Houston-based designer Jillian O’Neill reveals how she turned her interior design business into a first-of-its-kind franchise across two continents.

Baskin-Robbins, Dairy Queen and designer Jillian O’Neill have something in common, and it’s not just being sweet as spun sugar. They’re all franchises.

O’Neill launched her eponymous design firm in 2005 in Chicago and spent more than a decade making a name for her easy, elegant interiors—in time, building her business from a solo endeavor to a team of up to six. In 2013, when her husband’s job took the family to the Houston suburbs, she reopened the firm in Texas. It wasn’t until O’Neill began developing a furniture line a few years later that she realized she might be ready to pursue a new passion within the industry.