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Ep.4 - How I Hired My First Employee with Sabah Mansoor · Really Renée

• Sam Struck: Big part of building a team also is being very clear on what you want to own and what you want somebody else to own. And you actually have to be the leader that says, you own this, and I'm gonna be willing to let you feel. We're dreaders. Don't care what other people say. We're dreaders. Have you ever been curious about what you should do, how you should approach hiring? Or are you nervous about it? Is that something that you've been curious about? Well, today we're gonna be talking with Saba Mansor of Saba Mansor Interior Design. And she's gonna walk us through how she hired, how she fired people, how she confidently walked through those decisions. And we're gonna share sort of the good, the bad, the ugly of all of the steps to hiring and firing and all the things that everyone's curious about. So thanks for tuning in. Saba, thank you for joining me today. We met several years ago at design camp and it's been fun to kind of just watch your journey, see more about you, what you're doing. You live a very like amazingly glamorous life in the Bay Area. And I feel like I'm just like a Pacific Northwest ⁓ podunk hick relative to like your world of interiors. But I've seen some of those vacation homes, friend. Not true at all. Yes. Well, I mean, same same, same world, but sort of different in its own way. But ⁓ one of the things that I just am so excited to talk to you about today is employees. So ⁓ one of the one of the you know, biggest hurdles that we all face as small business owners, interior designers, having a studio is how to hire people, how to deal with that. And this was a conversation that when I you know, put it out to our group. I was like, does anyone want to talk about this? And you're like, I could talk about this all day, every day. So I It was a particularly hard cycle that I was in when we first just started talking about this. So happy to share. Well, I just would love to hear sort of ⁓ your your business, how many people you have, what your employment history has looked like, the journey towards, you know, where you are right now. And then ⁓ we'll get into some questions around that, but just give everyone that's listening kind of a little bit of a deep dive into who you are, your studio, how many people you've got, what the format looks like. We actually have ⁓ till about two to to be fully transparent, till about two years ago, I was a solopreneur with an assistant and the assistant was brand new too. Okay, so this was a solo journey for a long time and then Two years ago I hired my first assistant and then I had this like almost kiss mat kind of situation that happened because a girlfriend of mine who I knew from industry ⁓ kind of looked up to as like a mentor was wrapping up a studio that she had for 15 years and then had done a showroom for a few years. And she looked at me and she said, Well, I really love the work that you're doing. By the way, at this time I've been in business all of three years. ⁓ so I'm like, you know, in awe of this woman. And she looks at me and says, I love the work you're doing. If you're look ever looking for somebody to like kind of do a project for you or help with anything, I'd love to come and help. And I didn't know what I was jumping into, but I was like, Yes, absolutely. You want to come and join my studio and help me? I don't know what I need, but yes. So when we started that conversation, it was really just that like a friend. Being like, I'm kind of in this retirement phase of life, but I don't want to let go of the creative journey. Let me help you. And when she came in and she looked at what I was doing, she was like, Are you insane? Why are you like what are you doing? And why are you doing this by yourself? You have the business to support employees, you have the but I had not since I started never lifted my head up to look at it and think, what does scaling look like? Or I was just like, on the little treadmill going right like I was just trying to keep afloat. so when somebody from the outside, like she came in and she was like, No, no, no, you need help. What are you doing? Working and my day looked like, you know, getting up before my kids, working, starting the day, getting with the kids, and then getting back to work, stopping when the kids came home and then back to work at night. So life was kind of a little bit out of balance. So anyway, that brought us to kind of thinking about what we wanted to do and we her coming from a more traditional studio setup, we decided to do go down the path of finding a senior designer, a junior designer, and kind of starting to build that structure of a studio. The first person that I actually did end up bringing in was a procurement person, ⁓ because I thought that, ⁓ this is like the part of the job that if I could get off my plate, it would really make a difference. ⁓ So procurement, ⁓ we ended up hiring our bookkeeping firm to do. And that worked up until a point, and then I decided to kind of bring an input. So right now we do have a person in-house that does procurement and is supported by our ⁓ accounting firm that does like broader procurement for us. ⁓ but we do have a full-time person on our staff that does procurement. We have two senior designers. A junior designer and intermediate designer. ⁓ I do have two, I have a full time stylist on my staff. He's kind of my director of styling, but also does a lot of our I kind of like to call him as like the keeper of the brand. He what like looks at ⁓ social, what's going out, he looks at anything that's outward facing client facing presentations, he zhuzhuls it all. Like he zhuzas everything for us. ⁓ and then Nancy, who's my the my original ⁓ partner in this crazy ⁓ journey who kind of runs our ⁓ who's like ki she I call her my director of design in terms of only furnishing projects. So when we get a project that's only furniture, she does that. I do a lot of the projects that do ground up construction and furnishing. ⁓ and then we have like an operations person who's Jocelyn who runs like kind of she's like I call her Mother Hen basically. She's like Mama, I need this fixed and she figures it out. So that's kind of our family right now. So that's a total of six, seven? I'm like eight people. With you, eight. Okay. So in terms of your role then right now, what would you say your role is and what do you what does your day to day look like? I am So there there's my aspirational role and what I really do. Okay. So aspirationally, I am supposed to be creative director across all projects. Yep. What it really looks like is that there are projects that I am designing soup to nuts. Most of the projects that I'm designing soup to nuts are are big, full scale, ground up construction. I'm a construction nerd. I like every tile, every stone, every trim, every like that's like my love language. So I'm in it. I'm in the weeds everywhere. I have severe ADHD and so I mean grew up with dyslexia. So for me I learn every like I can retain a ton of lot ton of information. So I actually do know my projects. I can, you know, tell you what trim goes in which bathroom because I only remember everything here. Nothing is anywhere. It's filed away, but in my brain. ⁓ so that's the only way I remember. So Everything is I write everything down and I r ⁓ retain everything. ⁓ but so I'm very, very, very involved. ⁓ what I would love for it to look like would be that ⁓ I still have every project divided by ⁓ a senior designer. So I do have a senior designer assigned to every project. ⁓ I would like for it to look a little bit differently as we move forward because right now I'm carrying the weeds on everything. Sure. Okay, so then, you know, if if the business were to like function in the way that you wanted and you were out of the weeds a little bit more, what would it look like for them to be able to do that versus what you're doing? Do you know like maybe and then maybe we have Yeah, and actually we have we have made no, we've actually made some ⁓ inf like I found myself and maybe this was when we were first talking, right? I found myself in a really tough position because I have this team, like a fabulous team. Again, talented, great people have done wonderful things before they came to work for me. and I found myself in a place where I had one team member out on ⁓ on leave. I had another team member that was my senior designer on the second and two of my biggest projects, one that needed all construction documents to be submitted, and my senior designers. out of pocket and I don't have access to a lot of stuff. So I'm like rebuilding everything for submittal. And I have a full on 10,000 square feet furniture project deliverable in the same three week period. And I was working like I was at the office at six in the night ⁓ in the morning and I was going home at nine at night and I like kind of hit rock bottom. And I I this is not The life. This is not what we're trying to build. I also would like to build some work-life balance. And so what we ended up doing was we all took a step back. I took some time to kind of look at these projects, reevaluate what I actually need to keep on my plate and what I need to actually let go of. And maybe it need that there needed to be some amount of letting go on my part. I think in some cases my my seniors were feeling like Maybe she wants to own this. Maybe this is her like I I don't want to step on her toes, but I was feeling like I don't have anybody who is taking initiative to take on this role. So there was this kind of like dance that was happening. Again, knowing full well that this is a new team. These are all team members that have been at my in my team six to a year, right? Six months ago. This is like a new young team. And I realized that a big part of building a team also is being very clear on what you want to own and what you want somebody else to own. And you actually have to be the leader that says, you own this and I'm gonna be willing to let you fail. I think a big part of what happens is that it's my name on the door. And I refuse to let my myself fail. So I'm unable to let go of if something doesn't feel quite right, I'm jumping in and doing all of the red lines, doing all of that fix rather than being in that position where I am telling my team this is what needs to be done. So letting go is a big part of this growth journey that I think I had to hit really hard to be able to learn how to do. Totally. Yeah, I think that's true probably for a lot of business owners as they start to like get into the process of hiring and whatnot. I know in my case, when I first hired, I actually my rock bottom w was the catalyst to me just being like, I'm not doing any of this anymore. And so the pendulum swung the complete opposite way. So I like let go of too much and it was to the detriment of the business. So we ended up, you know, I ended up deviating from our core level of service or like our how elevated things were because I didn't hold on to it tightly enough. And I ended up ⁓ the deliverable quality actually went down. And it was like to the detriment of the business. So I like I experienced the opposite where I just kind of like hands off and said, I hired a senior designer, like go be a senior senior designer. And I didn't hold tight to the brand and expectations. And I think to your point too, like both in both situations there is a need to have an awareness over expectations and communicate that clearly. And so I didn't really communicate the expectations around how I expected deliverables to be, what the process is for re me reviewing them before they go out to a client. And so it just caused like a rift because I didn't really set them up to succeed to like help them understand that I didn't want anything to go out unless it hit this like very high level of execution and delivery quality. So ⁓ yeah, I I think it's flip side of the same coin, right? I think it's exactly the flip side because I think it's the same thing. Like I didn't communicate as a senior designer what I wanted that role to be like and what the expectations of that role were. ⁓ and I think that there are a lot of senior designer kind of roles that end up becoming ⁓ for large part like paper pushers, right? So they're like they become like kind of This triage role. So they are not really producing, they are triaging all the time. And a lot of firms, especially larger, more established firms, I think that that's what I've come to experience is what senior designers have done at other firms. At our firm, we also require you to be a doer. So I I don't have like my business requires every designer to actually contribute on the design side as well. You cannot like you can't survive at SMD if you're not doing design. Like you cannot be tri triaging all day, every day. It just won't work for what we need. ⁓ but I don't think that I ever was very dirt. Like I kind of also am a little bit as a I think leadership style wise also, I'm a little bit like hands off till I'm hands on. So I'm kind of looking to learn from what do you know? What would you like? Where would you know, how can I make this work for you? And I think I got ⁓ I went a little too far in trying to make it work for everybody else and not really work for me. And I think that's where at some point of time I was like, wait a minute. I this also needs to work for me. Yeah. No, I mean that resonates with me deeply. I grew up in a house with ⁓ my dad was a tradesman and he would say all the time, like, Be slow to hire and quick to fire. If somebody's not serving you, then you need to let them go. And that concept was really hard for me as a business owner. And I also think just as women and being people that you know are nurturing and we want to do the right thing and we care about people, I think it's really hard to like bring in employees and then you want to like serve them well, create a good culture in your office. You want to provide good benefits, you want it to work for them. But at some point the like the scale does tip over where you're like you're like, wait, I am now working. for these people. They're not working for me. And so ⁓ I think it's really hard to like do that dance. And I was really bad at it with my first few hires. It was not good. I did not handle leadership well because I really wanted our team to feel like, ⁓ we're friends and we're like working together and it's like this great culture. And I think in essence that's a that's a good thing. But I also feel like it led to hurt feelings down the road, I think it led to me me not feeling like I could hold ⁓ the team accountable at times when they needed that. And so I I like went through a period where we had a downturn a couple years ago and I like laid everyone off and I was like, I need to reevaluate how I'm doing this. And now in a season of like regrowth and rebuilding My approach to hiring is like so different. And I think it's amazing that you were able to like kind of pivot in that way with the people on your team. I think that's like a testament to your character and like your team's like loyalty and like investment in you. But it took me literally like separating, which sounds bad, but it's true. No, I don't I know I don't think so I don't think it sounds bad because I do think that there is a culture of hap like I do think that there's an entitlement culture that there It is ⁓ there is a different and and talking about like cult creating culture for our teams, right? I think that I'm an eighties kid, right? So I'm in my mid forties. And I think that what I value and what we valued at when I was starting out ⁓ as culture, community building, like having this like, you know, I provide snacks, I'll provide lunch, you can do this like the things that I value. Are very different from what my team values. Right? And I think that that learning in and of itself felt very harsh at first. Because here I was like, I'm providing these benefits. They don't remain benefits, they become expectations. And then when on the reverse they are asking for more, now you feel pushed because you've already extended yourself to make this work for them. And then you're like, ⁓ that was not enough. And now you're asking for something that now makes me on the reverse feel like I'm being pushed in a way that feels uncomfortable. So I do think that there is this culture now of values that have di are a little bit differently aligned. And I think living here, especially in the valley where tech companies are kind of what the culture norm is here, I can't compete. Are you kidding? Like they what the the benefits you can get working at a corporate tech na tech tech company in this area, a small business cannot even come close. But what we are trying to provide and build in terms of culture is something that they don't. But the value shi shift is very hard to sometimes manage. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Similarly, I mean we live in a high tech area, even though we're a small town and I agree. It's like I we so for me, I'm like really particular about we provide Platinum health insurance 100% paid for by the by the company. That feels like the right thing to do from like a human perspective, right? But you know, I I left Design Camp, for example. ⁓ one of the things that stuck with me was Lindsay talking about her ⁓ having unlimited paid time off policies for her team. And I thought, like at the time, I was like, this is incredible. We should do that. And I came back and we tested it out. And it was horrible because I live in an area it we live in a lifestyle community with a already a tremendous level of work-life balance. It's actually really hard to get people to work. So that's that was like I provided an unlimited paid time off policy and it became like now I can't get people to come to work. And so ⁓ it was like, no, this doesn't work. So you have to really be able to identify what the benefits are that also incentivize people to want to be there and and how can you get them to like buy into your business strategies, what you're doing without it becoming, like you said, like a burden on you as the business owner. So it's you ha yeah, you have to it's like trial and error, right? That's all we're doing every day. I mean every day. I like, you know, there was a point of time where I was we we actually piloted this summer for the first time, we piloted ⁓ Friday's Work From Home. And and when we, you know, pilot anything new, we do tell them, ⁓ so this is a pilot program, we're gonna try this and please make sure that if there are appointments or meetings or client requirements, you're still showing up for those, you know, you can work from home there. Do you think there was a single client project or client meeting that was scheduled for a Friday that any of my team members showed up for? In fact, it became something that I did. So if there is now, for instance, a tradesperson that has to be met at a project on Friday, hey Saba, do you mind seeing this person? Because you know it's on Friday. ⁓ do you kind of create like I I would never in a million years think about telling my boss that when I was starting out. But it is yeah. They're like, ⁓ I mean, I I live an hour away and you know, you live right down the street, and would you just let the guys in? No, actually that's not my job to do. But it does like there is this like entitled behavior that becomes part of the language. And then you start thinking, the Friday work from home was supposed to be a benefit. Now it's an expectation. And now I've created a culture that essentially we work Monday through Thursday. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you're I think you're spot on on that. You really have to be willing to try things, but then also take them back if it's not working for you. So it's, you know, and it's tricky. And sometimes people get frustrated, employees get frustrated. But as so long as you can communicate that and like come back to this is why we did it, it's not working, so now we need to reevaluate, I think that that's like that's part of what you a small business team has to be able to adapt to. And so if a c if a if they can't do that, then it's kind of like sink or swim, right? Okay, so if you're finding this content helpful or informative. I would so appreciate if you could consider subscribing to us and leaving a comment or a review just so that we can reach more people, reach more designers and help elevate the design community. Thanks for tuning in. So I guess question for you would be like when you are gonna hire somebody or when you're thinking about onboarding somebody, tell me about like the first ninety days. How do you integrate somebody into your business? How do you evaluate whether they're a good fit maybe before that ninety days? Like what What goes into the hiring process for you and how do you set expectations on the front end to help somebody know what they're needing to do as they assimilate into you and your business? So the one part of it that really did add a lot of benefit to our life was that we started working with a com with another recruiting company. ⁓ she's ⁓ somebody local to us called Studio Bloom and I really spent a lot of time with her. And s like I think we might have spent three or four hours talking multiple times, but talking through what we were looking for and how we wanted to build culture. And we've had like big broad conversations about it, more detailed conversations when I was looking for a particular hire. And when I have ever tried to hire on my own, it has not gone my way. So somehow with ⁓ I've had more success with her. So now that partnership actually has become something that I rely on. And if there is like for instance, recently there was somebody I'm not looking to hire at the moment, but there was a candidate that she was like, I would love for you to meet her. I take her word for it. I take the meeting. I meet the person. And actually it was a great candidate and we are now like in touch and we were like, let's revisit at the end of the year if we make the space for you. Like she she has come to understand our business enough that I know that there is value in going with her gut when it comes to that. Some of the things that we have incorporated, like ⁓ so it's it's actually great because it is ⁓ we she also was the person that shared with me ⁓ a local HR best practices kind of person. So she helped us put and is in the process of helping us continue to develop an employee hand out handbook, really kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of okay, Friday work from home. This is what that policy looks like. Here is what that like spelling it out. Actually having a written copy of it because when it needs to go away, these are the reasons it went away. Or when it needs to, ⁓ now we're gonna be two days work from home because it worked so well. Here is what the framework looks like. But I do like I didn't actually value any of this when I was starting out. I was like, you know, it's my like the I love this person. They're gonna come in. It's gonna be a f I think the framework and the everything that you can get in writing and something that people can go back to reference is Always better. I think the other thing that we did was like we just upgraded all of our pal policies recently, right? Software, policy, because I realized that there were candidates that I I would fall in love with. I I'm this is my personality, and then I would make exceptions. Sure, you can have an augmented work schedule, sure you can have a different software that you work with, sure you can have whatever that might be, but an exception always. becomes a problem with other team members. Because then you're kind of making them feel like, how come so-and-so has something that I don't? And that comparison never makes job satisfaction for the other employee either. So my star employee might look at her neighbor and be like, why don't I have what she has? And that make became dissat that might end up in dissatisfaction. And at the end of the day, you as the business owner are left with What am I going to now? Am I going to make an exception for her as well? Or is does her exception look different? And now I'm managing four different people with four different programs that they want, or, you know, a myriad of like I want to be working from home on Fridays, I want to be working from home on Tuesdays, I have healthcare stuff that's kinda all of these exceptions where I'm just like sitting in the middle holding a basket of trying to keep up with everybody's needs. And so we kind of took it all like kind of brought it back down to baseline. And now this is best practices. If there is an exception, you now know it's an exception and it is not part of our policies. It's not part of what we do. We're not changing the company policy to support that. But for you, we have done like now you know that this is something that we've done above and beyond for your role. And you see it as a value add. Right. But it there was a lot there was a lot of policy like there was a lot of actual structural infrastructure that we had to build around it because I never never imagined HR to be to require this level of ⁓ thought and support. ⁓ but I had an employee tell me that she was pregnant and needed to go on maternity leave when she was six months pregnant. And she went to maternity leave 45 days later. And What do you do? Yeah, so like again, like we we live in very ⁓ California is a very employee employer ⁓ harsh state. It's a very employee friendly state. So yeah, we have to be very careful about what and where. But for a small business, carrying some of these these little weights around is not easy and cost of you know some of these things really can be detrimental. Like I couldn't hire another person while I had her out on maternity leave. I just couldn't. ⁓ totally. Like I had been given, you know, 45 days to try and figure this out and I didn't figure it out ⁓ in time. So I would ended up with having to pick up those pieces. So there are now we just kind of have a lot of things just in paper, in black and white, and there are far more strict rules around what ⁓ you know notification looks like, what ⁓ even when you're leaving on vacation, what that memo looks like, what you have to hand off to your team members, everything is in writing. So I think that that has helped keep the bar where it needs to be. Right, right. I mean, I guess to segue off of that, like what are the the tips that you wish you would have known when you first were hiring? Like if you were just starting out right now and you were considering your first hire. What are the things you wish you would have known? What are the things that you wish somebody would have told you? What would you do differently? Any of that? I would say that I don't think all design firms need to be run the same way. Like so you don't necessarily need every project. Like every firm doesn't have to be a senior designer, junior designer, an intermediate designer on every pro like I yeah almost I almost feel like think about how what your business is, what are the projects you have, and how can you best support them. So it might be that you need not another designer, you might need a project manager. You might need ⁓ you know, like for right and for us, we like I realized that I have designers that are just much stronger at construction drawings, documentations, architectural background, whereas designers who are better at furnishing. So maybe the depart the the way that we set it up is that all plan building and all structural work and all of that permit sets go through one designer. And then lands up on the other day. So it doesn't have to be that you own the project soup to nuts, the senior designer owns the project soup to nuts, but it can be divided as the construction team versus the, you know, furnishing team. So there are some ways that your firm might be best supported. Don't look at like the archetype of a design firm and try to build your team around that because that's what I did. And I think that we had to like make adjustments to make it make make sense. Yeah. ⁓ That's one and I also think everything is not a hire. I think that's the other thing that I wish that I had I had thought about earlier because even now we do bring in like a lot of so like we do have we have a cat service person that whenever we are overwhelmed or overworked, we bring that team in. We have people that do renderings for us, that's external. ⁓ and I think that everything doesn't ri need to be a hire. So some of those roles that I even have in-house now. could have been solved in a much more cost-effective way by doing them creatively. ⁓ I think that's a great point too. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point too. I th I've said that as well. Like, not everyone needs to be an employee. It's okay to like, you know, a great start is to 1099 up front and to try it out. But if you are somebody that's very controlling And you wanna be able to tell them when they can and can't come out of the office. Oregon's very much like Washington. It's very employee protective. So ⁓ very I always knew like if I am gonna start to tell somebody you have to be in the office from nine to five. For sure you can't tend any nine them. That's not gonna happen. They have to have full control over their schedule in our state and they have to be able to like, you know, come and go as they please and you can't say anything about it. And so, If you want to test what it's like, I think 1099 needs somebody is great to be able to like, you know, just have them as a contractor, try it out. Their overhead is less because you're not committed to a full time salary. You're not paying for their taxes. But yeah, exactly. So I think that in a lot of ways it's helpful, but also ⁓ not, you know, as you build, it's okay to like hire some employees and still like 1099 or do contract work as needed. I think ⁓ And a an ability to be agile as you're going and like address what you need, I think is critical. But I think ⁓ I think oftentimes ⁓ small business owners like really struggle with this idea of like, well, I need to hire everyone. It's like, no, sometimes you don't, you know. Sometimes you don't. And I think the other part of it that I realized is that the culture of ⁓ especially like my CAD team is ⁓ is somebody that is also small business owner, right? So sh her work ethic is very similar to my work ethic. Her like l she will support me in the same way that I need like that I want to show up for my business. So we've actually had good partnerships sometimes with working with external teams altogether. Right. So yeah I think there are creative ways to solve problems. I've when I started out, I used to use Upworks a lot and you know had freelance people do projects for me and That worked really well for a long time. I think when you're scaling and when you're at the place that we are with kind of projects that we have, it is hard. Like the client also wants to see continuity with the person and who who their person is. ⁓ some need to be employees, but I don't think everybody needs to be an employee on your team. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. Do you have any employees that have you gone through the process of like firing an employee or like how has that been ⁓ when you have like pain points with an employee. What's your what's your way of navigating that? I think that it is I am a very emotional person. So I get very detached. So I almost every time have had people stay six months to a year too long. Yeah. ⁓ you know, and I think that's every single time. And ⁓ Jocelyn, our my business manager will tell you that You know, she know the right she knew the writing was on the wall. She's told me six different times, but I will always drag my feet, drag my feet till it gets to a point where and usually the trigger for me is when something happens with a client or when it is external facing where I really feel like that was not good for our business. When it's an internal issue, I'm able to kind of put things in boxes and let it go. ⁓ I'm much more patient. I have a harder tolerance for what goes out and what my clients are seeing or experiencing. So that one was is really tough. But I do think that I hi h firing people is really tough, especially in our small businesses, because it does change the dynamic of the whole team. You may feel like there are there are issues, but as a team they get along, they have, you know, and it The same way that when you make a really great hire, overnight the team dynamic changes. The same thing with a bad one. Yep. And you can tell. Like literally there was a day, like there was a point of time where I would walk feel like I was walking into an office where the team was like negatively gossiping about me. Like I had that feeling and it was one employee. It was one employee. But I didn't think about that in that very isolated way. I thought of it like, ⁓ there, you know, what can I do to make this better for this one? And how can I fix it for this one? And every single time I think, like what your dad said to you, right? Fire fast. Like there is no need to drag this on because the longer you drag it on, the actually the messier it becomes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the one that I wish that I had done differently was I I hired an assistant who literally on day two I knew was not a good fit. And I let it go on to a point where it went on and on. And finally, she was she had a tantrum basically and left on a Thursday and didn't return. But I let it get there. And that I take upon myself, right? Like I don't now I feel like it is better to almost we are like getting into that 30 day review, 60 day review, 90 day review, but you don't have to wait for that 30 day. You're not obligated. It's an ad whatever it may be, it's an at will state. And if it's not working or it's not as advertised, walk away. I had an employee too that ⁓ we hired for office manager and procurement. And she started probably like the first week, I was like, definitely, this is not gonna work. And so I let it go, I let it go. And I just kept trying and trying, and the culture just kept getting worse and worse in the office. And then I finally was just like, I need to let this girl go. This is not. This is not gonna work. And so, ⁓ and then I've I've had probably three different employees that I've had to fire. And obviously the more you do it, the more you get comfortable with it. But the definitely the last two, it was like, this isn't working. Today is your last day. And they were just like shocked, like, ⁓ can I have a week or two to figure something out? And I'm like, Nope, I will happily pay you. You know, an extra week, but today is your last day in the office. And so I think that there is some there is something really good about that too, because I think trying to drag on after you know that it's ended is also very, very uncomfortable. Yeah. Well, it's just awkward for everyone. It's really bad. Yeah. No, I I agree. I think it's one of those things where if you know it's not working and it's gonna end, it's like Just better for everyone to just like let this happen, let them loose. And if you want to just to be kind or generous, give them a week or two, whatever. But like ⁓ move move on and just like have that be. I think the the ripping of the band-aid is better than like two weeks of I think too the one the one thing that I will say that we have implemented now after our experiences is that we have made it that the team has to every Friday update Google Drive. So Nobody is sitting on information and in like because that was a big problem, right? Like when you let go of somebody that's not for whatever reason, you still are then left the fear of like, ⁓ my God, now I'm gonna be left with this. bag of shit that I have to go through and dig and figure out. And so now we've kind of after our experiences, that's one of the things that we've implemented. And I kind of am the, you know, the teacher in the classroom that will s do a spot check on your folders. And if you're not updated, we'll you're kind of hearing about it. Because that does like when, you know, ⁓ I had to pull out a whole construction set, I knew a lot of the stuff she had worked on. But it was in her inbox in places that I didn't have access to. So that information asymmetry is a real problem and it's really an easy fix, but also helps when it's when you're in these situations where you're like, okay, at the very least, when I'm letting somebody go, I don't have to feel the stress or the burden of how do I do this offboarding process? How do I onboard somebody new for this project? Because the information at least is all centralized. All that to say, like in our case, we issue laptops and then we have everything obviously on Google Drive G Suite. But like I literally will be like, all right, today's your last day. Sorry to tell you. Like, hand your laptop in. And I have all the collaterals. So I'm just like, I've got your laptop, I have your password, I can reset your, you know, G Suite password to ours, and I just take all the data. ⁓ because yeah, I don't, I've never had anyone that I feel like would be like, Vengeful or delete it, but I also like I want it. You don't want you don't want that. You don't want that. Yeah. Yes, yes. I will wrap this up by asking any quick tips for other designers, small business owners that you would just like like to impart on others as they continue on the journey of hiring and growing and scaling? I think that There's a couple things that if you could find somebody that can help you in this journey, like if you find a recruiter, if you find people that you feel like are trusted sources, ⁓ lean on that because they have expertise in the area that they are working in. So that's a good, ⁓ good partnership and a that money well spent. Totally. Also, if like, you know, the employee doesn't work out, she still is gets me somebody else to take that spot. So it is there there is like a little bit more of a guarantee of ⁓ the having success there. ⁓ if you find somebody that you feel really well ⁓ connected with and can really help support you. I think the other part of it that I I would say is don't look at archetypes of design firms. Really dig into what you love to do, what you want to outsource, what is the stuff that feels like you want to hold on to, what you want to let go of, and hire based on what those needs are and what meets those needs. Rather than trying to build an architect of an interior design firm, which is senior designer, junior designer, ⁓ you know, proc procurement, maybe, maybe not. So I think that that's another one. I think really building for what you need and what you're personally like to hold on to and what you want to let go of. Yeah. I love that. Well, ⁓ Saba, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for sharing about this journey. ⁓ I so appreciate your willingness to like give us a window into employees, what worked, what didn't work, and we look forward to kind of watching you continue to grow and thrive in your journey. And we will thank you. ⁓ we will be putting your business, your website, your socials all in the show notes. So if anyone wants to reach you, then they know where they can find you. But other than that, I will say thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to chatting with you again soon. Yeah, talk to you soon. Awesome things. We're dreamers. Don't care what other people say. We live it like this could be a fun day. We're dreamers.