Adam Scougall - So You Want to Be an Interior Designer?

·35 min·2 clips

Adam says only four or five full project days now need him, because he built a 12-to-15-step process.

Adam's path does not follow the tidy career myth. Jane introduces him as someone she has worked with for years, then keeps the focus on the long arc of his career, from 18 years of peer-to-peer design work to the point where interior design became a full-time experiment. He left in 2018. For three and a half years, he ran his own design business full-time, taking on a wide range of clients and learning quickly which jobs fed the creative side of the work and which ones only kept the bills moving. That balance became hard. He says that taking work just to make ends meet stopped feeling sustainable, especially with financial pressure and the drag of work that did not feel rewarding. So he came back. The return to corporate life comes across less like a retreat and more like a redesign, because he now has a leadership role again while still keeping a growing interior design side business alive. That side business matters. Jane asks how he makes the two tracks work together, and Adam answers with a system built around planning, delegation, and a clearer sense of where his time actually changes the outcome. He looks backward first. Before building the current setup, he reviewed what had worked before he left, noticed the role of outside help, and used coaching to break the delivery process down into the handful of full days when he truly needs to be present. That changed the structure. Instead of trying to carry every part of each project himself, he now brings in full-time designers for blocks of hours, works out when they need to be on site, and keeps the practical details documented. Computer-aided design helps. The episode shows how careful planning and clear records can make a creative business feel lighter, because the work is no longer dependent on one person improvising everything in real time. Jane stays coach-like. She keeps translating Adam's choices into a broader lesson for listeners who may be thinking about starting with a side project, testing demand, or redesigning a career instead of forcing a dramatic break. The tone stays warm. The conversation closes with gratitude, a nod to an upcoming launch, and a promise of another check-in once the next chapter has had time to unfold.

As heard by us

A grounded look at reshaping a creative career around a workable balance.

Adam Schugel's move from corporate leadership to a solo interior design business, and then back into corporate work with design as a side project, gives the episode its real appeal.

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Why you'd press play

You want a real-world way to keep interior design and steady corporate work in play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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