85. From Designer to CEO: How Owning the Vision Grows Your Business

When you’re deep in the day-to-day of your design business, it’s easy to forget why you started it in the first place. I’ve been there — chasing goals, saying yes to opportunities, and still feeling like something’s off. In this episode, I’m challenging you to step back and look at your business through the lens of a true CEO and visionary. Because you can’t scale what you haven’t defined.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why most designers are stuck in their business instead of leading it
• How to get clear on what you actually want — not what you think you should want
• The difference between designing for your clients and designing your life
• How to spot the misalignment that’s keeping you stuck in the grind
• What it really means to be the visionary of your business
• How to build from intention instead of emotion
• Why clarity is your most valuable business asset as you grow

 Scaling doesn’t start with another system or hire — it starts with you. As the CEO, your job is to hold the vision, make decisions that align with it, and lead your business where you want it to go. If you’re ready to stop reacting to what’s right in front of you and start leading with clarity, it’s time to step fully into your role as the visionary. Let’s realign your business so it supports the life you actually want. Book a 15-minute problem-solving session, and let’s start there.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey there, designers. Welcome back to Success by Design. This is the podcast where we are talking about building a business that not only looks good on paper, but actually feels right in your life. And I wanna start off today with RAs in a lie. We're talking about a really important topic. That is a really hard one because you're gonna have to dig deep in this.

This is what do you really want? Outta your business. Oh, this can be a really tough conversation, but it's one that is so important because you cannot set vision until you know where you're headed. So let's start Two truths and a line. Number one, every successful designer I've ever met had a clear vision for where they were going before they ever got there.

Number two, your vision or your business vision rather, will stay the same for your entire career. Number three, you can't create a business that feels aligned. If you're too busy reacting to everyone else's priorities ' So stick around. We're gonna reveal the lie at [00:01:00] the end of this episode, but I want to think about yourself as a visionary.

You know what I hear the most from interior designers when we start working together, I'm just trying to keep my head above water. And boy, do I get it. I have been there too. In fact, when I had a year where our firm grew 15 XI felt this in every single way. In fact, my first hire was my operations manager, and I remember saying to her and pointing and saying, you see all these boards in the background?

This is how I'm project managing. And I literally was project managing off of whiteboards and felt like we were not getting there, but not knowing what else to do either. Because let's face it, when you're trying to not just manage your projects. But manage any people you have on your team. Pay your bills on time.

Think about revisions and installs, and that one client that we all have, that emails or texts at midnight, it can feel impossible to think about being a visionary. You [00:02:00] are barely hanging on by the case of your beautifully manicured new fingernails, right? I get it. Me too.

I was there. In fact, it's so easy as business owners to get stuck in the business that we forget how to step above it and remember what kind of business we even wanted when we started out and had this crazy idea of being an entrepreneur and putting out our shingle and beginning this crazy journey.

And along the way we end up forgetting about so many things that we end up taking on the projects we don't like, because let's be honest, they pay a bill. Right. And then we say yes to clients that maybe aren't aligned with who we are and what we want. And as a result of trying to service all of these bad fits, you end up not even having time to go after the clients that you want.

I remember this so much. So especially three years into my business, I was servicing the North Scottsdale Housewives and the doctor's wives, and everyone who was beyond high maintenance that. It took a minute [00:03:00] before I remembered to pull out and say, hold on. Am I having fun? And y'all, I absolutely was not having fun in any way, shape or form.

No offense to them. It was my fault for taking them as my clients. That wasn't where my happy place was. I sat back and I thought to myself, why did I get into this? And it's because I couldn't find the companies that I wanted to work with back when I was fixing and flipping my own houses and my own properties.

And that triggered the thought of, why don't I go back to working in a business to business environment, which is what I really started out looking for and couldn't find, and what my passion was, especially having a Master's in business administration. I love working with other businesses. As opposed to individual people, and don't get me wrong, our business is very relationship minded, but it's different when you're working with someone on their powder bath or their nursery for their first baby, as it is to a multimillion [00:04:00] dollar multifamily asset.

When I could get my mind around that. My entire business changed. It took three years. So if you're sitting here going, oh, I need to have this heart to heart with myself, don't feel bad. It took me three years to even get there myself. As the CEO of your design firm, your number one job isn't design. That's right.

I'm gonna say it again. As the CEO of your design firm, your number one job is in design. It's vision. Now design, don't get me wrong, plugs into that. But if you're sitting back and you're saying, I am design. I'm designing, but I'm not loving my business. I don't want to do the visioning, I want to do the designing, there is nothing wrong.

With selling your firm or handing it off because you wanna be able to clock in and clock out every day for someone else and do strictly design. There is no shame in that game whatsoever. But until we get our minds around as business owners that our first job is vision. [00:05:00] We are not going to have a successful business that is your job because no one else is going to hold that future picture of what you want your business to look like and how you want it to serve your lifestyle, and you and your clients, I can tell you, they don't care.

Your team, that's not their job and your account. I guarantee you she's not thinking in that way. She's trying to make sure your numbers all add up and that you're where you need to be. The reality is no one else can be a visionary in your business except for you, and that is why you hung out your shingle in the first place because you wanted to craft something that fit your life.

Style that worked for you, that allowed you to have the weekends that you wanted or send your kid to the private school that you wanted or retire early or build a retirement that served you on the hours you wanted. If you're sitting here and you're thinking, yeah, that is where it started, and I couldn't be further off course right now.

It's okay. We're gonna talk about how to get you back on [00:06:00] because fleshing out that vision, especially if it's been buried under your day-to-day chaos, which I can feel is absolutely critical to determining how you wanna march into 2026 and how you want 2026 to serve you rather than you serving it. So how do we actually flesh out this vision?

How do you start saying, what do I want my business to look like? Yeah. In fact, you may be even sitting here saying, I don't even know what my vision is anymore. I'm just here. I'm paying bills. I'm trying to serve clients, make sure things get installed. Yeah, you're not alone. I want you to grab a notebook.

And if you're driving, it's okay. Just mentally walk through this with me because there are some very precise steps I take my coaching clients through where we start defining the business that's right for them. And this is the process I had to go through to say, I don't want to serve the residential market anymore.

What do I want to do? This is fun. I love step one. [00:07:00] If you're a dreamer, which most designers are, you can imagine things that other people can't. This is such a gift. Instead of designing a room, I want you to design the picture of your ideal day, not your dream life. I know. Yes. I wanna be having my ties on the beach too.

That is not in the protocol right now, but I want you to think about your ideal Tuesday. Like when do you wake up? What kind of projects are you working on and who's on your team? What is your client interaction looking like for the day? Maybe you're designing luxury hospitals and beautiful healthcare facilities, or maybe you're running a boutique studio focused on those really beautiful residential projects in your city.

The reality is that we can't build what we can't see, so you have to describe it in detail before we can begin implementing it. And this can take a minute because I also want you to audit your current [00:08:00] business against that vision. Once you map out what you want your data look like, we're gonna audit it.

And before we get to the auditing portion, I want you to really think in detail about your day. Like for me, I know that if I don't get a minimum of two to three cups of coffee. Don't tell my doctor, but I need two to three cups of coffee to get going in the morning, and if I don't get that, it's really not okay.

There's the one pre-up when I wake up the second cup on the drive to school and the third cup when I come home from school and sit down at my computer, and sometimes I'm still sipping on them as I am today, right around lunchtime. Yeah, it's a reality, but I know that that makes me a much better and happier person.

And maybe for you, it's making sure you get to go to lunch with a girlfriend twice a week. That's awesome. For me, I don't care about eating lunch. I just wanna make sure that I can be done in time to go pick my kids up from school every day. That is [00:09:00] so incredibly important for me. And by done, I don't necessarily mean finished.

It just means in that moment, work's in a good place. I've done the main things. My team is well positioned. My clients have what they need to succeed. And then I can do the deep work late at night if I want to, which I'm finding as I get older, I don't enjoy as much truthfully, but I don't have to because the bulk of my day has been spent on the backend during those key business hours.

Alright. Let's talk about auditing your current business against your vision. What are you doing right now that is supporting that picture? Also by the same token, what are you doing right now that is not supporting that picture? What is stealing your time, your energy, maybe even your joy or your peace?

Maybe it's just one client. Maybe it's you've ended up in this niche market of clients you don't want. [00:10:00] Maybe it's that you don't have the systems in place. As one coaching client said to me, I wake up in the morning, I pull up my Google spreadsheet, and I start randomly assigning tasks to people. Let me let you in on a little secret.

That's probably no secret. Not only is that super stressful for you, that's super stressful for the people who are waking up to say it feels like whack-a-mole, right? The old arcade game from when I was a kid, what popped up and you have to bop it on the head. It's super stressful to manage a team that way for all the players involved.

This is really about an alignment check. It's almost like when you're working on a design board. Think about it, when you're putting together that mood board. Everything's feeling cohesive, but there's one or two things that feel off, and because of that, the whole thing feels off. The exact same is true of your business.

This is no different. I'll warn you, this can feel overwhelming. You may get there and go, oh my gosh, how have I gotten here? This is not where I wanna be. I'm making good money. But I'm not happy [00:11:00] and my business is not serving me. Instead, I'm serving it, and you may feel a little bit of a meltdown coming on.

I'm gonna tell you that's completely normal. Take a deep breath because paralysis of analysis isn't gonna get you anywhere. We're gonna start taking steps in the right direction. If you haven't read the book Atomic Habits, just read the first chapter and learn about the power of just a 1% incremental change and how over time it can change everything.

One of my favorite books. So let's start thinking about step three here, and just to review step one, we know what our ideal day looks like and we want our business to look like. Then we're gonna start talking. And number two, auditing it against where we are today. How far off of the dream are we? And now it's time for action, right?

We're gonna start small. But we're gonna be very strategic about those steps because I just wanna give you permission right now. You do not have to overhaul everything at once, nor should you, I would argue, because here's what ends up happening. If you try to make [00:12:00] cataclysmic change, it usually ends up being a cataclysmic mess.

This is about tweaking the things along the way so you're not upsetting the entire apple cart, but you are changing the direction that that apple cart is going. Does that make sense? Sometimes it can be as simple as just saying no to that wrong fit client. We all know what they look like. We all have felt them before.

In fact, if I give you two seconds, I bet you could come up with the name of your last wrong Fit client. Am I right? In fact, you may be sitting there and going, they're still on my roster and it's driving me nuts. Yeah, I feel you. Also, it might mean just blocking off some time on Fridays to be that CEO, to be that visionary.

Do you take blocking off time to do design projects? Or if you do, do you take time as a CEO to be just as serious about being the CEO of your company? Because here's the thing,

thinking about clarity doesn't get you where you want to be. You actually have to start doing the things that [00:13:00] align with the picture that you were given when you sat down to think clearly and what you wanted your business to look like. Like I said, this doesn't mean biting off 30 tasks in any given week.

It's about that incremental 1% change. In fact, I wanna hear from you. I want you to DM me your answer to this critical question. What part of your business feels the most out of alignment with your vision right now? What is it that is just your pinch point? And it could be really big, like, oh my gosh, I'm not even right in the right market sector.

I'm not even hanging out in the areas I wanna be. I'm not procuring the clients I wanna be, or it could be smaller and perhaps something more behind the scenes. It's actually still a big deal, but I just don't have the systems and processes to scale like I wanna scale, but I have no way of getting there right now.

It could also be your pricing. Maybe your pricing feels outta whack and you keep discounting your services because, well, it's a friend of my sorority sister and I [00:14:00] feel like I should, or I met them at the country club and because of that. You can talk yourselves out of a lot of P pricing. I love hearing where you're at and I hope you know when I read your dms and I respond to them personally, there is no judgment.

I so want to help you succeed. As a mom of two daughters, there's nothing I'm more passionate about than seeing other people succeed, especially women. And you would be surprised. I would love to tell you that every DM I get is so unique and mind blowing, and I never saw it coming. Y'all, so many of you are in the exact same mode, going through the exact same thing, and I wanna hear about it because then I can tell you, you are not alone from my heart.

Alright, here's where we're gonna wrap this up and why this work matters so deeply to me and why I am still here spending time with you every single week. Because you can read every business book, you can read Atomic Habits, [00:15:00] and you can join every Facebook group and you can insta follow every dream designer that you've ever met or want to meet and download every free template that every coach has to offer.

But here's the truth. You cannot get a custom solution from a cookie cutter process. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for a cookie cutter process. When you are working through getting five figures and six figures into your business, especially those sixes. You need those templates. You need those groups.

You need that support. But when you start getting into those high sixes and you wanna shoot for high sixes or sevens, this is when it gets really. Personal because it's not about what I would do. It's not about what's trendy in the industry. You've already tapped out on all that and used it. It's about what's right for you as the CEO and visionary of your company.

This is why when I take one-on-one coaching clients, this is exactly where [00:16:00] we start. No groups. No interactions with other designers because you are unique and you and what you are building is so special that by the time you get to this point, you need and deserve that one-on-one attention. It's not about marketing tactics or this really cool new pricing formula.

It's about uncovering what kind of business you actually want to build, and then we scaffold out of that to get you where you need to be with milestones and goals and deadlines. Because if you don't know where you're going, how are you ever gonna know what to say yes to? That comes into your life. This is why I'm still an active designer, because I know what it's like to juggle installs and invoices.

We're trying to grow a business that feels like it's growing you back, and that sometimes doesn't feel that way as we're talking about on this episode. Right? And that's why I created this space. It's really about helping other designers like you not just survive. But [00:17:00] really build a business that's designed, aligned, profitable, and sustainable.

I love talking about sustainability because we can do these short sprints of intensity where maybe our business grew 15 x one year. Oh my gosh. You wanna talk about a sprint? That was one of the hardest sprints I've ever done. But the reality is through that sprint we had to build the systems, processes, and people

that would allow us to be sustainable and not just see that year as a one-off year. And because we had that mindset when we went into that year, we have not dropped off since, regardless of tariffs, regardless of the economy, because we built a business that's aligned to a vision. I wanna come full circle.

Let's talk about our two truths and a lie, okay? Number one, we said, every successful designer I've ever met had a clear vision before they ever got there. Number two, your business vision will stay the same your entire career. Or number three, you can't create a business that feels aligned if you're too busy reacting [00:18:00] to everyone else's priorities.

And I hope it is so clear to you now, which one of those is a lie because it is number. Two, your business vision will stay the same your entire career. No, absolutely not. That's a lie. Your business should adapt to you. That is why you started your business. I cannot tell you how many different incarnations my business has had in the last almost 20 years.

It has followed me through so many seasons of life. That's right. That's a key word choice. It has followed me. I have not followed it. So when I started out in color consulting. I needed more income than color consulting would provide, so I went into interior design, interior design in the residential sector was not my jam.

And when I realized that I adapted to a more B2B or business to business model, that served me so well, especially when I got married and then when I had kids. And business hours are respected [00:19:00] and people have budgets that they're trying to execute. It was fabulous. And then I had kids. And I let my business continue to not actively grow, but take care of the clients I currently had in my system.

I didn't do a lot of marketing. I didn't want to, I was the mother of young children and that was not only, okay, it was like an incredible privilege and gift that I was never sure that it might actually happen. And so when it did, I was so glad I didn't have a highly demanding job in business. Instead, we were boutique, we were small, we were running a tight ship.

And then the year we grew 15 x. The year that my youngest went to kindergarten and I had the opportunity to spread my wings in a way I'd been envisioning for years, but it just wasn't right. Now. My business was ready to follow my lead and it just so happened that the opportunity came the exact year that my youngest did go to kindergarten.

This is the type of model I want to build for you, and I imagine someday I will want my business to contract as I head toward [00:20:00] retirement, right? Or I will want to sell it and position it for sale, which is a whole nother set of variables and systems, priorities, and metrics you need to have in place for a potential buyer.

All of these things are so important when it comes to your business working for you. And not you working for it. So whether you are a solopreneur or you have an entire team of 5, 10, 15, there should constantly be either expansion, contraction, or recalibration, but it's all being driven by you. That is what is normal, that you're the driver.

That's what good growth looks like, and that's a well designed business. So let me ask you, if you're ready to stop reacting and start designing your business with intention, I would love to help you out. Please reach out for your free 15 minute problem solving session with me, and let's figure out what's next for your business with you being the key word in your [00:21:00] business and where your vision might also need some refining.

Because remember, at the end of the day, the most important thing you'll ever hear me say is your business should work for you, not you working for it. Until next time, take care.