Kadie Chiera did not enter the interior design industry as a designer. Her career had been shaped by small companies where she regularly wore multiple hats and became the person helping hold different parts of a business together. What once felt like an unclear career path eventually became exactly the experience she needed to help build Élan Design House.
Today, as Business Director and one of three partners at the San Diego studio, Kadie brings an operational perspective to a creative business. She thinks about profitability, marketing, investments, processes, client relationships, and the decisions that allow the creative side of the firm to thrive. Her experience offers a look at what happens behind the finished interiors, where understanding the business can be just as important as understanding the design.
Finding Her Place in the Business of Design
Before entering interior design, Kadie spent much of her career working for small companies. At one startup with only about six employees, her responsibilities stretched across human resources, international employee visa paperwork, and other operational needs. She describes herself as someone who was often the glue holding different pieces together, although earlier in her career she sometimes found that lack of a clearly defined path frustrating.
Her transition into design began when a project coordinator position caught her attention. She knew she was not a designer, but the job required many of the skills she had already developed. Working within a small studio gave her a close view of how a design firm operated, and a later position brought her further into marketing, bookkeeping, and the business side of the industry. When she eventually started Élan Design House with her partners, those seemingly disconnected experiences became the foundation for the role she occupies today.
Understanding What the Numbers Are Telling You
When Kadie and her partners started Élan Design House, their experience inside other studios gave them a starting point for pricing. They understood billable rates, salaries, and the importance of tracking time, even when a project is billed at a flat rate. They initially based their pricing on what they knew from their previous firm and adjusted as they learned what worked for their own business.
Today, the partners review their finances every month and look at profitability when projects close. For larger decisions, Kadie likes to start with what the three owners want to earn, account for operating expenses, and work backward to understand what the company needs to produce. That information has helped guide investments in areas such as public relations and business coaching.
Numbers, however, do not always provide a definitive answer. When evaluating PR, for example, Kadie looks beyond placements to whether the firm is attracting better leads and projects the team actually wants to work on. For her, good business decisions require a combination of financial data, experience, outside perspective, and sometimes intuition.
Avoiding Analysis Paralysis
Despite her preference for data and logic, Kadie does not believe every decision requires endless research. In fact, one of the things she enjoys about owning a business is being able to encounter an idea, apply it, and see what happens. When all three partners believe something could improve the company, they are often willing to act quickly.
That might mean changing language in a client agreement or introducing fees when a client changes direction late in the process. Larger investments receive more consideration, but Kadie still tries not to remain in the information gathering stage indefinitely. Thinking about a decision for too long can create more uncertainty instead of resolving it.
The result is an approach that allows the company to test, learn, and adjust. Rather than waiting until every variable is known, the partners are willing to make a thoughtful decision and use the outcome as information for what comes next.
Why Three Business Partners Work
Élan Design House has another layer of complexity in its three owner structure. Kadie believes one reason the partnership works is that she, Kilian Camp, and Alison began as colleagues rather than friends who later decided to start a company together. They already knew how they worked alongside one another before adding the responsibilities of ownership.
Having three partners can also make disagreements easier to navigate. If two people feel strongly about a direction and the third does not feel as strongly, Kadie says they are generally comfortable moving forward without allowing the decision to create resentment. Their personalities are different, but they share enough underlying values and emotional intelligence to make the partnership work.
That alignment does not mean their goals will always be identical. Kadie described current conversations about what each partner wants from the company’s next stage. While her partners are considering the possibility of working fewer hours even if it means earning less, Kadie currently feels more interested in investing additional time and pursuing greater financial growth. Their business coach has become a useful outside perspective for bringing those differences into the open and helping the partners navigate conversations that might otherwise be difficult to initiate.
When $6,000 Is Worth Walking Away From
One early client relationship gave Kadie and her partners a particularly memorable lesson in knowing when to walk away. During the first meetings, the team noticed a difficult dynamic between the clients but decided to remain open minded and give the relationship time. Eventually, the behavior they had observed was directed toward someone on the Élan team, and the firm decided it no longer wanted to continue the project.
By that point, Élan had completed approximately $6,000 in design work. The client’s retainer was large enough to cover those fees, but after sharing the situation with an attorney, the partners decided to return the entire retainer and leave the $6,000 unbilled. They believed attempting to collect what they had earned could create a much larger problem.
It was a financial loss, but Kadie saw value in ending the relationship cleanly and protecting the team from further stress. The experience reinforced a broader business lesson for her: sometimes the amount a company is entitled to collect is less important than the cost of allowing the wrong problem to continue consuming time, energy, and attention.
When the Business Becomes Personal
For Kadie, owning Élan Design House has become more than a professional role. She is proud to tell people she owns a business and acknowledges that it occupies a significant part of how she sees herself. Having two partners has made entrepreneurship more manageable because the three owners share not only the rewards, but also the responsibility, decisions, and stress.
That connection is rooted partly in the period when Kadie life was changing dramatically. Around the pandemic, she went through a divorce and lost a job before eventually finding the position in Coronado where she met her future partners. Starting a company became connected to a sense that she could support herself, use more of her potential, and continue moving forward without depending on a partner to provide that stability.
At the same time, Kadie has begun questioning how much identity should be tied to work. Spending time in Spain with her husband has exposed her to a culture where she sees less emphasis placed on career as a measure of personal worth. For someone who has associated building a business with progress in her own life, that contrast has given her another perspective on success and what she wants the next stage of entrepreneurship to look like.
