When Jean Liu returned home to Dallas after graduating from college, she expected to stay for about a year. She had come back to help out with the family business her father founded, which specialized in the distribution of decorative hardwired lighting. It was supposed to be a brief stint—until a friend convinced Liu to purchase and renovate a historic Tudor home in Forth Worth’s Lakewood neighborhood.

Liu quickly sold the home after completing the renovation—and she enjoyed the process so much that she went on to flip three more properties. But as she neared the end of the last project, the recession set in and the economy began to plunge. Suddenly, moving a house off the market seemed like a nearly impossible task.

“I was pretty young, I had never had that much money in a house, and I was starting to sweat the fact that it hadn’t sold,” Liu tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “The real estate agent said, ‘Hey, I think you’re going to be in better shape if you come in and do some of the soft touches.’ I went back in and did all of the window treatments and a few more [details], and a week later, the house was under contract.”

The space also landed Liu her first design client, which led to a string of referrals, and before long, she was filing for her LLC. By 2010, Jean Liu Design was officially off the ground. The designer’s goals reflected her mindset at the time: She wanted to prove that she could find success outside the family business, grow a team that united around a shared creative vision, and produce work that reflected her design style. In the years since, many of those dreams have been realized—and in their wake, a new set of targets have come into focus, reflecting a firm that has managed to mature alongside its leader.

Elsewhere in the episode, Liu shares why she’s capping her firm at a certain size, the importance a retainer plays in gauging a client’s level of commitment, and how she helps prepare her team for their next chapter.

Crucial insight: With her experience working for the family business, Liu gained a firsthand look at how a leader’s role changes when a company’s workforce reaches a certain size, and she quickly realized she didn’t want to replicate that experience within her firm. “I think that beyond six [employees], you’re not really doing anything substantively design-like anymore—you’re managing personalities day in and day out,” she says. “When you hear some of these interior design studios have 20 [or] 40 designers, that is definitely a signifier of how successful they are—but that’s not something that I want. Six is the limit for me.”

Key quote: “I don’t really want to be working with [clients] who aren’t serious about their project, because we’re very serious about our work. I go home and I think about my jobs—I dream about the jobs too. It’s like in any relationship: I don’t want there to be a huge discrepancy in commitment.”

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