Business of Home Magazine
Next Exit
Do you dream of selling your design firm someday?
Here’s how to lay a foundation for future succession or acquisition.
BY FRED NICOLAUS
This March, the New York School of Interior Design held its annual gala—a yearly chance to see your favorite industry stars in formal attire—at The University Club in midtown Manhattan. The venue, a grand Beaux Arts mansion, was originally built in 1899. That evening, guests feted a design institution only a handful of decades younger: McMillen, the venerable New York firm founded 100 years ago.
McMillen’s president, Ann Pyne—only the third to lead the firm—gave a speech that looked back philosophically on a full century in business. The company, she pointed out, has “decorated for clients who grew up without electricity or an automobile.”
That kind of longevity is impressive. It’s also lonely: Precious few American interior design firms have lasted as long. Most don’t even come close, simply fading away when the founder retires or moves on to another pursuit. The industry may remember great names like Elsie de Wolfe, Billy Baldwin or Mario Buatta, but clients aren’t hiring their
LLCs to renovate a house in Sag Harbor. When I asked one well-known designer to share his strategy on succession with me, he laughed and said: “Live forever.”
To be blunt, successfully passing on a design firm to a new owner doesn’t happen that often. There are green shoots of progress on that front (more on that later), but it’s worth taking a moment to understand why it’s so difficult for designers to hand over the reins—or sell them, for that matter.
When you dive into the weeds of the succession process, you can quickly become ensnared in a thicket of business jargon—EBITDA, buyout clauses, liquidity preferences and the like. All of that is important. But for a business to change hands, two things have to happen simultaneously: Someone has to want to let it go, and someone has to want to pick it up. Both are tough in the design industry.
Most of the chatter about the challenges of succession is focused on the difficulty of finding a buyer. Though design is a brisk cocktail of project management, logistics and therapy, it’s also very much a creative business—and creative businesses are notoriously difficult to hand down. (There’s a reason car dealerships are easily bought and
sold, but Picasso didn’t pass on his painting operation.) And though design firms can be collaborative, democratic workplaces, they tend to be top-heavy: Much of the firm’s brand value—and, crucially, many of the lucrative client relationships—is concentrated with the principal. When they walk out the door, what’s left to buy?
If there’s no son or daughter waiting in the wings, the pool of potential successors can also be fairly shallow. Most designers start by looking at their team—that strategy certainly can work, but it’s far from a given. Most employees at design firms can be loosely sorted into one of two camps: People who are happy to work in the industry but have no desire to run a firm, and those who are dreaming of putting up their own shingle one day. Neither makes for an ideal buyer.
In this day and age, the latter group of self-starters is more empowered than ever. “Social media absolutely plays a role,” says Gail Doby, a designer turned business coach and co-founder of Pearl Collective, a company that provides advisory services to interior designers. “We’ve got a generation of young people in the industry who grew up in the digital world. They’re very tech-savvy, and that makes it easier to go out on your own.”
As challenging as it might be to find a buyer, designers often make for imperfect sellers. Some of that is emotional—it can be difficult to let go of a business as personal as a design firm—but more commonly, it’s the reality that, like other creative professionals, such as artists or writers, lots of designers continue working because they can and want to. Many simply scale down their firms, only work with their favorite clients, and keep going. “A lot of people will stay in this business into their 70s,” says Doby. “It’s not unusual at all to see that.”
Sometimes there’s simple bad luck that sinks the promising prospect of succession. In 2016, the celebrated New York designer David Kleinberg announced an ambitious pivot: He was renaming his firm to David Kleinberg Design Associates, elevating five of his employees to partner status, and implementing a plan to gradually hand off
equity in the firm.
For Kleinberg, the plan was personal. A former employee of the iconic Parish-Hadley firm, he had seen what a failure to develop a succession plan looked like up close. “It was talked about, certainly,” he says. “But the two of them had varied ideas about it, and it just never happened.” Sister Parish died in 1994; Albert Hadley passed away in 2012, and with him, what was left of the firm.
But getting a head start on the succession process doesn’t always make it easy. Some of Kleinberg’s partners ended up leaving for personal reasons—a marriage that took one to another part of the country, for example. And when the pandemic hit, it accelerated the departures. Like many at the time, Kleinberg’s partners were all reevaluating their life choices, pondering new moves, and looking to shake things up. By 2022, all of them had left.
“It’s possible I started this process too early, before I myself was ready to step away, and that didn’t convey the right message,” says Kleinberg. “But the truth is that I think a lot of it was just timing. The pandemic changed everything, and it happened before the partnership really had a chance to mature. I’ll never know what would have happened if
Covid hadn’t come along.” Either way, says Kleinberg, he’s done trying to make succession work: “I’m not going to do it again.”
Next Exit
Do you dream of selling your design firm someday?
Here’s how to lay a foundation for future succession or acquisition.
BY FRED NICOLAUS
This March, the New York School of Interior Design held its annual gala—a yearly chance to see your favorite industry stars in formal attire—at The University Club in midtown Manhattan. The venue, a grand Beaux Arts mansion, was originally built in 1899. That evening, guests feted a design institution only a handful of decades younger: McMillen, the venerable New York firm founded 100 years ago.
McMillen’s president, Ann Pyne—only the third to lead the firm—gave a speech that looked back philosophically on a full century in business. The company, she pointed out, has “decorated for clients who grew up without electricity or an automobile.”
That kind of longevity is impressive. It’s also lonely: Precious few American interior design firms have lasted as long. Most don’t even come close, simply fading away when the founder retires or moves on to another pursuit. The industry may remember great names like Elsie de Wolfe, Billy Baldwin or Mario Buatta, but clients aren’t hiring their
LLCs to renovate a house in Sag Harbor. When I asked one well-known designer to share his strategy on succession with me, he laughed and said: “Live forever.”
To be blunt, successfully passing on a design firm to a new owner doesn’t happen that often. There are green shoots of progress on that front (more on that later), but it’s worth taking a moment to understand why it’s so difficult for designers to hand over the reins—or sell them, for that matter.
When you dive into the weeds of the succession process, you can quickly become ensnared in a thicket of business jargon—EBITDA, buyout clauses, liquidity preferences and the like. All of that is important. But for a business to change hands, two things have to happen simultaneously: Someone has to want to let it go, and someone has to want to pick it up. Both are tough in the design industry.
Most of the chatter about the challenges of succession is focused on the difficulty of finding a buyer. Though design is a brisk cocktail of project management, logistics and therapy, it’s also very much a creative business—and creative businesses are notoriously difficult to hand down. (There’s a reason car dealerships are easily bought and
sold, but Picasso didn’t pass on his painting operation.) And though design firms can be collaborative, democratic workplaces, they tend to be top-heavy: Much of the firm’s brand value—and, crucially, many of the lucrative client relationships—is concentrated with the principal. When they walk out the door, what’s left to buy?
If there’s no son or daughter waiting in the wings, the pool of potential successors can also be fairly shallow. Most designers start by looking at their team—that strategy certainly can work, but it’s far from a given. Most employees at design firms can be loosely sorted into one of two camps: People who are happy to work in the industry but have no desire to run a firm, and those who are dreaming of putting up their own shingle one day. Neither makes for an ideal buyer.
In this day and age, the latter group of self-starters is more empowered than ever. “Social media absolutely plays a role,” says Gail Doby, a designer turned business coach and co-founder of Pearl Collective, a company that provides advisory services to interior designers. “We’ve got a generation of young people in the industry who grew up in the digital world. They’re very tech-savvy, and that makes it easier to go out on your own.”
As challenging as it might be to find a buyer, designers often make for imperfect sellers. Some of that is emotional—it can be difficult to let go of a business as personal as a design firm—but more commonly, it’s the reality that, like other creative professionals, such as artists or writers, lots of designers continue working because they can and want to. Many simply scale down their firms, only work with their favorite clients, and keep going. “A lot of people will stay in this business into their 70s,” says Doby. “It’s not unusual at all to see that.”
Sometimes there’s simple bad luck that sinks the promising prospect of succession. In 2016, the celebrated New York designer David Kleinberg announced an ambitious pivot: He was renaming his firm to David Kleinberg Design Associates, elevating five of his employees to partner status, and implementing a plan to gradually hand off
equity in the firm.
For Kleinberg, the plan was personal. A former employee of the iconic Parish-Hadley firm, he had seen what a failure to develop a succession plan looked like up close. “It was talked about, certainly,” he says. “But the two of them had varied ideas about it, and it just never happened.” Sister Parish died in 1994; Albert Hadley passed away in 2012, and with him, what was left of the firm.
But getting a head start on the succession process doesn’t always make it easy. Some of Kleinberg’s partners ended up leaving for personal reasons—a marriage that took one to another part of the country, for example. And when the pandemic hit, it accelerated the departures. Like many at the time, Kleinberg’s partners were all reevaluating their life choices, pondering new moves, and looking to shake things up. By 2022, all of them had left.
“It’s possible I started this process too early, before I myself was ready to step away, and that didn’t convey the right message,” says Kleinberg. “But the truth is that I think a lot of it was just timing. The pandemic changed everything, and it happened before the partnership really had a chance to mature. I’ll never know what would have happened if
Covid hadn’t come along.” Either way, says Kleinberg, he’s done trying to make succession work: “I’m not going to do it again.”
In 2003, Patti Julber founded a design firm in Bend, Oregon. Though she didn’t know any other designers who
had successfully sold their businesses, she knew it would happen for her one day. “It was probably magical thinking on my part—I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought, ‘I’ll figure it out when I get there,’” she recalls with a laugh.
Initially she planned to turn it around quickly and get out in five years. The 2008 recession threw a wrench in that plan, and Julber found herself repeatedly coming up with reasons to stick around a bit longer. But by 2018, she reached the endpoint. It was time, at long last, to make her exit.
Initially, Julber hired a business broker to oversee the process, but it didn’t yield any credible offers. Then, like many, she considered her own employees as possible buyers, but none was ultimately in a financial position to take on the risk. Then she started looking further afield, hiring acquisitions advisor [s Becky Smith and] Marty Fahncke of the Kansas-based firm Westbound Road to help her package and sell Complements Home Interiors. The process, which ultimately stretched nearly five years [Correction 2 years], was not without hiccups.
“Early on, there were a lot of offers that were just not right. There was one person who—I’ll call her semi-serious but fully crazy—believed in her heart I was just going to give her the business,” says Julber. “Between 2022 and 2023, there were seven people interested in buying it, and one guy got within 10 days of closing, but interest rates went high. A lot of it was timing.”
In the end, however, she successfully sold her firm. A local entrepreneur with a home-building company expressed interest, and working with [Smith and] Fahncke, Julber put together a deal. In 2023, she signed on the dotted line, handed over the keys to the office and walked away. Twenty years after entering the field, she had gotten the exit she dreamed of.
It would be wrong to say that Julber is part of a great wave of designers who are successfully selling their firms. But in recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests that the industry is starting to make progress on its long-running succession problem. Part of it may simply be a numbers game: There are a lot more designers now than ever before, so it’s only natural that some of them are figuring it out.
“I think it goes along with the ‘silver tsunami’ [the aging of the baby boomer generation],” says Doby, who helped coach Julber through the sales process. “I’ve been doing this for about 17 years, and I would tell you that it’s only in the last three or so that I’ve seen transactions happening. I think we’ll see this accelerating just because there’s
so many people getting older.”
The evolution of the internet, as well as the shifting winds of entrepreneurial culture, has likely played a role as well. Thirty years ago, identifying a buyer involved tapping connections and working the phones. It still does take effort, but online, there are more ways for buyers and sellers to connect. “There’s a big shift in the entrepreneurship world toward what’s called ETA, or entrepreneurship through acquisition,” says Fahncke. “People are coming to realize that there are a lot of built-in advantages to buying [an existing] business instead of starting one from scratch. Nine out of 10 startups fail. But nine out of 10 acquisitions succeed, because they’re already established.”
The internet has changed something else too: It’s given designers another asset to sell. Though a firm’s true worth comes from the work it does for clients, a popular Instagram account and a website that ranks highly in Google searches are valuable marketing tools that can figure into a potential deal. “If you start a new firm, you’re going to be way back in the Google listings,” says Doby. “If you buy a firm that already has good search positioning, it can be a huge advantage.”
There is no formula for selling a firm. But both Doby and Fahncke say that in the handful of acquisitions they’ve helped designers execute, a few patterns have emerged for successful transactions. One is obvious but worth repeating: It’s a lot harder to pass along a firm named after its principal. “Jane Smith Design” will always be a tougher sell than “Oak Interiors.”
That simple fact speaks to a deeper truth: You can’t sell your firm if it’s all about you. “If you’re everything in the business, and you leave, then there’s no business,” says Doby. “Get up-to-date contracts with clients, makesure you have agreements with employees, have policies and procedures, and get things documented. You’re also far more likely to be able to sell your business if you have a leadership team that can make decisions.”
Creating a leadership team, or elevating designers in your firm to leadership roles, comes with an additional bonus: You’re grooming possible buyers. Even if employees don’t always make the best buyers, they’re often the best place to start. “As a whole, employees don’t understand what it takes to run a business until you show them,” says Doby. “Your leadership team needs access to the books and to understand the financials, and they’ll become more invested.”
It’s also helpful to shift your marketing approach as you prep a firm for sale. In design, the best clients typically come from referrals and personal connections, which can be a challenging model to package and sell. There are workarounds—a common tactic is to set up an agreement whereby after the principal leaves, they can earn a fee or passing on leads to the firm. However, tactics like streamlining the way a website generates new business make a firm more attractive to potential buyers.
Another must-have: clean finances. “A lot of designers make the mistake of commingling their firm’s finances with their own— they’ll spend money out of the business accounts for personal things,” says Doby. “That really does dilute what you’re actually doing in your business. Everything has to be well documented, and you need good data, because you’re going to have to open up everything that you’re doing to the buyer.”
Finally, it’s time for the million-dollar question (potentially): How much is your business worth? Unsurprisingly, there’s no formula, but there are a few guidelines to keep in mind. The first is understanding whether a firm is even sellable on the open market. Fahncke. for example, specializes in advising businesses that generate anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in revenue, but he says $1 million isn’t a hard-and-fast minimum.“There’s flexibility to it. It’s just that at $1 million in annual revenue, you probably have a team in place,” he says. “You could be doing less [in annual revenue] and still have a lot of the things that would make your business sellable. … [But] if you’re a one-person shop with their name on the door, that’s not sellable.”
While revenue is a good proxy for the overall size of a business, it doesn’t determine how much it’s worth.“People often come to me convinced that valuation is based on revenue, and it’s not,” says Fahncke. “It’s going to be valued much more on profit.” A reasonable ballpark, he adds, is to assume that a business might fetch anywhere from two to five times its annual profit. (His firm also charges would-be sellers an upfront fee and a cut of the sale, which ends up totaling roughly 10 percent of the overall deal.)
“If you’re thinking about selling, tell your accountant: ‘I want to make the most money possible, profit-wise, even if I take a hit on taxes, because for every dollar I pay the IRS, I’m going to make three dollars in value on the other side of a sale," says Fahncke.
There are plenty of other complications, and seemingly endless reasons why a business might be worth more or less to a potential buyer. Another twist comes from the way acquisitions are often financed: Many would-be design firm buyers don’t have the cash on hand to purchase a business outright and end up taking out a Small Business Administration loan. Just as mortgage lenders determine how much they’ll lend a homebuyer based on their own appraisal of the property, the SBA has strict rules about how it will structure a business loan. “You may come up with a valuation you think is fair for your business, and the buyer might think it’s fair too,” says Fahncke. “But if the SBA won’t lend on that value, they need to explore other financing methods or the deal goes out the window."
had successfully sold their businesses, she knew it would happen for her one day. “It was probably magical thinking on my part—I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought, ‘I’ll figure it out when I get there,’” she recalls with a laugh.
Initially she planned to turn it around quickly and get out in five years. The 2008 recession threw a wrench in that plan, and Julber found herself repeatedly coming up with reasons to stick around a bit longer. But by 2018, she reached the endpoint. It was time, at long last, to make her exit.
Initially, Julber hired a business broker to oversee the process, but it didn’t yield any credible offers. Then, like many, she considered her own employees as possible buyers, but none was ultimately in a financial position to take on the risk. Then she started looking further afield, hiring acquisitions advisor [s Becky Smith and] Marty Fahncke of the Kansas-based firm Westbound Road to help her package and sell Complements Home Interiors. The process, which ultimately stretched nearly five years [Correction 2 years], was not without hiccups.
“Early on, there were a lot of offers that were just not right. There was one person who—I’ll call her semi-serious but fully crazy—believed in her heart I was just going to give her the business,” says Julber. “Between 2022 and 2023, there were seven people interested in buying it, and one guy got within 10 days of closing, but interest rates went high. A lot of it was timing.”
In the end, however, she successfully sold her firm. A local entrepreneur with a home-building company expressed interest, and working with [Smith and] Fahncke, Julber put together a deal. In 2023, she signed on the dotted line, handed over the keys to the office and walked away. Twenty years after entering the field, she had gotten the exit she dreamed of.
It would be wrong to say that Julber is part of a great wave of designers who are successfully selling their firms. But in recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests that the industry is starting to make progress on its long-running succession problem. Part of it may simply be a numbers game: There are a lot more designers now than ever before, so it’s only natural that some of them are figuring it out.
“I think it goes along with the ‘silver tsunami’ [the aging of the baby boomer generation],” says Doby, who helped coach Julber through the sales process. “I’ve been doing this for about 17 years, and I would tell you that it’s only in the last three or so that I’ve seen transactions happening. I think we’ll see this accelerating just because there’s
so many people getting older.”
The evolution of the internet, as well as the shifting winds of entrepreneurial culture, has likely played a role as well. Thirty years ago, identifying a buyer involved tapping connections and working the phones. It still does take effort, but online, there are more ways for buyers and sellers to connect. “There’s a big shift in the entrepreneurship world toward what’s called ETA, or entrepreneurship through acquisition,” says Fahncke. “People are coming to realize that there are a lot of built-in advantages to buying [an existing] business instead of starting one from scratch. Nine out of 10 startups fail. But nine out of 10 acquisitions succeed, because they’re already established.”
The internet has changed something else too: It’s given designers another asset to sell. Though a firm’s true worth comes from the work it does for clients, a popular Instagram account and a website that ranks highly in Google searches are valuable marketing tools that can figure into a potential deal. “If you start a new firm, you’re going to be way back in the Google listings,” says Doby. “If you buy a firm that already has good search positioning, it can be a huge advantage.”
There is no formula for selling a firm. But both Doby and Fahncke say that in the handful of acquisitions they’ve helped designers execute, a few patterns have emerged for successful transactions. One is obvious but worth repeating: It’s a lot harder to pass along a firm named after its principal. “Jane Smith Design” will always be a tougher sell than “Oak Interiors.”
That simple fact speaks to a deeper truth: You can’t sell your firm if it’s all about you. “If you’re everything in the business, and you leave, then there’s no business,” says Doby. “Get up-to-date contracts with clients, makesure you have agreements with employees, have policies and procedures, and get things documented. You’re also far more likely to be able to sell your business if you have a leadership team that can make decisions.”
Creating a leadership team, or elevating designers in your firm to leadership roles, comes with an additional bonus: You’re grooming possible buyers. Even if employees don’t always make the best buyers, they’re often the best place to start. “As a whole, employees don’t understand what it takes to run a business until you show them,” says Doby. “Your leadership team needs access to the books and to understand the financials, and they’ll become more invested.”
It’s also helpful to shift your marketing approach as you prep a firm for sale. In design, the best clients typically come from referrals and personal connections, which can be a challenging model to package and sell. There are workarounds—a common tactic is to set up an agreement whereby after the principal leaves, they can earn a fee or passing on leads to the firm. However, tactics like streamlining the way a website generates new business make a firm more attractive to potential buyers.
Another must-have: clean finances. “A lot of designers make the mistake of commingling their firm’s finances with their own— they’ll spend money out of the business accounts for personal things,” says Doby. “That really does dilute what you’re actually doing in your business. Everything has to be well documented, and you need good data, because you’re going to have to open up everything that you’re doing to the buyer.”
Finally, it’s time for the million-dollar question (potentially): How much is your business worth? Unsurprisingly, there’s no formula, but there are a few guidelines to keep in mind. The first is understanding whether a firm is even sellable on the open market. Fahncke. for example, specializes in advising businesses that generate anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in revenue, but he says $1 million isn’t a hard-and-fast minimum.“There’s flexibility to it. It’s just that at $1 million in annual revenue, you probably have a team in place,” he says. “You could be doing less [in annual revenue] and still have a lot of the things that would make your business sellable. … [But] if you’re a one-person shop with their name on the door, that’s not sellable.”
While revenue is a good proxy for the overall size of a business, it doesn’t determine how much it’s worth.“People often come to me convinced that valuation is based on revenue, and it’s not,” says Fahncke. “It’s going to be valued much more on profit.” A reasonable ballpark, he adds, is to assume that a business might fetch anywhere from two to five times its annual profit. (His firm also charges would-be sellers an upfront fee and a cut of the sale, which ends up totaling roughly 10 percent of the overall deal.)
“If you’re thinking about selling, tell your accountant: ‘I want to make the most money possible, profit-wise, even if I take a hit on taxes, because for every dollar I pay the IRS, I’m going to make three dollars in value on the other side of a sale," says Fahncke.
There are plenty of other complications, and seemingly endless reasons why a business might be worth more or less to a potential buyer. Another twist comes from the way acquisitions are often financed: Many would-be design firm buyers don’t have the cash on hand to purchase a business outright and end up taking out a Small Business Administration loan. Just as mortgage lenders determine how much they’ll lend a homebuyer based on their own appraisal of the property, the SBA has strict rules about how it will structure a business loan. “You may come up with a valuation you think is fair for your business, and the buyer might think it’s fair too,” says Fahncke. “But if the SBA won’t lend on that value, they need to explore other financing methods or the deal goes out the window."
Selling your business is one thing. Setting it up to succeed for the long haul is another—one that takes a lot of time to play out. Finding out whether a design firm can last a century? Well, it takes a century. Many of the deals Fahncke and Doby have overseen are only a few years old. Several of the industry’s high-profile succession cases—Caleb Anderson taking over Jamie Drake’s firm, or Elizabeth Lawrence doing the same at Bunny Williams’s design business—are still in process. But there are examples of a successful transition with some miles on the road.
Jeremiah Young is a case in point. In the aughts, the Tennessee-born designer and his wife moved to Billings, Montana, where they ran a clothing boutique. Young had always admired a retail shop and design firm called
Kibler & Kirch, a business founded in 1990 by local designers Rosina Kastelitz and Erica Hash. “It just had this incredible soul, and a real point of view, and I felt such a connection with it,” he recalls.
In 2010, Kastelitz and Hash, exhausted by the ravages of the recession, were looking to get out. “I just happened to have a conversation with them at the time, about how there had to be someone who could buy this business,” recalls Young. “Pretty soon, I realized it was going to be me.” With some help from family, he purchased the remaining inventory and the brand name, and took over Kibler & Kirch. Fourteen years later, he’s opening up a brand-new location in Billings and the firm is working on design projects across the West.
Young is happy with the outcome but admits that taking over a business has its unique struggles. There were processes to learn from the outside in, problems to solve, and relationships to build. When you inherit a business, he notes, you also inherit its culture—and, crucially, there is payroll to meet on day one. “People talk about owning
a business as working for yourself,” he says. “But really it ends up being that you’re working for a lot of people.”
There are challenges on the other side of the equation too. Though Julber happily sold Complements Home Interiors, the post-exit process had some unexpected twists. Following the sale, she offered to coach the new owner on how to run the business for a few months. It didn’t happen. “I came in to give him the keys to the office,
and right away he was like, ‘Great, bye,’” she says. “Since I’ve left, he’s entirely changed the business model.”
One of the often unexpected elements of selling a business is that owners get so wrapped up in the sales process that what comes next is overlooked. It’s hard enough to get an exit—but once you do, being on the outside can be tough in its own way. “I tell people it’s like a divorce, or like sending your kids off to college,” says Julber. “There’s
a grieving process you have to go through.”
For all the difficulties, selling a business can be both financially and personally rewarding. Julber is happy to be free from the day-to-day demands of difficult clients and job-site snafus—she now works with Doby’s firm, Pearl Collective, as a coach for designers who may be considering their own exit. “I have zero regrets,” she says. “It was
hard, but it was worth it.”
Jeremiah Young is a case in point. In the aughts, the Tennessee-born designer and his wife moved to Billings, Montana, where they ran a clothing boutique. Young had always admired a retail shop and design firm called
Kibler & Kirch, a business founded in 1990 by local designers Rosina Kastelitz and Erica Hash. “It just had this incredible soul, and a real point of view, and I felt such a connection with it,” he recalls.
In 2010, Kastelitz and Hash, exhausted by the ravages of the recession, were looking to get out. “I just happened to have a conversation with them at the time, about how there had to be someone who could buy this business,” recalls Young. “Pretty soon, I realized it was going to be me.” With some help from family, he purchased the remaining inventory and the brand name, and took over Kibler & Kirch. Fourteen years later, he’s opening up a brand-new location in Billings and the firm is working on design projects across the West.
Young is happy with the outcome but admits that taking over a business has its unique struggles. There were processes to learn from the outside in, problems to solve, and relationships to build. When you inherit a business, he notes, you also inherit its culture—and, crucially, there is payroll to meet on day one. “People talk about owning
a business as working for yourself,” he says. “But really it ends up being that you’re working for a lot of people.”
There are challenges on the other side of the equation too. Though Julber happily sold Complements Home Interiors, the post-exit process had some unexpected twists. Following the sale, she offered to coach the new owner on how to run the business for a few months. It didn’t happen. “I came in to give him the keys to the office,
and right away he was like, ‘Great, bye,’” she says. “Since I’ve left, he’s entirely changed the business model.”
One of the often unexpected elements of selling a business is that owners get so wrapped up in the sales process that what comes next is overlooked. It’s hard enough to get an exit—but once you do, being on the outside can be tough in its own way. “I tell people it’s like a divorce, or like sending your kids off to college,” says Julber. “There’s
a grieving process you have to go through.”
For all the difficulties, selling a business can be both financially and personally rewarding. Julber is happy to be free from the day-to-day demands of difficult clients and job-site snafus—she now works with Doby’s firm, Pearl Collective, as a coach for designers who may be considering their own exit. “I have zero regrets,” she says. “It was
hard, but it was worth it.”
Resources:
Business of Home Magazine
businessofhome.com/boh/bohwinter25
Pearl Collective
https://thepearlcollective.com/
Business of Home Magazine
businessofhome.com/boh/bohwinter25
Pearl Collective
https://thepearlcollective.com/