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podcast | Jun 18, 2025 |
How Alex Kaehler stepped away from her firm to gain a new vision for its future

Alex Kaehler comes from a long line of what she calls “house people”—those who have an innate appreciation for maintaining a well-designed home. Even so, it was something she saw as a personality trait, more of a way of living than a way to make a living.

It wasn’t until she was several years into her career in advertising that a friend pushed her to consider interior design—a hobby she had inherited from her parents and grandparents, and had continued to cultivate on a personal blog—as a potential professional pivot. “That was all it took: someone else saying to me that it was an option,” Kaehler tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “Everything fell into place.”

She promptly swapped her corporate job for design school, and by 2011, Alexandra Kaehler Design was off the ground. Over the years, she took an incremental approach to growing her business, gradually taking on larger projects to diversify her portfolio and hiring self-starters who could maintain the firm’s efficiency as it scaled up. When the pandemic hit, that carefully plotted path forward was sent into overdrive: Demand for her services exploded, an opportunity to write a book came along—and to top it all off, she had just given birth to her third child.

Before long, Kaehler realized she was stretched entirely too thin. If she wanted to truly take advantage of the sudden abundance surrounding her firm, she had to come up with a strategy for tackling the influx—and to do that, she had to take a big step back, then reemerge with a new vision for her firm’s growth. “I wasn’t feeling like my soul was being fed by the work in the way that I once had,” she says. “That, for me, was a cue to say, ‘I have to hit pause. I have to figure out what this looks like moving forward.’”

Elsewhere in the episode, Kaehler shares how putting her firm’s values in writing changed the company culture, how she’s communicating rising costs to clients, and how she’s finding joy these days in a workflow that has her getting into the weeds on each and every project.

Crucial insight: As Kaehler grew her team, she found herself consistently hitting roadblocks in the onboarding process, where communicating her firm’s approach to new hires didn’t always come naturally. Then a suggestion from some of her veteran team members to put it down on paper placed the process in a new light. “Creating a culture document was a way to bring in new staff and team members and say, ‘There are certain standards of how we interact,’” she says. “When it came to culture, that was something that, once we started to really write these things down, was hugely helpful and important to me. I don’t think I had always done the best job of articulating that to my team.”

Key quote: “There’s no template for success. There’s no recipe [like] ‘If you build this way, and you keep growing and scale to this, then you’ll be successful.’ Part of the challenge is figuring out what success means to you individually, because it’s going to be really different than for the person sitting next to you—and that’s in all areas of life, but it’s definitely true in interior design. I think that's where my most recent reevaluation and pause came in.”

This episode was sponsored by Lutron and Serena & Lily. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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