When Cortney Bishop was growing up in Atlanta, her mother ran her own design firm out of the basement of the family home, which meant childhood was filled with fabric samples, project updates and design center visits. Although the creative aspect appealed to Bishop, it was the complex process of running a business that came to occupy a permanent place in her imagination.

“When people say, ‘What did you want to do when you were little?’ I always say, ‘I think I wanted to be an entrepreneur,’ even though I didn’t know what that word was, or what a career in entrepreneurship was at that time,” Bishop tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of Trade Tales.

That might explain how Bishop’s career unfolded: with a business degree and a postgrad stint in corporate sales, followed by a progression of jobs—an associate in furniture galleries and showrooms and then a co-founder of a two-person design firm—that got her increasingly closer to the helm of her own firm. When her young family relocated to Charleston, she struck out on her own, opening Cortney Bishop Design in 2007.

Building a business was never a chore for Bishop to endure in order to support her design work—instead, she applied the same ambitious creativity to her various new ventures and internal structures as she did for her client projects. The result is a one-of-a-kind design business, complete with an in-house receiving operation and a music-inspired approach to experiential e-commerce, called Album. Though she hasn’t been immune to the growing pains and daily challenges many designers face—employee turnover and properly charging for her work, to name a couple—she’s managed to build a team that’s committed to seeking out new ways to improve.

“It took several years, if not 10 years, to get this company and this business up and running and really thriving on a level of profitability where I considered myself a success,” says Bishop. “It’s really about continuing to learn—that’s kind of my ethos for life.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Bishop shares the path she took to level up her clientele, why she thinks of her projects as marketing campaigns, how hiring a business manager is one of the best decisions she ever made—and what you should look for in a candidate if you want to hire one too.

Crucial insight: For Bishop, there’s one hire that completely changed the game—and within the firm, she’s known as “Mama B.” That’s Blair Gough, the business manager who handles everything from employee management to vendor communications, keeping the unforeseen hiccups of running a firm off of Bishop’s plate so that she can focus on creative work and big-picture planning. When recruiting for such a role, Bishop recommends finding someone who’s in it for the long haul: “You really need a lifer. You need a career-minded individual who wants to build something with you,” she says. “Character is the number one thing that I would hire for this position. [Ask] where they are in their life, what they want out of life. Will they be in this game with you for a long time? If you’re both equally pleased, [they will] help you build the company in ways you’ve always dreamed.”

Key quote: “There’s a dance to each client. There’s a strategy to each relationship. We are extremely selective with who we [get] into a relationship with at this point in my career, but there’s a lot that factors into that too. It’s not personality per se; it’s just specific things, kind of a give-and-take. What do I want? What do they want? And how does this [fit] into our trajectory?”

This episode was sponsored by Ethan Allen and The Shade Store. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.