Ep 245: Nobody Warned Me About This Part: When Growing Your Design Firm Changes Your Job

You started your interior design business because you love design. You wanted to create beautiful spaces, work with clients, and build something of your own.

But somewhere along the way, the business grew… and your job changed.

Suddenly, you're spending less time designing and more time managing people, making financial decisions, building processes, and carrying the responsibility for everything happening inside your firm.

And nobody really warned you that this was part of the deal.

In this first episode of my new series, Nobody Warned Me About This Part, I'm getting honest about what happens when the business you built around your talent starts requiring something entirely different from you.

I'll share my own evolution from doing everything myself at by Michelle Lynn to leading ML Interiors Group, why stepping away from design was both liberating and surprisingly emotional, and what it really means to transition from being the designer to being the business owner.

Because here's the thing: Growth isn't just more clients, bigger projects, or a larger team. It's a transfer of responsibility. And the work doesn't disappear just because someone else is doing the designing.

We'll talk about:

• Why the role of the owner changes as an interior design firm grows.

• The emotional challenge of stepping away from the creative work that built your reputation.

• Why leadership, pricing, processes, and capacity planning are not overhead. They're the work.

• The uncomfortable middle stage where you have a team but still feel responsible for every decision.

• How staying involved in every detail can unintentionally turn you into the bottleneck.

• The difference between having high standards and communicating those standards effectively.

• Why hiring more people doesn't automatically create freedom.

• How to determine whether you actually want to lead a larger firm or prefer a business that keeps you closer to the design work.

• The questions every interior design business owner should ask before pursuing the next level of growth.

The question to consider: If your business doubled over the next two years, how would your daily job change? And would you actually want the life that comes with it?

Because there is no one-size-fits-all definition of success. You get to decide what kind of business you want to build.

Ready for Support?

If you're navigating the transition from designer to business owner and need help figuring out your role, your team, or what comes next for your firm, private coaching with Michelle Lynne can help you get clarity and create a business that supports the life you actually want.

Explore Private Coaching with Michelle Lynne at https://thedesignbakehouse.com/private-coaching

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Follow Michelle Lynne for more honest conversations about the business behind the beautiful designs.

This is the part nobody warned us about. And it's worth talking about.

Transcript:

MICHELLE LYNNE (01:02)

Warned me that if my design firm grew, I might eventually stop designing altogether. I knew that growth would mean more clients. I knew it meant hiring people, bringing in more revenue, taking on larger projects, and making decisions with bigger numbers attached to them. I understood all of that in theory. What I did not understand was that growth would slowly change my actual job. At some point,

I was no longer the designer who happened to own a business. I was running a business where someone else did the designing. Those might sound like two versions of the same job, but they don't feel the same when you're living them. One job asks, what's the right solution for this room? The other is thinking about whether we have the right people, whether the project was priced correctly, whether the workload is realistic, and whether the business is set up to deliver what we promised.

The designer gets to stay close to the client and the work in front of her. The owner is thinking about that client along with every other client, every employee, every commitment we have made, and all of the consequences that may be coming around the corner. And somewhere in this transition is a question that most of us are not asked when we are encouraged to grow. And that is: do you actually want to lead the business that your talent created?

This is the first episode of a new series I am calling Nobody Warned Me About This Part. We talk constantly about getting clients, making money, hiring a team, growing a firm, etc., etc., etc. But we talk much less about what happens after some of those strategies start working. When the business changes your role, your relationships, your appetite for risk.

And sometimes even your definition of success. So I'm not coming to you with every part of this neatly resolved. Some of it I understand because I've lived it long enough to recognize the pattern. Some of it I'm still working through. So that's the point of this series. This is the part after the advice ends.

So when I started ML and Terry's group in 2008, I was creating a design business, sort of, but I'll tell you about that in a moment. At least that's kind of how I thought about it, right? I wanted to work with clients, create beautiful homes, solve problems, make decisions, and have more control over my career. I'd come from the corporate world, so I wasn't naive about work. Like I'm not scared of working hard. I knew that business owning

Would include responsibilities beyond the creative part, but I just assumed that the business responsibilities would surround the design work. I didn't realize that they would actually start competing with it. So, funny story. When I started my business in 2008, it was not called ML Interiors Group. It was called by Michelle Lynn. Because and and what I was doing at the time was home staging, organizing, and

Redesign, okay. Decorating, redesign.

I just wasn't confident enough to really put myself out there because if I was doing home staging, organizing, and redesign by Michelle Lynn, which was the business, I figured, well, I've quit corporate. If home staging, organizing, and redesign doesn't work, I could do dog walking, basket making, and I don't know, car washing by Michelle Lynn. So I was working from my house, a normal day looked like there was there was no normal days.

There was no normal days, right?

I handled everything. As a lot of you listeners are doing the same thing. Like you're you're dealing with the sales, you're dealing with the marketing, you're dealing with the projects all the way through installation. Like

I remember just working from the car, having a lunch packed, okay, carrying sand like schlepping furniture in the Texas heat. So it was it was it was something y'all because in those early years the business and I were basically the same organism, right? If a client hired the firm, she hired me. I sold the project, developed the design, communicated the decisions.

Sourced the pieces, managed the details, handled the problems, and carried the relationship. my gosh, that was exhausting. But it was also very clear. I knew what my job was because nearly everything was my job. And, you know, as I look back, there's a strange satisfaction in that stage. Like the workload might have been unreasonable, but the feedback loop, it was short. I made the decision.

And then I got to see the result. A client is delighted, and I know exactly what created that delight. Something goes wrong. And although I didn't always enjoy fixing it, I understood exactly where the responsibility lives. So that clarity can make entrepreneurship feel more controlled than it actually is. Like you're carrying too much, right? But you know what you're carrying. When you start growing, it introduces more hands, more layers, more distance.

Between the owner and the final result, the business may become more capable at the same time the owner feels less certain about what she is supposed to be doing all day.

So early in my business I

When we moved from homestaging, organizing, and redesign into more of the decorating and design side. I was not doing any more home staging. You know, success to me designing was more projects with a better budget.

Having a studio to go to work at each day. I've never been one to really pursue a lot of recognition. So getting published or getting awards, that's not that's not what drives me. But I wanted to have those, I don't know, I think it was proof that business was real. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think that that's what I was ultimately wanting.

Now it's similar. I like the large size, large scale projects. We've got bigger budgets now, bigger projects. I know the business is real because I've got a lot of hair loss from it. Okay, actually, maybe not lost, but it's been it's turned gray. But I don't think that my earlier goals were wrong. They were appropriate for the business and the woman that I was at that time.

Well here's the complication. It's that we can keep pursuing an old definition of growth long after it has changed the job we wake up to every morning.

And the job does not change in a dramatic moment. Nobody sit like nobody when mine changed, nobody sat me down, handed me a new title, and removed designer from the description. It happened through a hundred perfectly sensible decisions one after another.

Like a new project came in and we needed more capacity, right? So we hired, so I hired somebody. That person needed direction, which meant I needed a process. And then the process needed someone to make sure that it actually worked. And then as more revenue moved through the firm, the financial decisions carried more weight. As the team grew, communication could not keep living inside my head. Clients still wanted access to me.

Employees needed answers, and the business itself, not the designs, but the business had needs of its own.

So each individual step, each decision made sense at the time, but putting it together, they created a job that I I didn't consciously choose.

So eventually, like I personally have stepped out of leading any designs. Because what happened is that

The business needed more than I could give while also navigating the clients and their needs. My client service started waning.

So I remember there was one day that I was in the zone putting together our processes. So now they are lovingly called our 16 steps of sanity for ML Interiors Group, and it's how we run every project. Every project is different, but the process is the same. Y'all, I sat down and for a few hours I was just in the zone organizing these things, like coming up with pricing. I I can still remember where I was sitting.

was in my old house and I I didn't even get dressed that day. But what happened was is that the the the deadlines that I had for the project that I was leading, I got so far behind on that that I had to bump the appointment with the client.

So like I remember those days where I have I I worked hard from morning until evening and I solved real problems, but I wasn't protecting the client experience.

I was supporting the team. We were moving the company forward. But I still felt like I hadn't done my work as a designer.

And so I was arguing in my mind that the design was this was still the real work and everything else was overhead. But leadership is not overhead. Pricing is not overhead. Processes is not overhead. Making sure the promises sold can actually be delivered is not overhead. Looking at capacity before the team becomes overwhelmed is not overhead.

Giving someone clear feedback before frustration hardens into resentment is not overhead. those things are the work of running a firm. But they don't really give us the same immediate satisfaction as creating a beautiful space.

So with evolution.

My team took on the lead the roles of lead designers. I eventually stepped out of design. Now that's my that's my preference, because I really love the business side of it. I'm not suggesting that's your solution. Now, Juliana is my principal designer for ML Interiors Group and she develops the design. Okay, I review it, I give my opinion.

I question something when needed, and then she works out the answer.

When I realized back in the day I had a di a completely different team, it was Debbie and Megan, Lori.

When I realized I was no longer the person who had to come up with the design, for me, like that was kind of liberating. It was sad at the same time. But hiring people smarter than me is probably the best thing I could have ever done for my business. Smarter than me, better designers than. Well, I'm not gonna say they were better designers than me, because I've I've got some wicked skills.

Okay. Some of them have better technical skills.

Okay, as a team, we're on fire. So looking back, like handing off the administrative work is one thing, right? But stepping out of the work that has been tied to my taste, my reputation, and my identity, y'all, that was something else. As much as I was enjoying knowing that we were giving the client what they needed and what they wanted.

I knew it was the right thing. Okay. But now I get to look at the work, give my opinion, point out what I think needs another pass, and then I let Juliana work it out. I don't have to be the person who finds the final answer. And it it it it sounds a little bit like freedom, and it kind of is, okay, but it does require a different kind of confidence.

I have had to learn to trust that my value is not measured by how many finishes I personally select or how quickly I can solve the room. My experience still matters, my opinion still matters. It just enters the design differently now.

What I've seen is that a lot of owners build teams and then remain involved in every decision anyway. And then they call it quality control. They call it quality control. And sometimes that is exactly what it is. Okay, but other times, other times these designers who still have their fingers in every decision has not, they have not figured out who they are inside of their own company.

Because if they're no longer doing the thing or leading the thing that built their reputation.

And I I like nobody like nobody told me this. Nobody says this out loud. Okay. But what happens is is that the designer is just wanting to stay copied on every single client email and they keep reaching back into the work that they already handed over.

So there's there's there's this weird middle stage of growth where the firm is too large to run casually, but it might not be large enough to pay for every layer it really needs.

The owner has helped but she is still the backstop. Processes exist, but somehow every exception finds its way to her. Revenue has grown, and payroll and overhead have grown right alongside with it.

But she's no longer doing everything herself, although somehow she feels res more responsible than ever.

And this is the stage where growth can look better from the outside than it feels from the inside.

It can be stressful whether you are paying your people on a salary or whether you're paying your people on an hourly basis. There's always something that feels like you're not quite ready for, but the business needs it.

For example, a studio. I was fine running my running running my business out of my dining room for a long time. And then when we were staging, I had a warehouse and a little office attached to it, but it's not anything that, you know, I would have brought clients to. And then eventually, with the processes that I was creating, I knew that we were gonna have to bring clients to a studio. And y'all

I did not feel like my business was ready to support that financial commitment. So there was this new level of responsibility paying my lease every month, but there was also this relief of bringing my clients to this beautifully decorated studio and having a specific area to give them their design presentation.

So there's this emotional and operational reality that that we're juggling. And when you work alone, the consequences of a slow month, y'all, it's it's basically just on you with a team and other overhead responsibilities like a studio or even if it's just like your general software subscriptions, a slow month has has more attached to it.

It can have names and families attached to it. So if you make a mistake pricing a project, it doesn't merely reduce your income. It affects the company's ability to pay people, to pay lease, to pay bills in general, or to absorb a problem, invest in systems, and keep its promises. So growth adds beautiful possibility, but it also adds weight.

As the owner, you begin making decisions for the whole rather than for just yourself. So sometimes you have to pass on a project that the designer, like the designer in me would love, but the scope is wrong for the firm.

There's times where you have to address performance with somebody that you personally care about. Okay, or protect a process when making an exception would feel kinder in the moment.

And y'all, sometimes, and this has been the hardest for me, is having to hold a financial concern quietly while I'm showing up calmly for my team and for clients.

And none of this means that growth is a mistake. It means that growth is not merely more of what you were already doing. It is a transfer of responsibility. The work moves off your desk, but the accountability doesn't.

So have you built a team, but you are still the person who catches everything before it hits the floor?

If that is where you are, you may assume you need better time management. And maybe you do, but there's also a structural question underneath it. And that is, are you still trying to perform your old job while carrying the full responsibility of your new one?

In my experience, that arrangement can work for a season, but it cannot remain the permanent operating model without costing you something. Usually it's energy and then it's creativity, and then it costs patience.

And sometimes it costs the very growth that you work so hard to create because every decision remains limited by the owner's available hours.

That's that's I became the bottleneck in my clients' projects because I couldn't let the other balls drop because we needed to pay the lease. I needed to pay my team. So when people talk about stepping into the CEO role, like they make it sound like it's an elevation. You leave the lower level work behind and spend your time focused on a vision. But that description leaves out most Tuesday afternoons, y'all. Like leadership includes a vision.

But a surprising amount of it is repetition.

Here's what I mean. You say what you thought was obvious for the fourth time, and eventually maybe the fifth time comes around, then you have to admit that if four or five people misunderstood you, probably not as obvious as you believed.

another one would be you you make decisions with incomplete information because waiting has started to create its own set of problems.

You have to hold a standard without turning every issue into something personal.

And as the CEO, some days you look at the numbers when you would much rather open a box of samples or open a bottle of wine. It's also recognizing that the habits which made you successful as a solo designer may not make you effective as the leader of the firm.

a lot of what I do is instinct. And it's efficient when one person is doing the work, but it's a terrible infrastructure for a team. You know what I mean? Like I I'll know it when I see it. Okay, that might work for a a design.

But it doesn't give an employee it give or or let me rephrase that, it gives an employee almost nothing to learn from when you're the owner saying, I will know it when I see it. So if the standard in your firm cannot be explained until after somebody misses it, the business has not really created a standard, it has created a guessing game.

So I've had to confront the difference between having high standards and communicating those standards well.

When my designers were trying to go for like perfect perfect standards. Like done is better than perfect. If you've been around for any length of time, you've probably heard me say that enough to get it tattooed on your own forehead. Okay. But as the owner, I've had to see places where I wanted people to take ownership while continuing to make myself the final answer. But then

At same time, I've had to recognize that if every decision comes back to me, the team is not failing to step up, the business may still be designed to pull everything back to me.

And y'all that can be humbling.

And that is particularly humbling for people who are used to being competent and efficient and like the best of the best.

So our businesses are often built on the ability to see what others miss. Leadership repeatedly puts us in situations where we are the person who missed something. Sometimes the employee is not the problem. Sometimes the role was just unclear. Sometimes the training was, was there even any training, or is it just on-the-job training? You know, the training's incomplete.

Or sometimes we change directions in the middle of something without even acknowledging that we've changed it. I'm guilty of that.

Sometimes we avoid a small conversation until it becomes a large problem. And there are some times, yes, when the person is simply not right for the role. So as the leader of the firm, it requires us to distinguish between these possibilities without using blame to make the answer easier.

So let's go back to the question at the center of this episode. And that is, do you want to lead the business that your talent created?

Babe, there is no morally superior answer to that question. Wanting a small, highly profitable studio where you remain deeply involved in the design is not a failure of ambition.

Wanting to build a firm whose work extends beyond your personal capacity is not selling out the creative part of yourself.

The trouble begins when we build one kind of business while secretly wanting the daily life offered by the other.

You may be like me, where you love design, and then you discover that you love the business portion of this too. The leadership, developing people, setting the direction, and watching a team accomplish something none of you could have done alone, that might be deeply satisfying. For me, the business itself has become one of my creative projects.

Or on the other hand, and there's been times like I fall into this, I don't want a large team. Okay, so maybe you realize you don't want a larger team at all. You do not want your days filled with personnel decisions, financial oversight, and operational planning. You want to design. And there's nothing small about building a business that lets you keep doing the work that you love. That's useful information.

It's not an admission that you were incapable of growing. Like there's a lot of stuff that you can simply outsource and stay principal designer.

You can structure it so that you're the principal designer doesn't mean that you're doing all the implementation.

So a great deal of business advice assumes that growth is the goal and scale is the evidence of maturity. But honey, every level of growth creates a corresponding job for the owner. I think we should be examining that job as carefully as we examine the revenue.

So some things to think about is if your firm doubled over the next two years, how would your daily job change?

Which parts of that job would you want? And which parts would you be tolerating only because they appear to represent success? Y'all, at one point I had almost 10 people on my team.

And I thought that's what I was supposed to do. Like, we were lots of success, lots of people.

yeah, I I've definitely overcome that one. Another question is are you hiring to build a firm or hiring so you can keep doing your current job with less support work?

Does your team need more access to you or do they need clearer authority without you?

What are you still doing because you love it? What are you still doing because being needed feels reassuring?

Ooh, that's a good one.

And here's the last one. If nobody else could see the size of your team or the amount of your revenue, what kind of business would you actually choose?

These are questions to ask yourself. Don't look around to your designer friends. Don't look around to Instagram.

The answers for you may not even point to a larger business or a smaller business. They might point, and I hope they point towards a more intentional one.

Here's kind of looking back as I was outlining this as I was outlining this episode, like what I believe now is that growth does not remove the owner from the work. It just changes what her work actually is.

At first, our value is easy to see because it shows up in what we personally produce, right? We create the plan, we select the materials, we solve the room, we present the design, and we make the client feel understood. as the firm develops, the owner's value becomes less visible. It shows up in the clarity she provides, the decisions she makes before they become emergencies.

The people she develops and the environment she creates so excellent work can happen without her touching every single piece of it.

And I believe or what I experienced is that the transition feels a little bit like a loss before it feels like growth.

Like you miss that clean satisfaction of finishing something with your own hands.

Like meetings, forecasts, feedback, planning, they don't always feel as productive as putting a beautiful space together. It can even feel a little bit strange when your team is creating the design while you carry responsibilities that the client and your team may never see.

The owner's work is often invisible by design though. If leadership is working, the project feels supported without the client or your team needing to know how many dis background decisions made that possible.

The the the decisions that you make that support the design decisions.

And also and and here's one thing to keep in mind as well. You cannot delegate your way out of deciding what your role should be. Hiring more people does not automatically create freedom. Trust me, I tried that. Okay. Because without clarity, it can create more people who need answers from you. And systems do not replace leadership either.

They reduce unnecessary decisions so leadership can be applied where judgment is actually required.

And I also think that the owner has to grieve certain versions of herself. Like the designer and me, who touched every beautiful detail. I was exactly who the business needed at that one stage. But if I had insisted on staying in that role forever, there would have been no room for Debbie.

to take real ownership of the work. Okay, or other talented designers that I've had working with me. Juliana right now is is like she is fully owning the work. Letting go does not diminish the woman who built the foundation.

Okay, I want you to hear that. Letting go does not diminish the woman who built the foundation. It means that she is not the only version of you who gets to decide what comes next.

So, y'all, I'll tell you, one of the biggest perks about not being the principal designer, not being the person who interfaces with the client all the time. Or even when I was the principal designer, but Debbie and Megan were my senior designers. Okay, I'll tell you, not having to deal with the client's personalities or their moods. That was definitely a qu a benefit that I didn't. That that's definitely a benefit. Okay. Now

The part that I still resist is having difficult conversations.

with my team, with the clients, because the buck still stops at you. The buck still stops with me at the at the end of the day.

So, what I'm working through now is not whether I should be designing. Like, I'm not designing anymore, y'all. Juliana does the design work and she should. Like, she is beautifully and wickedly talented at it. I get to look at what she's developed, give my opinion, okay, question the choice, or say something like not quite there yet, or make suggestions like, what if we flip-flop this or what if we change that?

And then and then here's the cool thing. She takes the input and she figures it out. I am not the one going back to the drawing board. And I don't need to be. Okay, the work for me now.

Is resisting the temptation to simply solve it for her because I can see a possible answer.

There's a difference between offering the perspective that comes from my experience and stepping back into the designer seat. One helps her sharpen her work, and then the other takes the work away from her.

I'm also deciding what I want my own days to look like. What do they hold now?

Okay, I know that design production is no longer at the center of them. Hasn't been for years. Okay, I have several businesses. I coach other designers. I speak. I build ideas. We've got Sidemark. you guys are gonna die when you see what's coming out with Sidemark working behind the scenes. It's gonna be so fun. and I still, of course, lead ML Interiors Group. So I'm not trying to find my way back to my old job, but I'm

Figuring out how to fully occupy the one I have now without measuring every day against like work that you can see.

And then there are moments when I see something in a design and I know immediately what needs attention. Here's the cool thing: I get to say it. Like I get to tell Juliana, my gosh, what if we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Juliana, she works through it. And the final result is better because both of us did our own jobs. Like I can come in without the emotional clutter from a client. Now, for me, that arrangement is not a consolation prize.

For me, that is what my real design firm looks like when the owner, me, is no longer pretending the company can grow while every creative answer still has to come from me.

How does that translate for you?

What do you want? The intention of it.

And maybe nobody warned us that growth would change our jobs because from the outside, y'all, growth is supposed to look like the reward. And yes, it can be. But the reward comes with a new role attached. And you are allowed to examine that role. You are allowed to shape it. You are allowed to decide that the next right version of the business is different from the one that you once worked so hard to build.

So the question I want to leave you with is this. If your business continues to grow, are you willing to become the person it will need? And do you actually want the life that person will be living?

If you're somewhere in this transition and need another experienced business owner to help you sort through the role, the team, or the business that you are trying to build, this is exactly the kind of work I do in private coaching. We can look at what's happening in your firm, what you want next, and what may need to change to get you there.

I'll make sure that the private coaching information is in the show notes. But y'all

This is the part that nobody warned me about. And I may not have it tied up neatly, and you may not either.

Okay, and what I do have tied up today neatly, I know is gonna change in the future. So this is worth talking about. If you're in the middle of your own version of this, honey, give yourself a little room to look at it before you rush to turn it into a lesson.

Okay, sit with it for a little bit. Be okay with it.

I will meet you back here next time for another part that nobody warned us about.