Hiring an external HR consultant allowed the Maryland designer to stop worrying about employee policies, benefits and labor regulations—and let a specialist do the heavy lifting.

Over more than three decades in business, Dennese Guadeloupe Rojas readily admits that she has kissed a lot of frogs in the process of building a strong team to support her Maryland-based firm, Interiors by Design.

“You try to find like-minded individuals to bring on board—people who have the same vision and the same values,” she says. “But sometimes they get in and you discover they don’t know what they’re doing, or they come into your business with their own intentions, and think they can do it better than you.”