Running a thriving design firm is often described as one of the hardest jobs out there. If that’s true, how does a successful designer not only manage the chaos but scale a business to attract the top one percent of clients and win industry awards?

This week on the Creative Genius Podcast, Gail Doby welcomes Stephanie Kraus, founder of Stephanie Kraus Designs, to share her remarkable story of transforming from a national magazine publisher to the head of an award-winning interior design firm. Stephanie reveals how she leveraged her original career’s organizational expertise to build a design business with consistent waitlists, making it one of the hardest—yet most rewarding—jobs she’s ever undertaken.

Listen in as Stephanie discusses the evolution of her firm, which shifted its focus to handling full home gut renovations and custom homes while navigating the unpredictable challenges of the industry. She defines what it means to be a “fierce” but caring businesswoman, and explains how her philosophy of being a fast action taker ensures her employees feel protected and the business runs smoothly enough to scale.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full shownotes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s14e2-shownotes

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

Well, welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Stephanie. First, I’d love to start with your personal story. How did you get into design?

Well, thank you, Gail. It’s great to be here. Great to see you again and hear your voice. Okay, I started my business about 13 years ago. And prior to that, I was a publisher for a magazine and in the medical field. So absolutely nothing to do with design at the time, but I’ve always loved design, fashion, style. I think it’s just in my DNA.

So back in 2013, I don’t know if you remember this, but design blogs were the thing. And I devoured them while I was at home with my kids when my children were little. Because when I had my first child, I actually had to stop working as a publisher. Because when you’re a publisher for a magazine that’s national, you need to travel. So I had to take a break from that.

because both myself and my husband were traveling nonstop and something had to give. So it’s sad to give up that part of my career, but it actually opened the door to another part of my life and a new career. When the kids were little, I did always know I wanted to go back to work and wanted to run my own business. publishing, believe it or not, was like running your own

many company so i learned a lot about leadership and operations and i did want to open something for myself i felt like i definitely had that entrepreneurial bug and i combined that with my love and passion for design and i started my own company stephanie cross designs into the thousand thirteen specifically focusing on you know small projects and residential design

And how I started was I started decorating my own home and started writing my own design blog, obviously with publishing as a background. I really liked to write and I thought I was pretty talented in that area. So I wrote my design blog, did my own house, and then things just took off. My first clients were friends and family, and then word of mouth spread and I haven’t stopped since.

Busy and have had wait lists since the day we opened.

That is amazing. So what was your original vision for the business?

In the beginning, before I had any grand plans, I just wanted to run an organized company that had processes and procedures in place, just as when I was a publisher, we had a very organized process. And what I wanted to bring into it was more of the creative side and a creative aspect that helps people live beautifully and comfortably.

I never imagined it would grow into what it is now, but I feel like doing consistently good work, caring deeply for my clients, being an ambassador for them, and actually a translator for them among the team that they work with when they’re building a house and designing a house for acting as a translator between the builders and architects and trades so that the client’s vision

can be translated into their dream home with the whole team behind them.

And has your vision changed? 12 years is not a terribly long period of time, but I have a feeling things have changed because obviously you got into this business coming from the publishing world and then you start this and it’s been very successful. So what has changed over time?

When I first started the projects were a little smaller. Sometimes it was just furniture and other times it was a small gut renovation or you know kitchen renovation, bath renovation and the vision of the company now is we are focused mainly on full home, full home gut renovations and our whole focus

is our clients working with clients who are family centered to create custom homes from concept to completion. And we feel like we’re really lucky to collaborate with incredibly talented architects and builders who help us translate each client’s dream into reality. Again, my vision for the company today is really concept to completion, helping a client.

reach their dream home through not only beautiful aesthetics, but how they circulate and work through their home and flow through their home now and many years from now. We always like to take into consideration what stage they’re in in life. No small kids. How does that translate from small children to teenage years, to college years, to when they have grandkids and

also encompass all of the family events that take place in these homes and create a beautiful backdrop for our clients.

That’s great. Well, what are some of the biggest surprises along the way in running a design business? Because it’s totally different than publishing, I would think.

designing, running an interior design firm and being an interior designer is probably the hardest job I’ve ever had. I think it’s the most detailed job and there are so many things that are out of our control. So I’ve worked in the publishing and the medical field and this is by far the hardest. The only thing we do control is our creativity and how we show up.

So it took years to build a reliable team of vendors and trades, but once you have them, it’s gold. But it’s really hard not controlling the timing of the furniture, the damages that come with the furniture, the kitchen cabinetry that we designed, but we didn’t create, we didn’t fabricate. All of the things that encompass an interior design project that we rely on

other people to fabricate, make, install to give the final product. And not having control over every aspect of that is very difficult. But what I’ve learned over the years is it’s really important to work with trusted architects, trusted trades, and trusted builders. So we’ve been really lucky.

That’s great. Well, and I would describe you as a fierce businesswoman. Have you always been that way?

I think so. Once I’m comfortable in a role or in a space, yes, I think I just like to set a goal and meet it. And you can’t know everything. So if I’m uncomfortable in a role, if I don’t know anything, I just lean in, keep learning, stay transparent with our clients and just do my best.

Fierce doesn’t mean loud. It just means consistent, fair, decisive, and caring.

I think that’s a great definition for fears and I think fierce is a good thing to go for. So and it’s a great model that you have. One of the things I noticed when we were at boardroom retreat just a few weeks ago, I watched you do something really interesting and it tells me a little bit about your work style. We had everybody take an assessment for their business and it was pretty long. And during this time you were.

you were answering the questions, but you were also executing actions. And you told me about this later. And I thought, wow, that’s really fascinating. Because who would have thought that somebody would just immediately say, OK, well, I need to get into action on this and start executing in the middle of doing an assessment. So that is talking about fast action taking. Is that how you work normally?

Yes, and I think that’s instinctive for me. I think that just comes naturally. I’ve always taken action. Trust me, I do procrastinate with things like unpacking my suitcase and doing laundry. But for achieving a goal, making sure that my company, my team, my employees are taken care of, that I just do my best to try to take action.

And in particular, I think what we were working on was insurance, you know, is my insurance up to date? Is my contract in place? Because those are the kinds of things that not only are really important to running a successful business, but also keep your employees feeling safe, make them feeling comfortable. I want them to feel when they come into their office every day that I’m protecting them, making sure that they have a job in

you know, for many years to come, if you don’t feel safe, if you don’t feel comfortable, then, you know, how can you do your job effectively? Kind of interesting. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. But if something needs doing, I just do it, handle it. Yeah. And I think that’s what I was doing was I was emailing my insurance agent mid meeting just to review our policy. And I actually had added cyber insurance, which I didn’t have before.

So to make sure that my client’s money when it’s, I guess, given by wire transfer or by credit card that it’s Same with updating our contracts. I review it every few years because our business keeps evolving and keeps growing with seven full-time employees and two contract employees. Again, I want everybody to feel protected and supported. And I want them to know that they have a leader at their company who’s going to take action.

And make sure the business is running as smoothly as possible because if you don’t have a smoothly running business, you can’t be successful.

I have a feeling that this confidence that you have in this way of operating came naturally to you. Is that true?

think so. But I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t probably always this confident. If I started this business 20, 25 years ago, I don’t think I would be as confident or as self-assured as I am today. I think time, experience, being honest with yourself, knowing that it’s okay to not know everything. So you have to show a little bit of vulnerability.

Being honest and also i’ve been really lucky over the past before i started before i had my children working for really incredible people who mentored me along the way who taught me leadership who taught me how to run a business successfully in fact it was kind of funny a few months back. One of my past bosses she was a group publisher i was a publisher for the magazine.

sent me a DM through Instagram and said, my gosh, Stephanie, I can’t believe that you are working with Mark Asher, one of the architects that we work with. He built my house 20 years ago when we redesigned it. So was so glad she had reached out to me because then I had a chance to thank her. said, Pat, if it weren’t for you and how you mentored me along the way when I was in my 20s and 30s, I don’t think I would be as successful as I am now.

So I just wanted to thank her for that because I learned so much from her that her confidence gave me confidence. And one of the things she said was, I knew you would be a super successful person. I love all of your designs. You were a really hard worker. She’s like, I’m not surprised. Keep going. Tell Mark I said hi and we love what you do.

That is so great. Well, and so with this confidence, I also have to ask this question because sometimes I’m surprised at the answer. And have you ever had imposter syndrome or fear of failure, fear of success, any of those things?

I don’t think I have. Again, I started this company 13 years ago. So I was in my, I was in my forties. So I have a strong sense of, you know, who I am, a strong point of view. And I love helping clients and other people find their point of view. And I feel like I’m really good at getting to know people and getting to know their needs. And

helping them feel comfortable sharing what they want with me as a designer because they trust me. So I think that if you have the trust of the client and you have your own point of view and you can stand in your space, I don’t think you need to worry about, you know, are you good enough? Are you like better than other designers? It’s really about putting out consistently good work or work that you feel is good.

and trusting yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you build a great firm and in fact, you won an award at our boardroom retreat for some of your amazing results. So what would you like to share with other designers that are wanting to grow their firm and have the level of confidence you have?

You can’t scale and you can’t grow your business without hiring good people. So that’s my number one piece of advice. As soon as you’re ready, hire. Your people are everything. Hire the best person you can afford and ideally someone who’s smarter than you. You don’t need another you. You need somebody who can compliment you and don’t micromanage your people. Teach them, listen and bring your team along to learn, to experience,

Bring them to high point, introduce them to new styles, let them take risks you learn from them. Keep the work environment fresh and exciting. People are your most important asset. You need to hire really good people in order to scale. You cannot do this yourself. There’s absolutely no way you’re gonna be able to design a 5,000 square foot house without the help of your team.

Yeah, that’s a big job.

have all of your processes and procedures in place. We all know that every single project is completely different than the project before and the project that you’re going to be doing next year. But every project should be run the same exact way. You should have the same process, the same procedure. This will give you confidence. Having confidence in your process and how you work and creating steps in order to

produce the most successful end result for your client, even though it doesn’t seem as a creative, you should be as organized and have process and procedures. I think that’s also really important. Everything needs to be organized. Everything needs to flow consistently in order for your firm to be successful.

I totally agree with you. This is really interesting. We have questions about this all the time. Some designers work from home and some people feel really bad that they work from home. They feel like it hurts their business. But you’re running a larger firm in the world of design. And has that had any impact at all on your ability to attract and serve these top level clients?

No, it hasn’t affected attracting top clients. We have a studio in my home in the basement that’s about 1500 square feet. So we have plenty of room, although we sort of growing out of it now, obviously. So it hasn’t affected attracting high level clients, but it’s definitely helped attract top talent because working remotely,

will give you an opportunity to hire the best person, give them a very flexible environment, gives them automatic trust and independence to do their work efficiently and effectively in an environment where they feel most comfortable. So we’re in the office two days a week, but then three days a week they can work from home and that’s where they can focus and get a lot of work done versus being in the office where we’re all sort of like chit chatting and

you know, getting distracted really easily. But we definitely also feel that we do need two days in a row in the office because unlike other firms, even though we’re divided up into a couple of different teams that work on different projects, we all collaborate on every single project. So even though you might not meet all of our lead designers or support designers, every single one of them has contributed.

to your home and to your project, because what we wanna do is use all of these creative, talented minds to produce the best possible solution to a problem or to produce the most creative, interesting, beautiful space. And five or six minds are so much better than one or two minds. So the two days in the office are used to collaborate, to help, to assist anybody with struggle.

And then the three days are at home are really used specifically to do all the technical drawings, do all the proposals, focus in on work that needs to be, I guess, where you need to focus the most, right? Use the most brain power in a silent, calming environment.

What’s your secret for attracting the top 1 % clients?

I think, well, most of our work becomes, comes from referrals. So it’s not unusual for me to have three or four projects from one family. So we’ll start out doing their primary house and then we’ll do their beach house. And they typically at the beach, we’ll have an overflow house for their guests and their family members. And we’ll design that house.

And then they’ll have a house in Florida and we’ll design that house. So it’s easy to attract high level clients when they have multiple homes and we do such good work for them. They never want to leave us. And after we do one house, they say to themselves, wow, I kind of want my home in Pennsylvania to look like this. while we’re at it, let’s work on my Florida house. Right now we have

four projects at the same time for one client. And I had already done two projects of theirs. We did their house in Ocean City. We did their house in Ponte Vedra. They’re buying a house in Bethesda and we’re doing that house and they have a house in Bakers Bay that they’re building. So we’re working on all of those, obviously not all at the same time because they’re all different timeframes, but we have contracts signed for those.

They also then tend to refer us out to their family and friends. And then we also have an incredibly large presence on Instagram. And I’ve gotten a lot of business through there. Even though I don’t really use Instagram to gain business, I actually use Instagram so that when clients are looking at our work, they see the type of work we do and know that we do beautiful spaces.

And it just sort of builds a trust factor for them. Typically they’ll say, Stephanie, I’ve been following you for 10 years and I finally get to build my dream house and we want you to be the designer. Or they’ll say, you know, I picked you because I love every single thing you post. It might not be my style, but I love what you do.

That’s great. Well, that is good information for the people that are listening because I think sometimes we forget how important it is. Certainly referrals are one of the best ways to get business, but being in an area that you’re in, of course, a lot of the people are they have second, third, fourth homes. It makes a lot of sense. It helps if you’re in a resort area or an area where the people that have that kind of

money are able to do projects. that’s a it’s a big plus for you.

And actually, I don’t want to leave out two other really important referring sources, and that’s our architects and our builders. So our big referring architects and builders, we bend over backwards to make sure that we take care of them and their clients if we’re a good fit for them.

Great idea. Well, I’m curious if AI has impacted your business yet or if you see that impacting your business in the future.

see it impacting our business in a positive way. We’re super excited for how AI has helped us improve our renderings, improve our mood boards, improve our furniture presentations, improve our visuals that we present to the client. Anything that helps our clients better visualize their home is a win in my mind. And my team has done a great job of really taking that on and absorbing that and learning

for themselves how to use it most efficiently. So I’m excited to see how it keeps improving our presentations and our processes. We also use it for the back ends. We obviously use it for emails and communication. In fact, one of the things that, one of the most important things that I also do with my firm is continually educate our team. As I mentioned, we take the team to High Point a couple of times a year. We go to New York City, we do sourcing trips.

but we’re also having an AI expert in the design area come to our office in the next month so that they can teach us the latest and the greatest on how to use AI to help our clients visualize what their house is going to look like.

That’s great. Are there a couple of tools in particular that you’d like to share with our listeners?

Well, the designers are probably better at that, but we use ChatTPT, obviously. That’s probably the easiest one. One of our designers is in Chief Architect, and she’s been using something, I’m really probably not the person to ask this question to, because they’re the ones that do all the technical aspects. do the creative concepts, and they do all the technical side. So I’m not sure what she’s been doing, but

They’ll use mid journey. I myself have used mid journey to create and visualize a vision that I’m I see in my head, but I can’t find anywhere. And I’m able to type into mid journey, create a space that looks like this has this. And it’s been pretty good at giving me a fair representation of what it is I’m looking for. So

That helps provide something that’s unique that you can’t find on Pinterest, that’s really in my own brain, that mid-journey’s helping me to translate.

Love that. What else is inspiring you today? What or who?

So I get really inspired by traveling. We take several large trips throughout the year. always traveling to Europe. We lived in Europe and we go back once a summer with the family. always find broadening your horizons, seeing how other people live, function, design is always inspiring to me.

seeing different styles, seeing different aesthetics, breaking out of the box that we see on Pinterest or the box that we see here in the States and your neighbor’s homes and your neighbor’s neighbor’s homes. So traveling is always one thing that inspires me. My clients also inspire me. Seeing their joy when their home comes together is truly addictive.

Learning about how different people live and our different clients live, how they function in their houses, what they find beautiful. I find that really inspiring.

Great. Well, I’d love for us to wrap up with three takeaways that you’d like to share with our listeners and maybe some things that they can take and apply from what you shared today.

First, I would say hire well and trust your team. You can’t do it all. I think that’s the most important thing. Hire as soon as you can. You will need help. The more help you have, the more you can stand in your space and do what you love to do. For me, it’s being creative. For me, it’s having a vision when I walk into somebody’s house or look at an architectural drawings.

and see, okay, what do I see in this space? Knowing these clients, knowing their family, knowing that there’s gonna be multiple generations living in here if it’s a vacation home for the next 20, 30 years. So having a team to support me, having a team that is an expert in technical drawings, elevations, all the important information that really needs to be provided to architects and to builders in order to make that dream come true.

I think that’s really important. And don’t micromanage your people. Let them explore their creativity. Let them learn, learn from them. Even though you may have more experience, everybody can teach you something. Know that you’re not perfect and that you’re always going to be learning something new on the job. Curious, learn from everyone, vendors, clients. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from tile installers.

I love that.

I’m learning new technology every single day. The other day somebody was explaining to me the technology that they want to use in this grout on the tile. And I had to say, excuse me, can you please repeat that and explain to me what that means? I’m constantly asking those questions. Be vulnerable because there’s no way you can know everything in this job. Like I said, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. I will never be all knowing in this job.

And there’s so many different aspects of it, that so many different lanes that that’s why we have tile installers, framers, flooring people, let them be your experts and let them teach you. Yeah, and be kind to be consistent. This industry is small. Your reputation is everything. You may not be able to please every client and that’s okay, you know.

I totally agree with that.

Do the best you can, learn from your mistakes, learn from your failures, everybody has them. As long as you stay positive, be kind to everybody on the job. And one of the most important things I tell my team is everybody’s your client, not just our clients, but our builders, our architects, our framers, our suppliers, our vendors, our delivery team, our receiving house.

Everyone is a client because without the help of your team, your vendors, you will not have a successful project.

Yeah, I totally agree. One of the things I used to say to my employees is, your vendors, all the people that you work with, that is absolutely pure gold. Those relationships are critical. And if anybody messes up a relationship, they will be fired. And I did actually have to fire somebody one time. it was not one of my happier days. you have to protect your business and protect the resources that you have.

One of the things we’ve also adopted is hold meetings every six months with our receiving house, just to touch base with them because we do so much product that, you know, what, what, and the, and the world is constantly changing with tariffs. the shipping damages, as any designer would know is, just been awful. And then just been incredible, been incredible headache for all of us. We’re always trying to improve when the product.

comes into the warehouse, how can we make it most efficient for our delivery team to organize it, damage check it, tag it, keep it safe, have it ready for install day, make it the most effective, you know, because we’re having like things like light bulbs shipped, hundreds and hundreds of product for one project. How can we make, how can we help you help us?

So those are the types of things we sort of try to think out of the box on how to, know, we can’t blame the receiver for all of the mistakes. There’s so many hands.

that touch your product, how can we make it more efficient for them? Because they’re the ones that are the final end game. And they’re the ones that are getting that delivered to our homes.

Absolutely. Well, Stephanie, this has been great. Thank you so much for sharing your story and for sharing those ideas at the end. think those are valuable and helpful for everybody. So thank you again for your generosity.

and scale this was fun.