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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

HOW IT ALL STARTED

THE PIVOT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING FOR ME

WHY THIS NEXT CHAPTER IS ABOUT DELIVERING SOMETHING DEEPER, MORE TRANSFORMATIONAL AND MOR SUPPORTIVE THAN EVER BEFORE

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I honestly thought I would spend my entire career as an Interior Designer, retire, look back on my career with pride and joy, and move on to another phase in my life. But that obviously isn’t how it’s playing out. 

How it all started

As many of you know, I have been doing this for my entire career. 

About 25 years into my career, I was bored. I was really bored.

I still loved what I did, but I just felt like, huh, now what? I had pretty much done it all. I had worked at the pinnacle of our industry in New York City during the 90s when it was the heyday of design. I had also gone out on my own, I had had a retail store, and I had tons of different types of employees over the years. I had done residential, commercial, hospitality, health care, you name it, and I had touched it. 

I was at a point in my career where I was quite satisfied, I was successful, and pleased with what I had done, but I was like, now what?

I wasn’t ready to retire, yet I wasn’t sure I would continue deriving so much joy out of my work. 

I shared this with my three best friends from Interior Design School, and they were feeling the same way. Between the four of us there really isn’t a segment in our industry that one of us hasn’t done. 

At that time, none of us had in-person help, so we relied a lot on each other. We would text each other with problems and immediately somebody would answer. We could text each other and have an answer within minutes, so we started talking more about that. 

We decided we would continue our ‘day’ jobs, but come together as a group of 4 and do something, share our knowledge with anyone and everyone who needed it. So we formed our own company called Four Friends Design. 

We started researching. What could we do? We went to the design influencer conferences out in L.A. It was fascinating and opened a whole world to us that we didn’t even know existed. We were excited again about our industry.

We came up with a way for the four of us to make videos and share our expertise. Now, keep in mind, this was long before Zoom was a word. 

Then two of the four of us had some significant personal issues come up. So we tabled the idea, and then Covid hit, and everything shifted again. 

Fortunately, half of my projects were still going but the other half weren’t. So we had a lot of time on our hands. Two of us, from four friends, decided to join a mastermind, which is where I learned about and became inspired to start this podcast.

I originally started the podcast talking to homeowners, and then the designers started showing up. You were listening, you had questions, you showed me that you were hungry for guidance about construction management, job site decisions, fees, scope boundaries, timelines, confidence, literally everything.

And that’s when I realized the people I was meant to serve were the designers in the trenches like me. 

However, they were doing the work without the systems, structure or support to feel in control. 

That pivot changed everything for me because the questions became, “How can I learn more, Renee? When are you going to create a course? Do you have a course coming?” 

My first course launch

With the support of the mastermind, they encouraged me to create my course and made it seem so easy. This was not easy for me. It was an incredible amount of mental work to go through everything step by step. So much is muscle memory after you do something over and over and over again. It was hard for me to remember how to break down the steps because I was doing some without even thinking about them.

And so the first iteration of the course was born, Only Girl On the Job Site.

It was no truer than that week of my first launch, halfway through, when a call came in the middle of the night saying that my father had died suddenly. 

I would never have predicted that. I had actually spoken to him that evening. He was in great spirits, we had a lovely call, and I will be forever grateful for that. 

So here I am up all night with my mother, knowing I had to show up, on camera, the next day for the challenge. Bless those designers’ hearts, I don’t know if they noticed, but I was not on my game. So right after that, I recorded a video saying, I thought I could do this, but I cannot, and everything is on hold. 

I didn’t know how or what would happen next. It was heavy. And it was one of the hardest moments of my life. 

My heart healed slowly, and I came back. I realized that this wasn’t just about teaching what I know, it was about building something meaningful for the industry that shaped me.

It was a way to pay it forward to the designers who reminded me how much this work matters.

Over these  years, I have worked closely with hundreds and hundreds of designers.

I have learned so much about the way in which designers learn. What I learned is that we don’t learn through passive content. We learn through conversation, context, and collaboration, and by hearing how someone else handled it, and circling back three times, four times, six times until it clicks, and by applying what we learn and coming back when it doesn’t go as planned.

Construction management is not easy.

While the course evolved and grew, as an incredible resource and step by step guide on how to get yourself not only through a project, but to market in the beginning, build the relationships you need to fill your pipeline and finish so strong, that not only do your clients refer you, but they keep you around for their next projects.

While the course is the foundation, it’s the transformation of taking that and applying it to your jobs through a supportive network that was the missing link. And so that is exactly how the studio inside The Designer’s Edge was built out.