Growing up, Ali Faulkner’s father worked in commercial and residential real estate, which meant that her family moved around a lot—so much that she attended eight different elementary, middle and high schools. It’s no surprise, then, that she came away from the experience with a special talent: making fast friends.

“I never wanted to eat lunch alone, and when you don’t want to eat lunch alone, you have to know how to get people to like you—you have to become a people person,” the designer tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of Trade Tales.

Finding a connection with others turned out to be her superpower. While attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, she excelled at her part-time job working for one of the city’s five-star hotels—which turned out to be a master class in luxury hospitality—and became a manager there at age 22. After a few years working for Deloitte, she found herself back in hospitality, working on a hotel concept for a startup based in Orange County, California.

When that experience came to a sudden end during a round of layoffs less than two years later, Faulkner took on the task of renovating the kitchen in the home she shared with her husband while she looked for her next job. The complexities of handling the project herself came as a shock to her—and after a few Google searches, she discovered the world of professional design services, where she soon began to imagine a place for herself.

“I was like, ‘I’ve served this clientele in another facet of their lives, in hotels—could I serve them in their homes?’” she says. “This lightbulb moment started to click: Am I willing to bet on myself?”

In 2019, Faulkner launched AEF Interiors in Newport Beach. She explains how she finally feels like she has stepped into the leadership role she’s meant to be in—though not without the help of her growing team and an array of outsourced talent. As she continues to scale, she’s intent on structuring her firm, including everything from back-end operations to hiring and onboarding, around delivering an ideal client experience.

Elsewhere in the episode, she shares how outsourcing social media caused her inbound leads to multiply, how working with a sales coach transformed her calls with prospective clients, and how she’s building a work environment that allows employees to create accountability for themselves.

Crucial insight: For Faulkner, stepping into the role of creative director was only possible once she put the conditions in place for her firm to operate smoothly without her direct involvement in every task—a feat that involved, crucially, hiring some employees whose experience outweighed her own. “The quality of talent that we have brought to this team has really allowed me to step back and delegate,” she says. “You ultimately have to know which balls [that you’re juggling] are glass and which ones are going to bounce back. … For a while, I felt like I was the person catching [every] glass ball. And now I’ve really transferred that accountability and ownership.”

Key quote: “Incredible design is expected when you hire an interior design firm. It’s not about the what, it’s how we do the great design that matters to me.”

This episode was sponsored by High Point Market and Minted. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Trade Tales on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.