Doubling Down on a Design Legacy (Mike Ufferman and Catrina Cooper)

This week on the Creative Genius podcast, Gail Doby welcomes Mike Ufferman and Catrina Cooper, the principals of Loczi Design. Mike and Catrina detail their professional pivot from the restaurant and auction house operations fields into the design world, and how they eventually came together to lead a high-growth firm in San Francisco.

The conversation explores the complexities of “internal sales,” specifically how they navigated the process of buying the company from the original founder, Paige, after years of working as her leadership team. They share the raw, “brothers and sisters” dynamic of their leadership style and how professional coaching helped them move past emotional friction to achieve true operational alignment.

Hear about the strategic “miracle” team of advisors—from valuation experts to business attorneys—that allowed them to complete a full company transfer in under six months. Mike and Catrina also discuss the “unreasonable” client service strategies they’ve implemented to drive their current record profits and why they are already planning their own exit strategies.

Key discussion points in this episode:

• The Pandemic Pivot: How the team managed the dual upheaval of a global pandemic and the founder moving across the country in 2020.
• Alignment over Accuracy: Why learning to work as a leadership team was a bigger achievement than simply mastering markups and financial data.
• Buying the Legacy: The emotional weight and “healthy scramble” of New Year’s Eve signatures to officially take over the founder’s “baby”.
• The Non-Negotiable Paperwork: Why you must discuss the “no-fun” topics—like buy-sell agreements and key person insurance—while you are still in the honeymoon phase of partnership.

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full show notes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s14e8-shownotes

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Mike and Kat. I am so happy to see you. It’s been a while and it has been an interesting journey for you two and I can’t wait to dive into that today. First, I want to start with how did you two get into design and start working together and just tell us a little bit. I’ll start with you, Katrina. Okay.

First off, thanks for having us. We’re excited to be here with you. It’s our first podcast, so we’ll do our best.

Yeah, holy, you’re virgins.

So how did I get into design? as you already know, Gail, I was in the restaurant business for a very, long time before I started doing this. And at some point just realized I didn’t want to do that forever. And a good friend of mine said, you know, you’re kind of a natural designer. Why don’t you go to design school? So I took that advice and went to school for a few years and then just started working and, you know, have kind of built my career from there.

So it, yeah, I mean, it kind of happened nice and organically, but a little later in life maybe than other people.

Okay, yeah, well I didn’t go back to school till I was 35 for design so yeah.

That’s about how old I was too, yeah.

And I graduated, I think, two years later. yeah, it was good to go back. I think everybody needs to decide what it is that they’re called to do.

Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, it’s nice to have a second career and have some to do it later in life to it was more intentional. I mean, I was able to do a lot better than I think I probably would have right out of high school.

sure. This is such a different industry anyway. And of course, you’ve gone from being an employee to owning the firm. We’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. But Mike, about you, how did you get into design?

boy, that’s a long journey for me. I grew up in Ohio in Cincinnati in this small town and went to school for business at the University of Cincinnati and worked my way through college working at a hospital there and was sure that I was gonna go on to medical school and I really wanted to work in labor and delivery. That was the field. I got accepted there and studied a little bit and just decided it wasn’t really for me.

Did a couple things and ended up out in California and I was working operations for an auction house out here. At the time it was called Butterfields, it was a very famous auction house in California. Another company bought them and I was running a lot of operations. I was seeing art every day. I was just getting a master’s degree in art education every day I came to work. I fell in love with design from that. And I had…

You know, a change in life happened there and a friend of mine called me while I was literally vacationing on a beach in Mexico and said, Hey, I’m starting an interior design firm, get in your car and come back up here. Uh, and I did, and I turned around and I went back up and I ran his business with him for seven years and, um, he owns a building downtown and Paige, the previous owner of the company here was doing a photo shoot with Katrina and some others there. And I showed up and we talked and we ended up working together and.

A couple of years ago, I went back to Berkeley and studied a design there and we’re here now.

It is so crazy. Yeah, I think it really makes a difference if you have a business background too or some other experience coming into this and for you Katrina just having that hospitality background is perfect for interior design. Tell me a little bit about your firm who’s on the team, what the roles are, the responsibilities. I know both of you are the principals and the owners now, but what about the rest of your team?

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we’ve got six people in our San Francisco office. Of course, Mike and I work there and Ava is our senior designer handling some of the larger projects. We’ve got Diana and Jennifer who are both working as associate designers and then Eric is our staff designer. Samantha is hand in hand working with Mike. She runs our whole office and his whole life.

And we also have Olga, who doesn’t work in the office with us. She’s our controller. She’s a big part of what we do at LOXIE.

Well, that’s a good size team too. Yeah. I’m sure you’re feeling a little bit stretched because it sounds like you’re busy right now.

Sure are, yeah.

And we are having that conversation right now too about hiring a couple staff members, maybe another senior designer and also another staff designer.

That’s great news. like hearing that. What was going on in your business? When you reached out a few years ago, we determined there was probably somewhere in the range of five to seven years ago when you reached out. And at that point, you weren’t the owners of the business. So what was going on that caused you to do that?

I’m sorry.

Yeah, there was a lot. We were growing quite a bit and there were three of us that were leading the firm. We knew what we wanted to do, but we were going in different directions with it. We all wanted to grow, but we were growing differently. We were having a hard time sort of coming together with what our plan looked like. And it was really sort of important for us to reach out to you at that point, just to

to save the company really, to really figure out what we were gonna do next with the company, where we were gonna go with it. And that’s how we got to you.

Yeah, and you said it was a friend of yours and I don’t even know who it was that you knew, but…

Yeah, that friend of mine said, mean, going back to that, my friend, we were looking for a business coach and a friend of mine knew you or knew of you somehow, suggested that we reach out to you. And he said to me, you need to talk to her. She is the inter-design coach of the stars. We knew right then that you were who we needed to speak to and we never looked back after that.

my gosh, that’s so funny. I have no idea why anybody would say that, but okay. Yeah, my little secret is that I try really hard to not work with the celebrity designers. They, it is a no-go for me.

for.

You

Hmm, interesting. I hear more about that someday.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s another story all by itself. Some stories I can’t really say, so I’ll just leave it at that. But anyway, so you had a lot of chaos going on and let’s talk about that crazy day that we had. So I flew out there and met with three of you and I remember meeting or waiting for you all at the office. I was there on time and everybody was a little bit late and I was standing outside and all these guys were out there.

Brutal pruning in front of the office.

Yeah, we had a plumbing issue, I guess, that day and they were trying to break into the plumbing line and they had jackhammers outside and they were really making a mess of it. So it was a no-go to be in the office that day.

Yeah, and I remember that actually the whole plumbing wasn’t working and that we had to go to your house. And so, and then you guys starved me because we didn’t eat dinner. 1130 at night, I just remember that it was just one of those really unusual situations. We were having a very long day and I remember being so tired at the end of the day and you all dropped me off and I got…

Right.

ride back to the hotel and I think it was about midnight when I went to bed and it was just, it was a day. I can’t remember a day going now long before.

Yeah, in my living room, like we had to leave our studio space and I live the closest so we all packed up and went to my house and had our VIP day.

You realize that there are a lot of things you needed to change. So it was not a simple thing. And then we tell people that this is work. You cannot just come to us and get the suggestions. You have to do something about it. You actually have to implement. yeah, it takes a while to get to that point. And sometimes, and I think in the case of all of you, there was not necessarily alignment between what needed to be done.

And I think that was the thing that I noticed when I was coming in is that the three of you needed to get aligned and you had to agree on what the direction was for the company and who was doing what and why and what you were really trying to accomplish as a whole. So looking back on that now, what were some of the biggest impacts that you experienced after starting to actually put things in place?

Well, I think a lot of it was the interaction between the three of us just as a leadership team. Like that was the biggest accomplishment I think that we got from working with you is learning how to work with each other better than we were. It wasn’t the carry the two and divide by three and that gets you mark up so much for us. It was how do you navigate your business? when there are three of you on a leadership team,

How do you navigate through that and how do you keep emotions in check? It’s very emotional when you’re working with people so closely. So our learning experience just came from spending time with you. And honestly, if I can be very transparent, there were times when the three of us were on leadership calls, Katrina, Paige and I, and we’ll say we are brothers and sisters. Like we go at it sometimes. Like brothers and sisters would. Interestingly enough,

when we add a fourth person to that call, i.e. Gail, you tend to be on a better behavior sometimes. You that, right? No one wants to that side of them. just having your, honestly, having your presence around, for me in any way, really changed how I approach my management portion of the company.

Sometimes.

Well, interesting. Yeah, and I think that what was interesting about it is there was so much emotion involved for the three of you. I have not run into that ever before. And it’s not a negative thing per se, but like you said, and sisters, you don’t always get along, especially when you’ve worked together that many years. And it is okay to be able to

have disagreements and sometimes just knock down drag outs because it’s really important to get it out. You’ve got to resolve whatever that issue is. And I think honestly, you guys are the beginning of me starting to coach leadership teams. And that’s what I tend to do mostly all, all the time now for the very reason that I think that it really helps people understand the dynamics of how to work together.

Because if you can’t communicate well and you can’t agree in a line on where you’re going, then it becomes a very messy, sloppy situation.

Yeah, in particular when there’s one owner of the company, right? And then there two employees who are on a leadership team. And at the end of the day, that owner has a say in what happens. But when you’re the person running the finances and managing books and you know where money goes and how it comes in and out, and Paige’s strength is her creativity and the brilliantness that she brings to every project she’s got. And Katrina’s ability to like

project manage like everything that she’s creating and then me quote quote paying for it on the back end with the books. You know, it is this we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing, but we were coming at it from three different perspectives.

Yeah, you definitely provided a structure for us because I think because of you know the way it started it’s a small kind of startup company everyone’s really passionate we all got to know each other really well we love each other a lot. But we were all doing the best we could like Mike just outlined like we all have our lane and our super strengths which is why the company was so strong.

But without a real structure in place and kind of not knowing it was missing or definitely wouldn’t know how to put it together, it was tough for us to come together. So when we were working with you and you were kind of mediating and kind of therapy and, you know, kind of just being that anchor in the room that was like, well, we’re supposed to, you know, we’ve got to, we’re, trying to build a system here.

and the system is around the advice we’re getting and we’re trying to, I think all of us, the three of us, me, Mike and Paige learned how to realize that part of the success is learning how to communicate, to compromise, to come to a conclusion and just sit behind that conclusion and move forward. And just that simple shift, like that simple structure outlined for us, I think it started to sink in and it just started to work a little bit better.

things got a little easier, a little more organized, and we started implementing all kinds of great things. So I think it really helped a lot.

Well, yeah, and you grew really fast. And so right after you came on board, your revenue went way up and your profit went way up. And and to me, that was I think it was really because you were all more aligned on what needed to be done and who was doing what within the company. So that was one of the things that I noticed when we were working together.

And of course it was interesting because it hadn’t been that long since Paige moved to Chicago because her husband took a job there. Right. And so let’s talk about that because that was an interesting change for you all because all of a sudden she’s not there in the office all the time. so how did that change the connection with her in the business and with all of you?

Yeah.

And that happened right around COVID, right? I was trying to remember when page left and Johnny took that job in Chicago, it was right around COVID. So it was her leaving and then a global pandemic happening at the same time. Am I right about that timeline, Kat?

So yeah, COVID started to ramp up in February and then March was when all the shutdowns started and she moved in August of 2020. it was really a strange, especially for her. I mean, she was in a complete upheaval state of, you know, the world’s falling apart and I’m gonna move away from my company that I love so much. I know I have a team here that will run it, but we’re gonna drive across the country during a pandemic and start a new life. So everybody,

It’s funny that it happened in conjunction with COVID because both things were such life shifting events that, I mean, maybe one helped the other because we were all already having to work remotely, like designing whole homes, through Zoom and, you know, having to hone all these new skills. Then the idea of her going was like, well, this is just another thing that we’re going to figure out. We’ve already learned how to work remotely because of COVID. We’re going to work remotely with Paige. You know, we’re going to help her get settled.

and we just sort of, like we always do, we just said, yes. Okay. Yes. We’re going to make this work. We’re going to do it. Like we’re going to keep going no matter what. And we’re going to make it work together because as much as, know, there’s been tension and sometimes there’s disagreements, there’s always been the firm and you’ll know, you know, this Gail, the firm rock solid, like, well, no one’s leaving. Like this is what we’re doing. So no matter what happens, even if I flip out for a little while, I got to go over there. I’m going to come back. So.

It’s right, you know, it was it was an interesting time of a lot of unknowns, but we all agreed like we’re going to go for it. We’re going to make it work.

We did do that, but we also had a conversation too when she first talked about moving, about closing the company, if you remember. We had a very brief conversation about is this it? How could we even do this with me not here, with Paige not here? So we’ve had that conversation before about a transition of the company somehow, whether it was a closure or next iteration of it. So Kat’s right in the fact that we kind of have gone through this process before, you know,

with the quote, death of Paige in San Francisco and moving to Chicago. And then from the ashes of that, like sprouting the company again, and then having this grand plan of opening a Chicago office too with Paige heading it there. So we had like all these, these, these tools in place to do all of this. So I think that that was, was really instrumental in getting us to where we are right now, just having that history. Like Katrina said, like we’ve done this, no one’s going anywhere.

We’ve got it, let’s keep going.

Right. Well, and what I saw, especially from the two of you, is such a connection. And you two just work so well together. Not that Paige didn’t work well with you, she did. But you two are just like joined at the hip and you really are a great team, which is very cool because now that you’re owners of the company, I see that as I couldn’t see

this company continuing without both of you. So, think you both had a place in the business and in the plan. And then of course, was, I don’t know what a year and half, two years later when she decided she needed to consider selling the business. So that kind of came out of the blue. And I remember talking to her about it several times and she asked if I could help with that. And I said, yeah, I can help with that.

And so how did she approach you and when did she approach you?

Well, I’ll kind of start it and then I’ll let you take it, Mike. You know, it really was, like Mike said, even back when the Chicago thing came up, there was a little bit of like, do we buy it now? Do we close it? Like, what are we doing? What does it look like? And then as time went on, so, know, 2025 now, we bought it January 1st of this year. So she was gone for four years before we decided to make the change. And, you know, she had…

There were rumblings of it for quite some time. And I know she was talking to you about it, Gail, but it didn’t really come to like a full head of like, okay, this is happening right now until, you know, quite far into the process. And then I’ll let you take it from here, Mike.

Yeah, I think what that was too was, you know, after COVID, we had a really, really successful year in the company, profits were through the roof. And then people had to go back to work. And then our business for the next two years didn’t do as well as it did around the COVID period and previous years. And we had a loss two years in a row. And we were trying to figure out first, how do we stop this bleeding from happening?

What cuts do we need to make? What changes do we need to make in order to right the ship again? And we would look at our reports and there was a point where I was just like, gosh, I don’t even want to show these reports because they’re just not looking great at this point. And we had a couple of conversations last year that was like, look, if we can’t turn this around, like, why are we still doing this? But we’ve always believed in ourselves and we’ve always believed in our brand and we always knew that we could do it somehow.

And we did have conversations about maybe this is it. Maybe this we just disband here. And Paige was in town. And I remember that you and her and a couple of our employees were at an art gallery, I think. And I was waiting on you at a Thai restaurant. And Paige showed up at the restaurant. And very lovingly, we had this really beautiful conversation about where she was, where she had come from, where she had feeling the work she’d put in. This would be a really great question for Paige to answer, actually, because

She had a lot of heart and soul into like getting to the point of even offering to sell this company. This was her baby. Like this is, this is her identity. This is her history. This is everything about her. And for her to say, I think I’m ready to hand it over. That’s a big deal. And we didn’t take that lightly at all. Now we did think that we had more time to make the transition happen and it ended up happening very, very quickly. And it was a scramble.

to get everything done. A healthy scramble to get everything, but we got it finished.

Yeah.

I remember that very well. And when she started talking to me about it, and I know I was talking to the two of you also kind of in different conversations, and you all had different opinions about whether you wanted to do this, whether you were interested in it. But the thing that she always said to me privately was, just love Kat and Mike, and I want them to own this company. I think

they should run the company. I said, I agree, they’re the right people to run the company. They can certainly buy it and they can certainly do this. And she was all in. She wanted to make sure that you were well taken care of. So that was her message to me throughout from the very beginning of the process. So I remember that well.

Yeah.

And we’re very appreciative of that too. We know that and we’re very, very appreciative of that.

Yeah, a lot of emotions involved in it for sure, because behind all the paperwork and the learnings and the stress and the timing and all of that, it was the three of us and her kind of generosity and just the place that she came from around the whole, it was very generous and it was really lovely. mean, looking back at it now, we’re very, very lucky. I mean, we just built up this company together, the three of us.

built the company we wanted to work at. always say that. And then she agreed to, she got secure with herself as far as like, really do, I am ready to step away and I am okay with letting it still live on, even though it’s my name with the two of them kind of running it from here. And it was very, very generous. was a great situation. Really feel very lucky.

Yeah, I agree. think her intent was positive from the beginning. And so that is the best way to come into a situation like this. she wasn’t trying to take advantage or charge you ridiculous amounts for it. She was, I think, exceptionally fair in the way she approached it. So when I look at it from the outside, because I’ve helped several companies now go through this sale process.

And I look at it and it’s not always that way. And it doesn’t always turn out the way that you want it to. But she had asked me to throughout, she said, can you help me through this and help us work through this? And I said, absolutely, because it’s something that it really was more about making sure that everybody was well cared for in the process. And yes, it’s still a business transaction, but there’s a lot of

of the people part, emotional part that has to be addressed. and I know it was hard for you all and I think sometimes scary to come into it, especially after having a couple of down years to like, should we really buy this company? And the thing that I knew was, yes, you should because you had a good brand, you had a great visual, you had put so much money into your branding and all the things that you were doing.

that it would have been crazy to walk away from that. that was really, it gave you a leg up to have, to be buying into a business that could be turned around, which you obviously have done. So tell me a little bit about the process. How long did it take you? You said it was very short, which it was. And what were some of the things that you had to do to complete that transaction?

Yeah.

Well, we had to get the team in place first to help us. We needed advisors, and that was a key critical component to this. I am part of a pretty

extensive networking group here in San Francisco. And we’ve been very fortunate to find a good group of people in there with really diverse skills. And I will credit to the day I no longer work at this company, all the people from that networking group who stepped up to support Katrina and I and Paige through this entire process. We had in our networking group a woman who does company valuations. We had a business transaction attorney in our group.

we had an architect, we’ve got the contractors, like you named them, they’re all in this group. And we were able to pull on that to have them come over and act in this judiciary way that was fair to both parties. Like we didn’t have two valuations done. Kat and Paige and I all said, let’s go with this valuation. We trust Annette and what she’s doing. She provided the information. We reviewed it all and we made decisions based on that. We had a CPA that we’ve been working with for a number of years.

who was kind of instrumental in structuring how the buyout would look. Mike, you’re gonna pull funds from here. Katrina’s gonna fund this. We’re gonna pay page in this manner and it’s gonna look like this. These are the dates we’re gonna do this. So she was instrumental in that role and then bringing Anthony, our attorney in to draft the agreement around all of that. And also he spent a lot of time pulling documents that we needed to have, articles of incorporation, stock agreements.

all the things that we had to prepare for him. It was a lot of work to get those documents together. Fortunately, I’m the keeper of most of those documents. So it was a barely painless process for us to get all that together. But just having all of these people on our team, you included being very instrumental in that. And then the final component was having our financial planner, mine and Katrina’s financial planner on board too, looking at all the documents saying, here are the implications of all this and here’s what it could look like for you.

Having those components in place with all that documentation is the only reason we are able to do this in the short amount of time that we were. It took less than six months to make the entire transfer.

Right.

Yeah, yeah. To the signature on the deal. was really, really fast.

It was, mean, the signature on the deal was literally because our CPA wanted it done in the calendar year 2024. Our attorney was at work on New Year’s Eve at noon. And we were at our docu signs waiting for it to come through to make this transaction happen literally at the 11th hour.

We were up and down.

Yeah, I think it was like 330 in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve and we were like, the makes are going to close. Are we going to get, mean, it was really last minute. It was so much of it was kind of a miracle. Like it’s, it’s a great exercise. And like, if you build it, they will come, or if you imagine it or ask for it, or you, you know, you step toward it, it will come because the group of people that we had around us, like Mike said, was, it was a miracle. It was just amazing that we had access to these people that

we had a relationship with and that we trusted. We would have been lost if we had to find those people and vet them. And it was really, it was really something.

It’s a lot and it does take a team. takes people you trust, people that can work together too. So each of those may or may not have worked together before in a transaction. So you need people that have transactional experience.

That’s right. And none of them had ever met before. So we had cobbled this team together and put them in rooms of strangers together saying, okay, here’s what we’re trying to do. And they’re like, where’s the other attorney? Like, no, no, no, you’re the only one. Where’s the other business? No, no, no, you’re the only one. You’re acting in all of our best interest here. And I think that having the foundation of what we were trying to accomplish ready to go, and meaning that Kat and Paige and I talked about

what this would look like and what we might encounter. And you sang very clearly to us, look, there are gonna be challenges. This is going to get very personal and very emotional. And it did, but having all of those conversations on the front end really aligned us really well so that when we went into this, we went in not from opposing sides, but from the side of like, how can we best all come together and do something really positive and successful? And I think we were really able to do that.

It’s interesting because I worked with another company that used one transaction attorney. now we did it for the sole reason that it actually made it less contentious. And it was allowing it to move faster in this way because you were mostly agreed on the terms and conditions. And it was really more a matter of that person helping you execute on.

Yeah.

This was more of an internal sale between colleagues and employer employees. This wasn’t an outside transaction where a lot of negotiation went into it with people that you didn’t know at all. this, if you’re gonna buy a company, I really think the best way to do it is work there. And buy it from a friend, right? I will not really agree with that.

Well, how does it feel running the business?

It’s scary as hell.

It’s super fun!

Yeah, it’s both, isn’t it? There is no way that it can be anything but both of those.

Yeah.

It’s very exciting. for myself, it’s it’s rewarding in a way that I don’t know that I have words for in that Paige and Kat and I, like we’ve mentioned, we’re so close and Paige just wanted the best for us too. So also to have her like as our cheerleader in the background here too, like we’re sharing with her, we’re having record profits this year, record profits this year.

And to have her, when I told her this at lunch a couple of months ago, and I’m sorry she’s going to listen to this and I hope I don’t embarrass her. She was crying about, was in tears. She was so happy and proud of where we’d gotten to. And there’s, don’t know that there are words to describe how good it feels to take someone’s legacy and pull it forward in a really meaningful way with integrity and intention and to come from that perspective. It’s just.

It’s so rewarding for me particularly.

I love that. And I think too that having her still there in the background, still your friend, and you’re still talking and seeing each other, it just speaks so well for the relationship you all have. And I guess I’d ask this question, and it’s not as a negative, it’s more about knowing what you know now, would you have started your own business instead of buying one?

of.

No, and you advised us on that as well. The three of us sat on a phone call and we talked about what if we can’t make this transaction happen? Like, should we just go out and do this on our own and start over again? And we looked at numbers and we looked at the efforts, the sweat that we’re going to have to put in this, the time that we’re going to have to put into building and branding something new, which we could do. I have every confidence that we could do that.

but it was right there for us. And it was handed to us in such an elegant way that there was no world where I really wanted to do this from scratch again. I would much rather my team, all of us be focusing on creating lovely projects and changing people’s homes and lives versus stressing about marketing dollars and getting into a magazine so someone knows to call us somewhere.

Mm hmm. Sure. Well, and you had a lot of that that you’re working on, too, is getting the marketing back in gear as well. let’s talk about the partnership between the two of you, because that is something that you had worked together as friends, as colleagues in the business. Has this changed your relationship? How do you feel about it now that you’re partners versus just working on your own? Because sometimes partnerships don’t work.

Well, Mike and I fight pretty well. do. We do well. Like I don’t and I don’t mean we fight a lot and it’s awful. I mean, like we’re pretty good at it. Like we know each other really well. We will speak for me. I’m comfortable being super vulnerable and embarrassingly like raw or incorrect in front of him so that he can really see what’s happening. So we’re really honest with each other. And I think that helps us a lot in.

in the business because we do know each other, have the best intention. We also, like you had mentioned earlier, Gail, we have always partnered well together because we’re very similar. We think very similarly. So there’s not a lot of debate about like what should go where and which direction we should move in. We feel very similarly, which is a blessing. mean, that’s really just such a great thing because it just kind of happens. So I think the foundation of our relationship and, you know, has been a huge part of

making this as easy as it can be. We have a lot of work to do to set things in place and to get down to the nitty gritty of what happens when what happens. But we also have pretty firm roles, which I know Mike can talk a little bit more about. We have our lane, we know where we’re supposed to be. And that helps a lot too. We try not to step on each other’s toes. Sometimes we do, but we try to say it in advance. Sorry, I’m gonna step on your toes a little bit. Sorry, I’m gonna say this.

So it goes, you know, it goes pretty well. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

It definitely changes your relationship though, right? Because before we were colleagues that were working for Loxi Design and now we’re partners who own a firm together and we’re much more and we were very intertwined before anyway. She’s one of my dearest, dearest friends on the entire planet. And I wouldn’t want to do this with anybody else. I really wouldn’t. She’s brilliant at what she does. And I’m so thankful that she’s on our team. I just am so thankful of that.

And they’re all in, we’re very intertwined and like we’ve gotten ourselves to the point where I made a comment to somebody the day I said, we’re at this point where we know each other so well that we know when the other one needs to lead and when the other one needs to be led. So we’ve got this really good dynamic of being able to step back and letting the other person lead when it’s their role to do so. And when it’s not step back and let that other person take that role.

Well, that is one of the positive things about being friends and also knowing each other and working together for so many years too. And staying in your lane is probably a big key to that as well.

percent. Yeah.

And there’s a lot of crossover in those lanes. we stay on lane, but I will have no problem pulling her in going, I need help here. I’m stuck in analysis paralysis. I can’t get out of this. I can’t make a decision on this marketing plan. Come here and help me. And within seconds it’s solved and we’ve moved on. Like you need that kind of partner that can come in. And when you’re stuck, they can come in and like step in and just say, I got this, do this, let’s move on. And that’s what she’s so great at doing.

I think you brought up a really important point, and that is learning to be decisive and also learning which way to make decisions because there are really three ways you can do it. You can do it unilaterally, which is very tough when you’ve got two people who own it together. And there’s also getting the other person’s input, and then one of you makes the decision. And the third one is doing it collaboratively, where you have to agree.

before you move forward. So it’s one of those three ways. And I think it’s really important to know which one is working at that particular moment for that particular decision. But to me, the biggest problem that a lot of people have running these businesses is not being decisive. And the reality is, is you’ve just got to make a decision and just go and you figure it out later. If it’s not the right one, you you’ll adjust, you’ll fix it.

or you’ll stop what you’re doing and try something different. So it doesn’t matter. It just matters that you’re making a decision and moving on.

I couldn’t agree with that more. Yeah, even if it’s the wrong decision, you make a decision and then you correct it.

Do something rather than nothing.

Absolutely. So what’s your vision going forward? Where do you want to go from here?

Yeah, this is the tough one to answer because we’re kind of building it now. think Mike and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. And with the year that we’ve had with all the learning and the foundation building and the massive growth that we’ve had this year, when, at least for me, when I’m posed with the question, like, what’s your vision and what do you want next? The only thing that comes to mind is for this to just keep going. you know, just, we just, think for me, I’m still in a place

You know, we’re almost a year into owning the company. And I think I’m still in a place where we’re figuring that out and we’re just learning to be owners and learning to work together. And I think we know that we need to, you know, come up with a vision and a plan and we need to have some goals set for ourselves. And I think we both kind of do loosely, maybe individually, but we have a lot of stuff to build that we’re excited to do, but we haven’t quite started it yet. So right now my vision is

that we keep what we’ve got. have a wonderful team. We’ve got amazing clients coming in. And I’m just grateful that that’s where we’ve started as the owners. So right now that’s kind of all I can see in my view. Mike might have some other bigger vision.

Well, my vision is don’t burn it down. But it’s important. I get asked that a lot. Now, the company, what’s your vision? And I have to say that I’m not trying to dance around it, but we’ve built our vision. We’ve been here for 13 years now building.

The same.

our future and now we’re living in our future that we’ve built. So for that, like that is my, that’s my vision is to just design with integrity and intent. I’ve mentioned that before to grow thoughtfully and to take on really exciting projects and do some work that maybe we’ve not done before. We’ve worked on a bed and breakfast recently in Mendocino.

We have another one, exciting one that we might be working on in San Jose that’s a nice bed and breakfast as well too. So we’ve got these potential projects coming in that like help us expand and stretch muscles that we haven’t been stretching that much yet because we’ve been doing really good work and residential. But now it’s kind of an opportunity to see, yeah, it’s still residential, but it’s breaching that hospitality moment right now. So I’m excited to like touch on that a little bit and see where that takes us.

Sure. Well, have you read Unreasonable Hospitality, that book? It’s such a good book. I love that.

Yes, over and over and over and over and over.

I, Katrina has heard this multiple times now. So she’s like, really? You to tell the story again.

on business. I’m like, I know.

You recommended this book to us and I listened to the audio version of this book and because the author is the general manager of this restaurant, right? And the story about this book is he and a friend of his, who’s a chef, buy a restaurant and they’re trying to turn it into a Michelin star restaurant. And not only a Michelin star restaurant, but the number one restaurant on the entire planet.

And it’s called Eleven Madison Park in New York City for anyone that’s listening to this, read this book, it will change your life. And the whole book is about the unreasonable links that they go to to change how they are and how they function and how they operate to be better. Nothing is ever good enough for them. They question gift giving, which has been a enormous change for me and the things that we do for some of our clients now and some of our potential clients.

and the feedback that we’re getting just from following some of the principles from this book have changed how I manage all of my client relationships. Read this book.

It is so good. It is so good. And I’m really glad that you’re using that and putting it into action because when you do, you can wow your clients. You can treat them in ways that they’ve never thought about and they really now want to have because that is so special to have that kind of a relationship with someone who provides professional service for them.

So.

Yeah, I

shared this book with the editor of Lux Magazine out here and she’s a good friend of ours. she and I talked about this book. This was two years ago when we had this conversation. She and I still talk about what we’ve done around gift giving with this. And I’ll give you, if I can, I’ll give you a very quick example of one of the things that we’ve done. I was on a client call earlier this year and she was sitting in her car and we were talking about a kitchen remodel.

And her dog kept popping up in the background in the backseat of the car. And I asked her first off why she was in her car. And she said, well, I’ve got a contractor inside who’s giving us a quote on the kitchen. And I said, well, why do you have him in there? He doesn’t have anything to quote yet. So first off, get him out of your house. We don’t need him there yet. And second, why is your dog in the backseat? And she said, well, because he’s a little rambunctious in the house and he just he can’t be around people, but he’s behaving very well right now. So I’m really happy that he’s sitting in the car.

And the call went on and on. And afterwards we got off the call and Samantha, who runs our entire life at work, I said to her, said, go find a pet store, get dog treats and a card that just says, thank you. And I want you to write on the inside of that, who’s a good boy and send it to them. So we had it delivered and she reached out and said, I cannot believe that you thought to give my dog in the back seat, a treat for behaving himself, why we were on this call.

And now we get to work together.

That is so cute. I love that.

Yeah, and that came directly from that book.

Well, it’s so great to be able to come up with some creative ideas because it’s an expansion of your creativity because it is a relationship driven business. And if we can build these beautiful relationships with people, they’re going to come back. They really don’t. Well, that’s great.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Personally, I mean, repeat clientele and it’s just so wonderful. I mean, that’s what we really want to build.

Of course. Well, I know this is a weird question to ask you, but have you started thinking about your exit strategy?

Every day. Every day. Every day. mean, look, I’m 55 years old. I’m thinking of where I’m going to be in 10 years and life changes are happening. we have a fantastic financial planner Katrina and I are working with and he’s so involved in how healthy the company is and what we’re doing and where we’re going and what our goals are, individual goals are.

Everyday.

I just met with him yesterday afternoon and I got off the call and I was like, my goodness, that feels so much better having had that conversation. And it wasn’t like, I need to sell something in three years from now, but it was the, if the company continues to grow and flourish, the valuation of the company will be, you know, such that it’s valued really well. And we have this potential to either sell it at that point, maybe to employees that we have. So it’s just really nice to start thinking about.

what that would look like, but not losing sight of the thought that we still have a lot of work to do to keep the company on the same track that it’s on and to keep the profits coming in the way they are right now, right? So that when it is time for Katrina and I to let go or no longer be stewards of this company and allow the next people to come in and shepherd it, that we’ve got it in a really good place to do so.

What happens if one of you decides you don’t want to continue? there’s some life happens, of course, and you have an agreement in place. Have you done that already?

We are working on that. I I’m going to state this for both of us that we have this one year goal of learning and by January we’ve got to hit the ground running for sure on all of these things that we’ve been advised to put in place. we’re both excited to do it. just kind of business is getting in the way and projects and stuff like that. we’ve got

Like we mentioned before, we’ve got such great advisors and such a great team. And we’ve got a lot of people saying, do you have this yet? Do have this? Do you have this? And we just need to start building. And I just asked Mike yesterday, what’s the first thing on that list? Like, what’s the first thing we would do? And he answered and I said, well, let’s just at least chip away at that. Like, let’s just start putting it together because we know we need to do that. It’s really, really important.

You should take our assessment. We put together an assessment. It’s I think about 150 questions and it lists out a lot of the things that you need to have in place. So I’ll send that to you.

I would love to see that because I think we’ve got some of them, but every time I think I’ve got it, our financial planner is like, but you have a long 15 year term, long term health insurance or a life insurance policy. and it’s like,

That’s just one more thing we’ve got to check off this list now. So I do, I have a checklist. I would love to see what your assessment looks like as well too. We’re starting with updating our trust in the States. And you know, that we own the company and if something got forbid should happen to one of the two of us, we want to make sure that, you know, everything is outlined, what our wishes are now that we own this business. All this has changed and we have to make a lot of updates there.

And then there are things in that buy sell agreement that are what happens if one of us isn’t able to work anymore. I forbid there’s an accident or something happens or someone wants to leave what happens. And you have to have insurance policies in place to cover those things that’s covered in that buy sell agreement. And the buy sell agreement is one of those things. It’s no fun. No one wants to do it. But what I’ll tell you is that our attorney said, do it while you’re still sort of in this.

honeymoon phase of owning the company while things are really good. You can talk about things that like might not be so great. Well, what we disagree and we can’t solve something and we have to dissolve the company, what happens to that? That’s all written in this buy sell agreement. They’re not things you want to talk about. They’re things that you have to talk about. They’re assurances you have to have in place for your other partner. And so anybody that’s listening, like you definitely have to have a buy sell agreement in place for this. It’s not easy to do, but it’s really, really important that you have one.

It is, and also putting key person insurance in place. So for example, I have it on Erin and myself. If anything happened to either one of us, it specifically talks about that. We have in my will, and even in my husband’s will, what happens to the company in case something happens to me. So you have to really think about those things.

when you’re running a company. I know some people don’t want to think about that because it’s not pleasant, but you have to because I’ve seen too many people go through divorces, become very ill, have different things that have happened in their lives or taking care of family members. It can change in a second and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. So being prepared for that is really critical.

Well, this has been really interesting and I hope all the people that listen to this are going to understand that it is complex when you’re running a business. It’s not easy anyway, but if you’re prepared and if you’re thinking through things, if you have the right attitude toward each other, then you can do anything together. yeah. Well, I always like to end with three takeaways that you’d like to share with us. So what should our listeners

Yeah, so.

Hear hear.

take away from today’s session.

So I gave this a little bit of thought here. Kathy, don’t mind, I’ll give the takeaways here. I think the first thing, because the conversation that we’re having is about what happens when you’re trying to buy a company, particularly from the owner of the company or employee there. I think the first thing you need to do is you have to have conversations and you have to have conversations early and often about what it looks like and what it means to each person involved and what their involvement is in this. It gets real personal.

real quick. Business is your identity, as I said before, it’s your history, it’s all that you are. So you have to have those conversations and they are going to be hard conversations, but the sooner you have them, the easier they are to have. That’s first one. The second one is build the right team. You we talked earlier about having the right advisors in your sphere. It’s really critical that you have a really good CPA, you have a really good attorney and that you’ve got

a financial planner and a coach, a really good coach. I’m telling you, Gail, I’m not saying this just to talk about the Poor Collective, but like we would not be here in this position if it wasn’t for your guidance. I’m not going to sugar coat that. It is true. It is fact. Without you guiding us, we would not be here as owners of this company right now. So thank you for that. So building your team is really, really critical. That’s two. And the third one is if you’re buying a company with a partner,

You got to be really clear about roles and responsibilities. Who’s going to do what? Who’s going to manage what? Who’s going to be responsible for what? The clearer you are on those roles, the easier it is to have a partnership with that person.

That’s great. Well, what would you like to add to that?

Well, mean, building on the second thing Mike mentioned about the team, you know, also we were, you know, we take over something that exists already. We were lucky enough to have a great like front of the house team. I’ll call it Mike’s talking about the back of the house team, but we were really, really lucky to have that core group of designers, client facing people.

I’m in place already and all of them were excited for us they were super supportive so if you have great people on your team and you’re looking to buy a company you know do everything you can to retain those people to bring them into the concept early so they understand what’s happening and they don’t feel blindsided or you know so we talk to our front of the house team a lot as this was going on they knew you know every step and everybody was on board they were excited for us they all said yes we want to stay so.

know, really think about that if you’re planning, you know, to do something like that. Think about that front-facing team and kind of bring them into the mix of just awareness, you know, on the early side.

Mm-hmm. That’s great. Well, this has been so great to catch up and just hear what’s going on. I’m so thrilled to hear that you’re having a banner year. And of course, I want to know all the details. And I know I’m not asking you on the podcast, but I’ll chat with you afterwards about that. But I really am so proud of you two for making this leap and doing this. And I know that sometimes you think 55 is too old to do this, but I started

my business at 52 and I’m still working and there is no time that you have to retire. So it’s really about when you feel like you have this opportunity to build something, there’s something special about that. It is not easy and not everybody can do it. So good for you. You guys are just killing it.

Thank

Thank It is a hustle. Every day it’s a hustle. But I wake up for that challenge every day.

That’s your challenge. Well, thank you both for being on today and I hope everybody enjoyed this session and take these ideas to heart. And if you’re thinking about buying a business, then do it. Just go for it. Because if this is something that you have to do for yourself, do it. Don’t let anybody stop you.

That’s right. That’s right.

Yeah. Thanks, Gail.

Gail, good to see you too.

to see you.