Featured on this episode:

• Join the wait list for The Designers Edge and my May 5th workshop.
• Grab Your Free Script Guide here
• Access the full video interview with Elana Steele of Steele Appliance here

What you will learn from this episode:

• Why raising your hourly rate won’t fix a structural billing problem

• How flat fee pricing transformed cash flow, forecasting, and client relationships

• Why community is as critical to business survival as strategy

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I want to tell you something I haven’t talked about in full before.

Not because it was too hard to say, although some of it was. But because I wasn’t sure the full arc was mine alone to tell. My husband is a private person. My kids didn’t sign up for this podcast. So I’ll tell you what’s mine to tell, and trust me, there’s plenty of it.

And I want to be clear upfront: I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because I think a lot of you are living some version of this story right now. And I want you to see the entire arc — not just the parts that are easy to talk about.

When the Floor Dropped Out

In 2008 and 2009, my husband was in the mortgage business when it collapsed.

No warning. No fault of his own. He never did subprime. The industry simply ceased to exist in the form he had built his career around, and he had to start over from scratch.

We had one toddler and one newborn. We had just bought a home on two salaries. One of those salaries disappeared in a matter of months.

We got through it. We dug into savings. We had help from family. We did a lot of grinding. His career rebuilt slowly and then steadily, and it has honestly been the best thing for him and for us. But it took years — real years. And during those years, my business needed to carry more than it was ever built to carry.

I was working less at the time. I had very small children and needed to be home more. Luckily, I was in construction and I managed construction projects, which kept me going. I’ve always believed that staying in construction is the only way to sustain stable income in this industry through economic cycles that are out of your control. Decorating is seen as a luxury during downturns. Construction is seen as an investment.

But here’s the thing. Back then, I was billing hourly. And hourly billing has a quiet flaw that took me years to fully reckon with.

That flaw is that you only get paid for the hours you bring yourself to charge for. The thinking time, the extra visits, the hours you absorb because the client won’t understand them on an invoice, those all disappear. One at a time. Every month. Stacked over years.

When my husband lost his job and my business had to carry more of our weight, that’s where the debt started. Not from recklessness. From a structural problem I couldn’t yet name.

The Year Everything Piled On

During that same period, my son, still an infant, started having serious medical issues. Frightening ones. The kind where you don’t yet know what you’re dealing with and your mind fills with the worst possibilities. There were specialists, hospital stays, and appointments I couldn’t move because the wait lists were long and hard won.

I had to pull back on my projects. Some clients were not gracious about that. I’ll be honest: I never worked with those people again. But others were wonderful.

And through all of it, my three design school friends, the ones I’ve talked about on this podcast more times than I can count, stepped in the way only people who truly understand this business can. They helped me source when my bandwidth was zero. They helped me problem-solve on job sites when I couldn’t see the way. They let me call and say one sentence without needing the twenty-minute preamble, because they already lived in the same world I did.

I don’t know what that time period would have looked like without them.

The great news is that my son came through. He has been fine ever since. But the emotional marks from watching a baby in pain, not able to communicate it, me not fully able to reassure him because I wasn’t fully reassured myself, those don’t fully heal. I’ve made my peace with that. They’re simply part of how I move through the world now.

Building Back Up — And Then Getting Knocked Back Down

Eventually, things started to stabilize. My husband was rebuilding. My son was healthy. The debt was still there, but the clouds were parting. My career got back to full steam and was hitting new highs. Projects were coming in. Things were going well.

And I made a decision that felt like a real bet on myself, something I had wanted to do for a long time. I hired a PR team out of New York. Expensive, well-connected, actively working. I had started my career in New York, and this felt like the momentum I needed to see what my business could grow into.

I was running back and forth to the city for events. Press was happening. Things were building. More was on the horizon. I couldn’t have been more excited.

And then I got sick.

I’m not someone who gets a little sick. I push and push and push, and then I fall off a cliff. That has been my story my entire life. So when I started feeling bone tired, the kind of tired that just doesn’t lift, I assumed it was my pattern. Working mother. Underlying stress. Very young children. Of course I was exhausted.

I was also losing weight, which honestly felt good after two pregnancies, and I didn’t think twice about it. But you know when something feels off and you keep rationalizing because you’re too busy to stop? That was me. And it went on longer than it should have.

Eventually I went to my doctor. He gave me the working mother talk, stress, lack of sleep, you’re doing too much. Honestly, it tracked. But as we were wrapping up, almost as an afterthought, he said, let’s run a full blood panel just to be safe.

That turned out to be the luckiest moment of my life.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

I remember exactly where I was when the results came back.

My husband and I were backing out of the driveway, heading to the Delaware Antique Show preview party. It’s always a big night for me, clients, vendors, my whole network in one room. I love antiques. I did not feel up to it, but you know how we are. You suck it up and you go.

Then my phone rang. A number I didn’t recognize. I answered anyway.

It was my doctor, which scared me immediately. Doctors don’t call your cell phone after hours. He asked where I was and what I was doing. I told him. And he said:

“Your blood work came back, and I don’t have good news. Your thyroid is barely measurable. You have hyperthyroidism, and it’s a severe case.”

He then asked me to put him on speaker and told my husband what to watch out for at the party. If I started speaking without logic. If I seemed confused or dizzy. Call 911, he said, because my heart was at risk.

We still went to the show. I was in full-blown denial. I vaguely remember that night, talking to people I knew, but more clearly identifying every solid wall, every post or pillar, anything I could find to lean against to hold myself upright. Eventually my husband said we were leaving. And we did.

That same night, my doctor called in a favor. He reached out to an endocrinologist he’d met at a conference, well-regarded and local, to get me in as soon as possible. The fact that he was making calls on my behalf after hours told me everything I needed to know about how serious this was.

By the time I got to her appointment, I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without losing my breath. My mom drove me. When we got off the elevator and the nurse said the office was at the end of the hall, I genuinely wasn’t sure I was going to make it to that door.

The Diagnosis and the Deal I Made

The doctor was extraordinary — well-known in her field. She told me I was medically interesting.

Let me just pause to say: you do not want to be medically interesting.

She formally diagnosed me with a severe case of Graves’ disease. I’d done a little research before the appointment and knew about radiation, surgery, and some of the more serious complications. I sat in her office with toddlers at home and told her I wasn’t doing radiation. I could not comprehend being radioactive and staying away from my children. Surgery scared me more. I was not in any condition to be making great decisions on my own behalf, but I was also bullheaded, and I come by that honestly.

She made me a deal. She gave me up to two years to try to let my body self-regulate through medication. If it didn’t work, she would make the call on the direction we went. She put me on heart medication to stabilize my levels in addition to thyroid medication and told me she gave me about a 15% chance of self-regulating.

I said I’d take that bet.

What followed was long and frustrating and exhausting. I had to pull back on work again — physically, I couldn’t manage it in those first months. Some clients were not kind about that. I never went back to work with them. Others were tremendously supportive. And as always, my three design school friends showed up the same way they had during my son’s illness, problem-solving, letting me vent, keeping me tethered to the business when I couldn’t hold it myself.

The PR team I had hired right when things were finally building was actively working when I had to stop. Press was coming in. The network was forming. All of it was looking incredible. And then all of it stopped at once. The team was gracious and let me out of the contract — they didn’t have to do that. But I had paid months of fees for work they had genuinely done and done well. And I got none of the upside. Just the investment, and then the stop.

Debt still present. Career on pause again. And now a lifelong autoimmune condition I was still learning to understand.

The Part Where It Finally Turned

My body did its thing. It self-regulated. My doctor was stunned. Frankly, so was I.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time is that once you become an autoimmune person, significant stress can trigger flares. I’ve managed that. I expect to manage it for the rest of my life. But I am here and I am well, and I now know how to listen to my body in ways I simply didn’t before.

After that, it was a slow slog. Still working construction projects. Still working decorating projects. Still in debt. Kids growing. Expenses growing. I remember thinking more than once: are you kidding me, universe? I build back up, I get knocked back down. I build back up, I get knocked back down.

I am not a quitter. But I was damn tired of it.

And then COVID happened.

For the first time in a very long time, I had breathing room. I joined a mastermind. I had always had my three design school friends as my constants through everything, and the mastermind expanded that circle. More designers. Different experiences. A broader community of people who understood the specific craziness of this business.

And in that expanded circle, the flat fee conversation became impossible to avoid.

Why Raising My Rate Didn’t Fix Anything

Friends had been telling me to try flat fees for a while. I had been saying no, thank you, for just as long.

Before I finally made the switch, I did something else first. I raised my hourly rate, with existing clients and with new ones. People who had never once questioned my bills. I braced for pushback. I got none. New clients at the higher rate. Still nothing. Nobody flinched.

And I sat with that and thought: what in the hell is this telling me?

Because if the rate hadn’t been the problem, if I just wasn’t charging enough hourly, fixing the rate should have fixed it. But the debt hadn’t moved. The month-end anxiety of sending invoices hadn’t changed. The late invoices, the hours I was eating, the gap between what I was actually doing and what I was actually billing for, none of that shifted.

It became clear that the problem wasn’t the number. It was the model.

Hourly billing asks you to defend every hour. Which means you inevitably stop charging for the hours you don’t feel you can defend. The thinking time. The extra site visit. The expertise that doesn’t fit on a timesheet. Those hours disappear, not all at once, but slowly and steadily, for as long as you run that model.

That realization is what finally broke my resistance. Not another designer’s argument. Not the mastermind, although that helped. It was my own lived experience of raising my rate and watching it not matter structurally.

What Flat Fees Actually Changed

I started cautiously. I went back through my project history and looked honestly at what I had charged, and more importantly, what I hadn’t. All of those absorbed hours. The softened invoices. The visits I ate because clients wouldn’t understand them. I mapped out the entire gap.

It was a gut punch when I realized how much I had never billed over years of work.

I tested flat fees on a few smaller projects with clients I trusted. Built the fees from real data. Presented them. Nobody flinched. In fact, clients liked it.

One told me that some months she’d get a bill from me for a couple hundred dollars and the next month it might be a couple thousand, and she never knew what to expect. She trusted me completely, she said, but the unpredictability was hard to budget for.

I had never thought about it from her side. When I heard it from her, I understood that my hourly model had been creating a problem for my clients, one they were too polite to name.

What changed internally was harder to describe, but more important.

The running calculation I had been doing on every job site, am I on the clock, should I charge for this, how do I explain this on an invoice, that voice went quiet. When a conversation wandered into personal territory, it was just a conversation. When something needed an extra hour, I gave it.

I live in the town where I grew up. I have one or two degrees of separation from most of my clients. The hourly clock had always sat underneath those relationships like a low-grade anxiety. I had learned to ignore it. I had never learned to resolve it. And then it was simply gone.

There was another advantage I hadn’t focused on. I was now being paid in advance. Fifty percent at contract signing, fifty percent after conceptual design. For construction, fifty percent when it starts and the balance at midpoint. Always ahead.

For the first time in my career, I could forecast my business. I could look at the next several months and know what was coming in. I hadn’t known that was even possible.

Within about a year, I could see clearly that my company would be out of debt.

And then it was.

The Thing That Made It Possible to Keep Going

The debt in my business didn’t come from not working hard enough. I worked incredibly hard through years of things that made hard work feel almost irrelevant. The debt stayed because the structure was wrong.

But I want to be honest about the other thing that made it possible to keep going long enough to get there.

My three design school friends were there through all of it. The crash. My son’s illness. My illness. The slow slog back. They were not a nice-to-have. They were the people who helped me carry the business when I genuinely couldn’t carry it alone. Who stepped in to source, to problem-solve, to think through things I didn’t have the bandwidth to think through. Who understood this industry, the crazy client dynamics, the billing complexity, the particular problems that only arise in this work, well enough that I never had to spend twenty minutes getting to the actual point.

I could just say the thing. And they already knew what I meant and how to help.

I didn’t know how rare that was until I spent years without it in other parts of my life and work.

Interior design is a strange and specific business. The people outside of it who love you and support you can listen, and that matters. But they can’t fully understand. The people inside this business know it the way we do. That is a different kind of support entirely.

When the mastermind came along during COVID and expanded that circle, I felt the difference immediately. And in that expanded circle, the conversation about flat fees became impossible to keep dismissing, because I was surrounded by people who had already made the switch and could tell me exactly what it looked like on the other side.

Why I’m Telling You This Now

That experience, those friendships, that community, is a significant reason this podcast exists.

I wanted to create something where the context was already shared. Where you could come and talk about your business without having to explain the weirdness of it. Where someone had already wrestled with the thing you are now wrestling with.

The Designer’s Edge was born from this podcast, and that’s where it goes further. It’s not just the knowledge — how to manage construction projects, how to build a flat fee, how to structure an engagement so you’re paid appropriately for what you actually do. It’s the community that comes with it. Designers working through the same problems in the same crazy business, showing up for each other the way my friends have always shown up for me.

That combination, the knowledge and the people, is what I wish I had found ten years earlier. And it is what I am trying to build for you now.

The workshop opening May 5th exists because of this story. Not billing mechanics in the abstract and not pricing strategy as a concept. It exists because I spent years in a model that was quietly undermining me at a time when I had very little margin to be undermined. And the fix, when I finally made it, was not as complicated as I had spent years convincing myself it would be. It required honesty about my own data and a willingness to do something differently.

That’s it. And it worked.

What I Want You to Hear

We live in a world of highlight reels, especially in this industry. The beautiful projects. The glowing press. The carefully curated career that looks like one long, easy trajectory from promising start to well-deserved success.

I see it everywhere. And I think it does real damage. Not because the beautiful projects aren’t real, they are, but because the hard years that run alongside them are just as real and almost never mentioned.

This was not one long, easy story of success.

It was years of building back up and getting knocked back down. Of financial pressure, medical fears, and starting over more than once. It was years of a structural problem in my business that persisted through all of it because I was too busy surviving to fix it.

And it was years held together in large part by three people who loved me and understood my work well enough to help me carry it.

I told you this story because I think some of you are in the surviving part right now. Doing good work. Keeping it together. Wondering why the numbers never quite catch up.

The answer to the numbers is probably structural. And the structure is fixable, faster than you think, once you stop arguing with it.

The answer to the surviving is community. And that is also available to you.

I spent longer resisting the fix than living it took.

Success takes on many forms. And what success looks like to me now versus back in those early years or even what would have happened, if I’d been able to keep up with the PR, I don’t know. But what I do know is success feels like where I am right now. Hard won, hard earned, and something that is absolutely accessible to all of us.

Like this Episode?

Be sure to check out Episode #254: A Roundtable Discussion on our Journey to Success: Celebrating 5 Years

Be sure to check out Episode #192: Real Talk: Designers Share Their Profitability Struggles – Can You Relate?

Be sure to check out Episode #246: From $900 Fees to $90K Projects: Rethinking How You Charge