Rayana Schmitz didn’t find her way into design after a first career in the corporate world, or even the adjacent fields of fashion and retail, as so many designers do—but rather, in the high-stakes world of firefighting.

“I went to school to be a fitness trainer, wanting to own my gym and have a career in that field,” Schmitz tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of Trade Tales. “But when I met my now-husband, he talked me into firefighting, and I was interested, so I’m like, ‘Why not?’”

As fate would have it, while training to become a firefighter, Schmitz met a fellow trainee who had an interest in buying and refinishing antique furniture. Together, the pair turned the hobby into a side hustle, combining their two areas of expertise to come up with the perfect business name: Fire Finish.

In the midst of this new venture, Schmitz and her husband decided to move. After putting their house on the market, it quickly became clear that her instincts for furniture design had translated to interiors as well. When potential buyers began asking who had designed the place—followed by requests to work the same magic on their homes—she found herself faced with yet another career opportunity. This time, it stuck: In 2016, she officially launched her firm, Firefinish Interiors.

The act of designing came naturally to Schmitz—the process of running a business, less so. Despite proving herself as a jack-of-all-trades in her career thus far, she decided that when it came time to scaffold the inner workings of her firm, she would turn to experts—including a chief operations officer to establish systems and processes and a fractional chief financial officer to get her firm’s finances in order—to keep the business’s back end tightly structured so that her creativity could run wild.

Elsewhere in the episode, the designer talks about the showhouse experience that pushed her creative boundaries, the book that helps her access creative freedom, and why she maintains strict hours for communication with clients.

Crucial insight: When it came to building her firm’s systems, Schmitz likes to say she went to “Facebook and YouTube and podcast university,” referring to her self-taught business education. Still, she often found herself longing for someone with an operations background to swoop in and provide some much-needed structure at the firm—until she agreed to grab coffee with a potential client leaving a corporate job, and realized the perfect candidate was right in front of her. “It was the best decision I ever made. The idea was for her to really observe the business and give me anything and everything that I could apply from corporate and take it to the next level—the official title would be COO,” she says. “It was putting the team together, getting the processes finalized and established [and followed.] … Since then, [we’ve gotten] so many better inquiries to begin with, and the projects that we’ve signed on.”

Key quote: “It’s hard to be stuck in the weeds for so many months or so many years with nothing to really feed your soul. To me, it’s all about: You design, you present—yay, everybody’s happy, you get a little bit of endorphins. So having these smaller projects feels a lot like it feeds the soul.”

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