On January 1, 2025 Hackett House Studio will officially turn 4 Years Old! Here are 4 Hard-Won Life Lessons I’ve learned as the owner of an Interior Design Studio over that time.
When you own a design business (or any kind of business), you’re putting yourself out there WAY more than you realize.
When I left my career in finance in 2020 and set out to start my own design business, I had one goal in mind: create beautiful interiors. I have been passionate about interior design since I was very young, and taking this leap felt like I was finally living my true purpose. It was all so exciting! I had heard stories about other people who had done it and knew I was smart enough to figure it out. Turns out, I was right, I was smart enough. However…it was way harder than I could have ever imagined it would be. In the first two years of owning this business I started to think to myself: “ I am smart enough… but am I tough enough?!”
When you own a business, and especially when you own a design business, you are putting so much of yourself out there in the world to be judged. Your design work will be judged. Your social media content will be judged. Your processes and systems will be judged. Your business decisions will be judged. The way you handle your professional relationships will be judged. The decisions you make in your personal life because of your business will be judged…the list goes on and on. And these are just the big things – there are also a bunch of tiny, micro decisions you’ll have to make every day that somehow always feel like they are the biggest decisions in the world. Each and every decision that you make comes with an opportunity for someone to form an opinion… and usually the opinion they are informing is about you. When you work for another company or if you work on a team, the judgements and perceptions get dispersed across the group. But when you’re a business owner, the buck always stops with you. All of the judgement and all of the opinions people form about your company or your work…good or bad…can ultimately feel incredibly personal. And that can get pretty heavy, pretty fast.
First and foremost, I always hope that my design work will speak for itself, especially now that I’ve found my footing and have a few projects that are more aligned with the true HHS aesthetic. Getting to do interior design work is a dream-come-true for me, and I’m so grateful that I get to do what I love. I have a feeling that some of the pressure of the opinions and judgments will subside with time., especially since all of these hard-won lessons have definitely helped me cultivate more of a IDGAF attitude as the years go by. As I head into 2025, I want to focus more on curating my own artistic voice and less on doing what’s expected of me. While the opinions and judgements will always be there, I’ve started to learn that the trick is to not put too much stock into them and to just continue to focus on providing an amazing, top-tier service and beautiful, thoughtful design work.
You have to learn to be okay with not being liked all the time (i.e. you can’t be a people-pleaser).
Although I think women struggle with this more than men, we all have people-pleasing tendencies within us. In most cases, it’s a good thing! As a human walking this earth, it makes you a good person to care about how you are making other people feel. But here’s the thing: whether it’s clients, consultants or employees, people will come into your business and will have opinions about how you should do things. And without knowing even a fraction of what you know about your business, they will 100% try to tell you what to do and how to do it. In some cases,: ya gotta let them! You have to listen to them, and you have to do your best to learn from them as much as you can. But…the truth is…you are the only one who knows what’s truly right for your business. No one, and I mean NO ONE, will ever care about your business the way that you do. That’s a fact.
Since starting HHS 4 years ago, I’ve had months (years, even) where I was paying people to work in my business while I was not taking a salary of my own. If that’s not a situation you’ve been in before – think about that for a minute. I would write people’s paychecks and subsequently watch them go on vacations with their families, while my husband and I were having somber nightly meetings about how hard it was getting for him to carry all the household finances on his own. I was working 80-100 work weeks, slogging through doing things like filing papers, submitting sales tax payments or responding to dead-end project inquiries… and I was doing that all without getting paid. As a business owner, the number of sacrifices you have to make every day, every week, every month, just to see your dreams come true is immense. At times, you will be frantic in your attempts to try to figure out how to not let your business fail. But here’s the thing, the people who work for you, or the people that hire you, or the people who are watching you from afar, they are never ever going to feel that way. Your business is never going to be as important to them as it is to you. Period.
Learning how to navigate this has not been easy for me. In order to grow, you have to bring people into your business but it’s impossible to expect them to care as much as you do. There has to be balance. There’s a saying that goes, “hire slow, fire fast” and of all of the cliche sayings people have about business, this one is the one that stands out to me as being the most true. Looking back on the last four years, I wish I had been much more hasty in calling things off when a client, employee or hired trade didn’t’ feel like the right fit. For example, in my second year of business, I hired a bookkeeper who I didn’t like from the very beginning. I hired her (despite an awful first meeting) because she was a friend of a friend and I was sold a story about how she was struggling and needed work. I let her work for me for 8 months before I realized she had no idea what she was doing. In the end, it cost me over $10,000 to fix her mistakes, and that's in addition to the monthly fee I was paying her while she was working for me. If I had listened to myself, and not insisted on making my friend happy by hiring her, I could have saved myself a lot of time and a lot of money. That was a tough lesson to learn.
Something else I didn’t realize when I started this business was that firing clients was going to be a real thing, too. Where things stand now, I have a comprehensive interview process I take potential new clients through that ensures we’re going to be a good fit for each other before we start working together. But in the past, I needed ALL of the work I could get and I subsequently let some clients walk all over me. That is now officially a thing of the past. I have a process and a system, and if a potential client doesn’t like the way I do business, then they are welcome to go find someone who’s going to be a better fit for them. It took me a long time to realize that, if I’m constantly people-pleasing, I’ll always be stuck in relationships that aren’t beneficial for me or the business.
While I don’t totally agree with the common phrase “it’s business…it’s not personal,” I do believe that there are elements of truth to it. There is, unfortunately, no way to own a business and make everyone happy all the time. Turns out this is true in life, too, and the sooner we all learn it…the better off we’ll be!
Making your own schedule is a myth… and… even when you own a business, you still have a “boss”.
One of the biggest reasons that entrepreneurship appealed to me was for the flexibility it could provide in my schedule. The standard 9am-5pm (which we all know is more like 6am - 7pm by the time you add in the commute, your bosses' expectations, etc.) just didn’t work for me. I quit my job in finance at the peak of the pandemic, and being able to work from home was one of the biggest reasons why I made the transition into entrepreneurship. It made so much sense to me to be able to get up in the morning and start some laundry, answer some emails, work out, then work on a project or do client meetings. I was able to craft my work schedule to fit my lifestyle, instead of the other way around. I had more autonomy over my life and I loved it, so it was a no brainer to me!
For my first year in business, I didn’t have a ton of clients so, all-in-all, my calendar felt pretty manageable. It was feeling like the right decision at first, despite the fact that I wasn’t making very much money. As I got bigger projects and better clients, though, the demands on my calendar started adding up. Before I had a design process of my own, I was at the whim of every contractor who wanted me to “swing by later that day” to answer a few questions about tile layouts or lighting positions. I was being pulled in a million different directions, and I had no control over it.
Then, on top of all of that, I added in a few employees and that’s where things started to get borderline unmanageable. I was now required to be in meetings with my team first thing Monday morning, then client meetings later that day, then hopefully swinging by a showroom to pick up samples while I was out – it was nuts. Add in all of the office work I had to do to prepare for that litany of meetings and, all of sudden, I no longer had any free time in my nights and weekends. I was miserable. I was burning the candle at both ends and this idea of “making my own schedule” seemed more like a malicious lie than an achievable reality. I was spending just as much time managing people as I was running the business, and it left me with very little time to do the design work I loved. When I did do that work, it was strained under tight deadlines. It was far from ideal.
It turns out that having the right help, and the right people in the right seats, is the exact solution to this problem, but that was another lesson I had to learn the hard way. Even still, my clients and my team members largely still dictate my schedule and infringe on that elusive notion of complete and total calendar flexibility. Which is why I refer to this idea as a myth, If you’re considering entrepreneurship, just keep this in mind: whoever is paying you is your boss. Even though you own the business and you call the shots, you still have people to answer to. Developing refined systems and processes, and hiring the right people to help you deliver a top-knotch service to your clientele can keep this from feeling too overwhelming, and that’s something you develop over time with experience and expertise.
Be prepared for immense and constant personal growth, because it’s not optional.
It doesn’t matter where my business is currently, as long as I’m on the upward trajectory there will always be something new to figure out. Growth is always going to lead to new problems (and opportunities), which will always mean I have a new skill to learn or a new obstacle to overcome. It turns out that I’m up to the challenge… but it certainly wasn’t something I was prepared to experience when I started this business.
Another thing I wasn’t prepared for is that this is a business of comparison...,and that can get pretty hard at times. I see other designers' work and I constantly think, “if only I could get bigger projects, or better budgets… my design work would be so much better!” Having started this business with literally zero experience in interior design (not something I recommend, for the record), I had a LOT of learning to do. I would compare myself to designers who started their businesses with some kind of “leg up”, i.e. maybe their husband is an architect or builder, so they get some clients or referrals from that. Or maybe they had parents who wanted to do a large-scale renovation and, so, that was their first project. While it still takes a ton of grit to be successful in this business, I was always envious of the people who had “easier” paths into getting started in this industry. I truly had to build this thing from the ground up, with no prior experience and not a single referral or lead on a source of business when I started. Looking back, I actually can’t even imagine what I was thinking. It seems absolutely asinine that I thought this was a good idea! I do think that this is something that a lot of entrepreneurs have in common, and we can often be heard saying “how hard could it be?” Well, LOL, let me tell you… it can be DAMN hard, and almost soul-crushing. But with the proper amount of consistent growth and a resourceful attitude, I’m proof that it can be done.
I also didn’t have the opportunity to do a project of my own to define my design style prior to taking on clients, which has meant that a lot of my creativity has been sacrificed to the whims of “doing whatever the client wants.” If I had had an established portfolio prior to starting, I probably could’ve been more selective in the projects I accepted early on, but that option wasn’t available to me. As I established a bit more of a portfolio, I've been able to find clientele that are more aligned with my aesthetic vision, and that feels like such a huge accomplishment. It took a lot of personal growth over the years to be able to set boundaries in my work or to stand my ground when I was passionate about a design decision, which is not an easy thing to do in front of someone who’s paying you a lot of money for your services.
Throughout owning this business, I’ve become a better designer, administrator, salesperson, marketer, content creator, financial analyst, subject-matter expert, account executive, networker, leader and so, so much more. I still have a lot of growing to do, but that’s going to be inevitable for as long as I keep this business on an upward path – which is ultimately the goal!
Well, there you have it! My four hard-won life lessons from owning a business for four years. Did any of these things surprise you? If you’re a business owner, can you relate? What did I miss? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so either leave me a comment below or chat with me on Instagram.
Before I go, I want to share some resources with you that have helped turn me into the entrepreneur I am today.
MINDSET & STRATEGY
To Be Magnetic - this program has helped me find my authentic self and gain the confidence to show up as her everyday. I pay for the program and can’t recommend it enough, but they have a fantastic (and free!) podcast as well.
Tandem - Renee at Tandem curates the most amazing masterclasses for interior designers and the topics she covers always seem to come up at incredibly timely points in my business. Sign up for her newsletter so you never miss a class announcement, and consider working with her for coaching services as well.
The Expert - Whenever I’m in a tough spot in my business, I reach out to a local mentor or I book a session with someone that I admire on the Expert. There’s nothing better than getting a 1-hour intensive with someone who’s been there, done that. If you’re an aspiring designer or business owner, you can book a one hour video session with me by clicking HERE! I love talking to designers or other creatives who are just getting started and want to learn from my experiences.
BOOKS & PODCASTS
I have a collection of over 100 interior design books, and I’ll link my favorite 40 HERE. Design books are the best way to further your design education, there really is nothing that compares to the knowledge you get from the ability to see another designer's work in detail and when it’s accompanied by text and explanations of design decisions that were made along the way.
The Interior Collective Podcast - Anastasia Casey is an amazing business owner in her own right, so this podcast is not just for designers. Tune in to learn more about the nitty gritty day-to-day problems (and their solutions) of owning a design biz.
Hot Young Designer’s Club - If you really just want to feel like you’re not alone in this business, then this podcast is for you. They also have amazing resources on their webpage that you can buy for turn-key solutions in your client-facing processes.
Thanks for reading! Here's a little bit about us:
Hackett House Studio is a full-service residential interior design studio located in Columbus, OH. Using a combination of your exquisite taste and our creative know-how, we bring your vision of a beautiful and balanced home to life. Here at HHS, we use science-backed research to design carefully-styled spaces that have a positive influence on your health and wellbeing.Our processes have been carefully refined so that we can fully appreciate our clients' personalities and aspirations from the outset. After gaining an understanding of your goals and wishes, we get to work creating functional interiors that enhance our clients' quality of life. HHS designs are timeless, elevated, approachable and, most importantly, a reflection of the beauty and opportunity you desire to bring into your life.Click HERE to read about our services and submit your information in our project inquiry form.
Services Provided:
Full-Service Interior Design in Columbus, OH & Beyond
Concierge Interior Styling in Columbus, OH & Beyond
1:1 Interior Design Consultation Video Chats in Columbus, OH & Beyond
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