jobs off of those?

We’ve gotten calls. had one person who bought the house this past, not this summer, but the summer before when I did the house. And she called, I had done the dining room, and she said that she really wanted to hire us. And then I guess her husband ex-nade that decision once he heard that it wasn’t free. So that was…

That was nice, but no other than that I have not and I know people have I think it I think I don’t know I don’t know why you do or you don’t I think it’s being in the right place at the right time I think if you’re if the right people come through you can get a great job and if not, know, it doesn’t doesn’t happen. So Kip’s Bay is my next One that I’d like to do in New York. That’s the big one And I think that you know

if you really knock it out of the park, then a lot of people do get clients from that. But you don’t really do a show house to get clients, because that is a very iffy proposition. You do it because you believe in the charity that they are supporting, and it’s great to be able to work with vendors and media people, and you meet nice people, and you meet great designers, but it’s really kind of a labor of love. You spend a lot of money doing a show house.

Right.

So you have to really believe in what you do.

Well for sure and it has to be in a year where you can afford the time and the money to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know some people have spent 100, 200 thousand on the houses. Absolutely.

Absolutely, no matter what. mean, had Hooker Furniture was incredibly generous for this past show house, the holiday house, and they donated all the furniture. paid for the shipping, Arte donated the wallpaper, I had the lights, you everything was offered to me, but you still have to, a lot of it, have to get there, a lot, and you have to, you know, disassemble things, you have to get painters, you have to do, I get all your trades in, and not even to mention the hours that you don’t.

get to spend on clients because you are working on the show house or you’re at the show house or whatever it is.

Yeah, it’s a lot. Wow. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the ultra high end clients, which you have dealt with lots and lots of them. Yes. What are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced?

Well, I’m going to speak about the more difficult ones because there are a lot of very high net worth clients who are lovely and who are appreciative. But then there are also some who are demanding and a little entitled and think that because they have a lot of money and they’re paying you a lot of money that you should really be there at their beck and call.

and that their time is very important and they need to communicate when they need to communicate. So you can get a text at 9.30 at night or at six in the morning or emails or on the weekend with lots of questions. And I know you’re supposed to be setting boundaries. I totally get that and I try. But when it’s college and you know that that might be your only opportunity to get an answer that you need, sometimes I do answer.

So there are lot of expectations that you’re going to be doing things the way they want you to do them and that you are going to always be there to answer every question and you know, and it’s going to that their project is really your life. It isn’t always it’s a project one of many. But so it’s a very that part can be tough, but they also

Mm-hmm.

You know, they want to be surprised and they want to be inspired and they are hiring you because they want something different than what they see and what their friends have and they want an experience really out of their design process that’s going to be a little bit different than the rest of their life. So you’re always kind of thinking, I’m always kind of thinking, how am going to make this?

And I think this way actually I shouldn’t say it for all my clients, you know, some of these very high network people are incredibly sophisticated and they’ve seen it all and they’ve been all over. So it’s a little bit of a higher bar to kind of think, how am I going to really make this an outstanding experience and design for them?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s hard.

It is, but it’s a great challenge. I think that by being who we are and showing that you really care about every detail and you care about them as people, because you’re in their business and so you need to be discreet and you need to be respectful as you would with anybody. But I think that they appreciate that. They appreciate being taken care of.

Mm hmm. I’m sure they do. So I think a book to add in here is Unreasonable Hospitality. That’s such a good book and gives some great ideas about little odds and ends of things that you can do. Oh, okay. It’s a great book. Be sure and check that out. And the other thing I would say is there’s a great book called The Next Conversation. And if you have difficulty having conversations with people, that would be another

I’m writing it down.

great book to read.

Well, I have to tell you, I will read that book because I just had to present a very large bill for time billing to a client who’s a very high net worth client, but who doesn’t really understand how much time things take and that we, cause they have done some of this stuff on their own and they think it’s kind of easy and you know, no big deal. And I was really, really nervous about it because I knew I had to be.

Confident and I had to just hand it over and I knew all the hours were justified, but I still was kind of waiting for them to Say what this is ridiculous We’re not gonna move forward because I’ve had clients say that they get a big bill and they’re like I didn’t know it’s gonna cost this much and You want to say well, what do you think we’ve been doing this whole time? How do you think of his habit? Right, but so there is a certain If they haven’t worked with a designer before there’s there can be a little sticker shock

all this stuff.

And so I actually asked ChatGPT for some help. I got a little counseling on the side.

how to approach this.

I wish I’d

Yeah. Well, it’s a great book and it’s one to be on your nightstand because I think for everybody, it’s probably one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Wow. Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, I love your book recommendations. I always do. I have, I have most of them. I wish I could say I’d read them all,

I had them, I buy them. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with my reading. That’s part of it. So how have your clients changed over the years?

Well, I live in a very unique area. It is a suburb of New York City. It’s very suburbs, I should say, and they’re very expensive with very high taxes. It used to be that New York City was the hub of everything, and so everybody came there. And then after these younger people would work in the city for whatever, five, six, seven, eight, nine years, they would move out to the suburbs.

starter home, which you know, was always large and usually new construction. And then they would want to hire us, give it character and you know, fill it up with things because they basically moved out with their stuff from college. And these are people that worked in finance, so they had, you know, a lot of disposable income. Then COVID hit. And people started working from home, which was also a boom to our business because we had

to.

You know, if we’ll look around and go, my God, I need a new this and I need all new furniture and I need a place to study. I, so that was very, great time for business. But after COVID, when people were no longer going back into the office in New York city, people started leaving in droves and there just wasn’t that, that flow out from the city. and people don’t need to live in Westchester anymore. They can work from anywhere. So we have felt, that our,

area is kind of feels a little depressed now as compared to you know five six years ago whereas other parts of the country where I have other designer friends like in Florida or in Texas or North Carolina or Colorado it’s booming there. There’s been this big kind of migration movement where people look around and they go why am I living in this area where I have to pay incredibly high taxes you know where I’m

kind of there’s a lot of population density. I have to send my kids a lot of places to private school, a of suburbs, and it’s just super expensive to live here. And so they leave. So it just doesn’t feel as vibrant as it used to. There’s a lot, the other issue is people are not, the people that aren’t leaving are holding onto their houses because they can’t afford to move.

Mm-hmm

You know, and this is not these are not the ultra wealthy. These are like the bread and butter clients that we used to have all the time that would buy another house and then they would move to a bigger house and we’d work with them. They can’t buy another house, so they’re not leaving. So no one’s able to come in to those houses, you know, so it’s just it’s kind of stagnated and real estate sales are way, way down. And so our new home construction starts. So we’re you know, it’s a little bit it’s a little bit tougher.

Mm-hmm.

There are groups of people that are definitely not affected. We’re doing more work in the city now, it seems like, because if people are going to be, if they want to live, if they’re city people, they’re going to stay in the city no matter what happens.

Mm-hmm.

We’ve done a bunch of homes for people who have moved to Florida. So that’s been kind of fun to see parts of Florida. And, you know, it’s just a constant, what’s next? What’s going to happen next? Or should we keep devoting our energies and efforts to this neck of the woods? Or is it time to try and expand somewhere else? The Hamptons is always great. People really love it out here, but a lot it’s, you know.

It comes and goes. it’s a little bit, feel like Northeast designers, especially in New York, the New York area, it’s a little bit tough right now.

Yeah, I’m sure it is. It’s definitely the financial market has been good. The stock market has actually been strong. So some of the people in the financial markets are probably doing okay.

They are, but you know what? They don’t all live here anymore. Yes, no, there are definitely people here for whom the tariffs don’t really mean anything because they don’t really care if prices go up 10 % or 15 % or 20%. They’re not price sensitive like that. So those are obviously the clients that we want. those are the ones we’re marketing to. And you know, it would be great if I could just have.

Interesting.

three of those all every year and that would be it. I’d be super happy. You know, we have a lot of real big mix.

I’m sure

So what is your vision going forward? You’ve been doing this for a while. huh. It is.

I still feel like I love what I do and probably, I mean, I’m 62. I’m thinking of working for another 10 years or so, maybe more, 10, 12 years. I would really love to keep my business going and hopefully pass it on to someone.

I

who is in the firm right now, who I think would be a great, great, great fit. So we’re kind of working towards that.

Mm-hmm. And that’s your second-in-command. Mm-hmm. Yep. And she’s been working for you for how many years? Okay. Amazing. Well, she’s an amazing person. is.

Yep.

Nine years.

She absolutely is and I couldn’t do what I do without her. She’s one of those very special people that cares. She never ever acted like an employee. She always acted like it was her company and it all depended, not in a bad way, in the best way possible, meaning that she cared so much about making everything run well and making sure the clients were happy.

It’s an attitude that not everybody has. Some people kind of just sort of say, well, I didn’t get to that. I’ll deal with it tomorrow or well, I’m seeing that client wasn’t happy. It’s OK. They’ll get over it. You know, that’s that’s not an attitude you want to have with anyone that works for you. And she from the very beginning was like, this is we’re going to make this. This is going to be amazing. We’re going to do it together. I’m like, you know, right here in the trenches with you. And it’s been great.

Mm-hmm. She is great. She’s amazing. Well, how do you see your role changing over the next 10 years?

Well, I think I would love to be more just, you know, either I’m doing a lot of the design right now and the design kind of the setting the design direction for all the clients and then also going out and doing a lot of the marketing and the kind of the networking and all that stuff. So I think it will kind of.

continue that way, I probably would like to do more of the marketing and kind of start to, I’d love to develop more design in house. So Christine could take that over and really do a lot of that as the design director. But it’s something that I love doing, so it’s going to be hard to give it up. But that’s kind of…

you know, the way I sort of see it changing, is become more of someone that’s getting out there, bringing in more of the clients and the big jobs, and then having the design done in-house and led by the team.

Yeah, and as you’re starting, you’ve got 10 years to think about this. So in that 10 years, hopefully in that at least five years ahead, you’re getting your succession plan in place. Really thinking about what that structure needs to be. So yeah, perfect timing to be planning that out.

Yep, now I think about it a lot for sure. You know, you’ve always advised us to buy a building, to have that kind of, and do that, and I would love to be able to do that as another additional source of income and developing it and maybe going into thinking I would love to sort of, we’ve been so focused on high-end residential, I would love to do some hospitality and maybe some multifamily and some

senior living spaces. So it would be great to be able to kind of grow the business in that way too.

Mm hmm. Well, those are big, big things to do. Big shifts for your business. it sounds exciting.

It is. It is. That’s what’s so cool about this job is there’s so many different ways you can go, things you can do and never have to stay still. Our days are, every day is a different day.

What are you most looking forward to?

In life, I am most looking forward to spending time with my daughters and their eventual children, which will hopefully happen. I’m looking forward to grandchildren. It will be lovely.

Not that I’m rushing my girls, but it’d be great. And I’m looking forward to the business just kind of being a little more of a well-oiled machine. always feel like, and that is, the good thing about our business is every day is different, and the bad thing about our business is every day is different. there’s always something happening, some contractor that doesn’t do what they’re supposed to, some client who doesn’t understand what’s happening and gets upset.

You know, no matter how hard you plan for all these things, there’s always something, but I would love it to feel more automated in some ways, you know, and I think that we keep learning new things and adapting those things to what we’re doing in new systems and new ways. And I think it would be great if we had like a couple of years where it just was kind of, we just knew exactly what we were doing and everything worked out.

I wonder if that’s possible. Great if it was.

It would be good. You can sell that. Huh? could bottle that and sell that.

I know. Well, I guess what I’m saying is I would love to see, I am looking forward to just constantly keeping the improvements going. So making things run better, smoother, more profitably, and that’s my challenge because that is not my comfort zone. to me, I love learning and that’s what I love learning about is how to do it better.

Mm-hmm.

I’m looking forward to doing it better.

Well, that’s great. Well, let’s end our conversation with three takeaways, something that people people to take from this and learn and maybe apply to their business.

Okay, so I wrote these down in advance because you I have no memory left but the three things that jumped into my mind when I heard I was going be asked about three takeaways. The first one was to have a plan, to make a plan. If you don’t have a plan, if you don’t have a roadmap, you’re not going to get where you’re going. You will just, every day will be a new day and a distractible day and you just won’t get to where you want to go. My second thing is

Get a coach, have someone who you trust, who can help you just do things each day a bit better and who will be your cheerleader and who will help you when you have hard times. And then the third thing was to find your people. Find the people that you can communicate with, connect with, you can trust, that you feel

will be there for you. It can have your back. Like if something happens, know, someone abscons with all your profits or you have a bad employee and you need to get rid of them, but just your group that can kind of gather around you and help you. That your peers, not a coach, but peers.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, those are great. And I really appreciate you being on the podcast.

Well, thank you for having me. It’s always so good to see you and talk with

Same here. Well, thank you for being here.

All right, take care, thank you.