Meet Michelle Miller | Interior Designer and General Contractor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michelle Miller and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michelle, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
My father was an entrepreneur; he started his own business the year I was born. As such, I grew up in a household where the money coming in was reliant on your own vision, your own hustle and your own perseverance. That said, I went the traditional route out of college. I worked a few smaller jobs at first, but then I spent 15 years working at two huge companies – Browning-Ferris (BFI in its heyday) and then MCI, which subsequently was acquired by Verizon. Those two jobs provided me with the confidence, experience and knowledge required to start my own company. My jobs were always in sales – not account management, but rather hard-core selling. While it was nowhere near artistic or creative, it was really hard. I had to hunt for business or I made very little money. I had to stay organized with correspondence and follow-up. I had to talk to new people every day. On top of that, both companies were so big that they were laden in layers of resources and paperwork so I often had to learn what to prioritize so that I would get paid. Needless to say, while my sales jobs did not provide the passion or the creative outlet that my job as an Interior Designer/ Contractor does now, it did provide me with all the necessary tools needed to manage the business of a design firm. Putting yourself out there. Chasing down leads. Selling yourself and your product. Working with resources such to get the project done. Managing red tape, budgets and spreadsheets.
Being an Interior Designer/General Contractor is so much more than picking out tile and moving walls. The business part of this business is loaded with layers and layers of minutiae. So when the time came to go out on my own and explore a creative endeavor, I never once got nervous about the business side of it. I knew that I could walk into a new situation and ask for the business and then show that I was professional enough to be trusted with a large scale monetary project.
While my prior work experience provided me with a very practical and stable confidence to start my own business, in all honestly I never thought twice about relying on my creative side. I had always been artistic, and decorating and designing was something I had casually been doing since college. I was often asked to assist in picking out flooring and furniture. In my early twenties, I was regularly reading Veranda, Martha Stewart and Traditional Home just because I enjoyed it. Design was always a back-burner focus for me. Looking back now I oddly think I had always been honing those skills, almost as if I subconsciously knew that it was always going to lead here. It just took several years to gain adequate experience in the business world to be confident in the acumen that I had obtained to support such creative endeavors.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I own a boutique interior design and general contracting firm. We specialize in the luxury home market and work throughout the country depending on where our client’s take us. We feel what sets us apart from other designers; is we are not only an interior design firm but a general contracting firm as well. So do the design and the construction, thus touching every aspect of the project. We find it to be a very streamlined approach and easier for the client to navigate. Often times, the Interior Designer and the General come from separate companies and usually have little knowledge of the other. From past experience I know that leaves a lot to chance – people don’t always communicate effectively and people, frankly, don’t always like to work in a ‘team’ environment. We know from experience that this can set up a project with pitfalls. In our case, myself and my team touch everything from the foundation to the towel bars. We find that this simplifies the processes allowing us to finish projects faster as there are far less hand-offs between vendors. We in essence have eliminated that fear of the perpetually vacant job site as you, the Client, wait day after day for some mystery vendor to show up and finish his part of the job.
We believe that this method of working builds trust with the Client as well. Our clients like that everyone knows everyone, there are no mystery vendors and there is one face in charge of all of it. The fact that we work with the same teams has also cut down on our days to completion. The Interior Design business is loaded with so many details, thousands and thousands of little tasks to be done and pieces to be purchased. AND, each project is different, so what worked on one doesn’t necessarily work on the next. BUT, what we have found through many projects is if the process and the people can stay relatively stable, and if we can control the project in-house, from design to build, it really does bring order and streamline the job. After many years of doing this, our embedded system and team approach I believe has come together and that excites me. It is a very fluid business, so while we will always continue to hone our process, I think how we are approach the business, turn-key and as a one stop shop, is aiding in our success right now.
The biggest lesson for me, to which I think is very indicative of the brand, is at the end no matter what I know or experience I have, it is YOUR house and you should love what we do together. While I will uninhibitedly tell you the truth and guide you in the direction we both agree the space needs to go, however I am never going to talk you into something you hate. I have been hired so many times by people who have had 2, 3, 5 designers. The stories for the most part remain the same. They got pushed into purchasing things they really did not like or things that really were not reflective of their lifestyle or person. Because designers really play such a huge role in people’s homes, I think that sometimes what the Client says or feels can fall on deaf ears. While my style is continually evolving (there are a million colors in the Crayola box and I want to try them all!) my brand, what we really strive to do, is listen to our clients. Even on those occasions when a client steps away from the project and leaves much of the decision making process in our hands, when they come back into the space it’s still THEIR space-it represents them. We are all about that.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Speaking from Michelle Miller Design’s success, there are two friends from long ago that had so much faith in me when I was just starting out as a Designer. They not only entrusted me with their homes, but encouraged their friends to trust me and my team as well. The experience I received from spearheading such substantial projects was instrumental in what I am able to do today. I gained, in a few short years, experience that others don’t get for 10 years. I will always be grateful for that jump-start and to them for having faith in me early on.
Speaking from just Michelle Miller, it is easy to take steps towards being what you want to be when you are surrounded by this tightly woven embrace of love and support. Starting from my parents and grandparents, to my sister and my husband, then through my children, aunts, cousins and friends, there are overflowing amounts of this infectious love and support given out unconditionally. I wish I was able to bottle it and share it.

Instagram: @MichelleMillerDesign

Image Credits
Jill Tiongco Photography