For Swati Goorha, the road to a design career was not a straightforward one. While she had marveled at architectural gems during her childhood in India, she went on to pursue a more practical path, earning her undergraduate degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in marketing and advertising. It wasn’t until she moved to Ithaca, New York, with her husband, and took a few art and design courses at Cornell, that she realized she wanted to pivot to interiors, which led her to earn a master’s in interior architecture and design from Drexel University.

The timing wasn’t great. Degree in hand, Goorha graduated straight into the recession in 2009. She spent some time working in retail before finally landing her first design job. As it turned out, several years within someone else’s firm only sharpened her ambition—by 2016, she decided to launch her own design business, and immediately sought out advice from a former project manager.

“He said, ‘In this area, if you throw a rock you could hit a designer. So make sure you’re clear on who you are, and you stick to that,’” the New Jersey–based designer tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “I took that advice to heart. There are enough designers that if you’re interchangeable with somebody else, you’re not doing it right. But if people are coming to you for who you are, you will be able to create good design.”

In a saturated market, Goorha made a name for herself by disregarding then-trendy beige and neutrals, instead embracing color and vibrancy—and above all, treating each new project as a character in its own right. When she was selected to participate in this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House (her first), she knew she wanted to create a space that paid homage to her personal story, using design to demonstrate the many phases she passed through to make it where she is today. The end result was a splash, and was emblematic not only of the designer’s visual storytelling skills, but also of the way in which she conducts her eponymous firm and communicates with clients.

Elsewhere in the episode, Goorha shares why she doesn’t conduct discovery calls, how she set herself up to work on higher-quality projects, and the billing adjustment that made clients more respectful of her time.

Crucial insight: While Goorha’s charging strategy began as a flat fee, she quickly realized that her team was spending far more time on each project than her rates reflected. When she switched to time billing, she was finally able to properly value her services—and as a bonus, it also transformed the way clients assessed the firm’s time and abilities. “Because we were billing for our time the way we should, clients became more respectful of our time,” says Goorha. “Otherwise, people think our team members are their private assistants sometimes. I am all for being friends with my clients: I really do become close with [them]—where I know everything about their personal life, and we go for coffee afterward, we go for dinner. But when we are working together, it’s important for me and them to have that client and service provider boundary.”

Key quote: “It’s not just the object, or the creativity that went into the object—it’s the story that supports the creativity. And people don’t just buy objects. They buy stories.”

This episode was sponsored by Regina Andrew and Room & Board. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.