Lilse McKenna owes her first big break to a cold call. Fresh out of college, she discovered a desire to break into the design industry thanks in large part to the shelter magazines she eagerly poured over during her study breaks while preparing for the LSAT. After scuttling her law school ambitions, her plan of attack was simple: Get in touch with New York’s top designers, and see if they’re hiring.

The first of those calls effectively set her design career in motion. After landing an internship with Meg Braff, McKenna soon found a full-time design position as an assistant to designer Lindsey Coral Harper—and several years after that, a job at Markham Roberts’s firm. Yet even as she soaked up the wealth of design knowledge surrounding her in each role, she couldn’t shake the dream of someday starting a venture of her own.

The stars finally aligned in early 2017, when a family member enlisted McKenna to personalize a Bunny Williams–designed home that they had purchased fully furnished. (The fact that she recognized the project from one of Williams’s books only sweetened the deal.) By the summer of that year, she had officially launched her own firm—and with the help of her design community in New York, it didn’t take long for her business to find its footing. By utilizing social media as a creative outlet and a marketing tool at the same time, she also worked to distinguish her own aesthetic and find clients who were looking for her creative voice.

“Hopefully, if you’re working for someone, it’s because you’re enamored of their work, so you will be influenced by them—I certainly was influenced heavily by Markham, and still am,” McKenna tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “But early on, I was excited to share things that were specific to me. … There is a part of just sharing yourself that helps when you’re trying to build a business that is so aesthetic and sentimentality based.”

For McKenna, a focus on the personal elements of design and a penchant for creativity permeate every element of her firm. Elsewhere in the episode, she shares the value of using hand-drawn floor plans and elevations to present her ideas, why she has turned to Substack as a creative outlet, and how she uses her sessions on The Expert to keep her problem-solving skills sharp.

Crucial insight: One of the most impactful hires on McKenna’s team has been a project manager who also serves as the firm’s client communicator—a role that involves taking over correspondence once the creative phase of a project is over. “My major role is to make sure that the vision that we’ve agreed on comes to life, and so often it’s more important that I spend my time studying the drawings than saying, ‘Hey, we haven’t picked this chair. What do you think?’” says McKenna. “Getting that message out takes more time than people realize, because you need to give the client context for the decision that they’re making. That’s its own process. It’s more making sure that the communication continues to flow and that the right people have the answers when they need them.”

Key quote: “Part of our job as designers is constantly reminding our clients that everything in their house has been touched by so many hands, and there will probably be imperfections, and if there aren’t, that honestly means something was made in a factory—and not as well as if it had been made by hand.”

This episode was sponsored by Joon Loloi and Universal Furniture. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.