After founding Redmond Aldrich Design in 2005, Chloe Redmond Warner spent the years to follow pouring everything she had into her firm. “I had a fortune cookie that said, ‘Struggle is the hallmark of progress,’ and I put it on my bulletin board,” she tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “I was like, ‘That thing has been up for years’—and it was. It was many years of doing nice projects but not making very much money.”

Still, the Oakland, California–based designer stuck with it, and eventually started turning a profit. In the intervening years, her success only continued to grow—but somehow, running the business wasn’t getting any easier. By 2022, she reached a breaking point. In desperate need of time to recharge her mental and physical health, she decided to take a four-month sabbatical, from which she hoped to emerge a better designer, and a better leader.

Following 10 months of careful planning, she took the plunge—and made the most of it too. During her time away, she trained for a ski race, took a trip to Egypt, started playing piano again, enrolled in an online gardening course, and spent extra time with her family. At the end, she expected to return to work with a clean slate.

“My vision was that I would be super refreshed—and that didn’t happen,” says Redmond Warner. “But then I saw the office, and I was like, ‘Oh, you don’t have to go back to doing things the way you had been doing them.’ It wasn’t that I got a break from those things; it was that I got to change and grow. I’m no longer tired, but it’s because I’m doing things differently.”

After returning, the designer saw her firm with fresh eyes—including the pain points in her processes where firmer boundaries, streamlined communication and better delegation could preserve her time and mental energy. Elsewhere in the episode, she shares about the employee who pushed her to improve the firm’s processes, and the lengths she’ll go to in order to suss out a client’s aesthetic sensibility.

Crucial insight: A few years ago, Redmond Warner found herself on the verge of billing her clients the largest amount she had ever issued—and she could barely bring herself to send it out. “I knew that the number was eye-opening, and I felt so bad about that,” she says. The task was so daunting, she decided to consult her therapist. “Her advice was, ‘Instead of apologizing or being afraid to send this, what if you took the internal attitude of being grateful to have this opportunity to do this beautiful work, and what if you imagined your clients being like, “Wow, we’re glad this work is being done on our behalf.”’ It was completely different from my instinct, which was to minimize and apologize—but it really is important and meaningful work, and if people were doing this on my behalf, I would be psyched,” she says. “I tried it, and sent the time billing, and never heard anything.”

Key quote: “People who dress very well, people who are amazing chefs, people who are perfumiers—everybody has people in their life who vibrate on that level, but it’s never been named. I was like, ‘I think it’s aesthetic intelligence, and I’m going to shorthand it as AQ, and I think it’s the secret to having a life that feels good.’”

This episode was sponsored by Universal Furniture and The Shade Store. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.