Getting StudioEn Ready with Nicole Kell
As I stepped into Cafe Francais, my eyes dashed around the room, searching for Nicole and a quiet spot as the hum of conversations rang through the air. I found a perfect and recently vacated seat that I quickly snagged with my bag and settled in. I have to say, nothing beats a caffeinated conversation with another mom, so my afternoon was off to a great start as she waltzed in.
I was excited to chat with Nicole Kell, co-owner of StudioEn, on how she manages to make time for design projects despite the demands of parenting her daughter. She had some insightful advice for mothers looking to become entrepreneurs. Nicole Kell and her team’s amazing transformation of spaces has created beautiful and cohesive interiors for spaces in the community.
I trust you will enjoy our conversation…
Q: What is your pocket of sunshine?
Nicole Kell: That’s interesting. I love what I do, designing and my daughter, and I’m doing a hundred things all the time. I work out six days a week. But that’s more for mental clarity, mental awareness. It allows you to breathe, but that’s more of a mental thing. It’s not necessarily spiritual. So I’d say that going to church on Sunday is when my soul is the happiest because it’s almost the only time I take to look inward and reflect. I would like to be able to meditate more. I just can’t get my brain in a state of calmness during the week because you’re always thinking about all the other things I could do, or I’m sleeping. I could sleep almost anywhere, anytime. That’s a skill.
Q: That is a skill. Interesting, so what’s meditation for you?
Nicole Kell: Yes. When I was pregnant, I did hypnobirthing and had to meditate every night because it is all about being in your own body during labour. It’s the most I’ve ever meditated, and it was the best I’ve ever felt.
Q: Could you explain more about hypnobirthing?
Nicole Kell: Essentially, it’s just allowing your body to do what it does, and instead of thinking it hurts, it’s more feeling the process instead of feeling the pain about it. It’s just a different way of looking at it, and it works so well that they left me in the triage rooms for seven hours while I was in labour because they didn’t think that I was progressing. Then finally, they checked me, and I was seven centimetres, and they’re just like, “Oh my gosh, you need to get in a room now.” Next time I might pretend to be in pain.
Q: What’s your journey to entrepreneurship? How did you start? Is this your first entrepreneurial adventure?
Nicole Kell: Yes, it is. My business partner and I worked for different architecture firms for about 10-plus years. Then I got pregnant, and essentially her father was like, “Well, you can’t go back to working 14 hours a day and making no money. You just need to start your own business.” The more I thought about it, I was like, “Yes, yes, I do.” Throughout the maternity leave, I started researching what that would mean and getting my business partner on board, and then we never looked back.
Q: How did you and your business partner meet?
Nicole Kell: Industry events. We were at competing firms, but through the IDAS, Interior Designers Association of Saskatchewan events. We just met at those.
Q: What made you commit to working with this partner? Why was she the one you wanted to do this with?
Nicole Kell: One, I don’t want to do it by myself. What we do it’s too collaborative. You must talk through issues, and it’s all about problem-solving. I just don’t know how people problem-solve by themselves on a daily basis because it is better when you have two brains looking at it from different directions. And she’s the yin to my yang, we are very different, but we have the same common goals. We both look at them, look at the same goal from different perspectives, and it works well.
Q: What would you recommend for a support system to help other women who want to be entrepreneurs as well as mothers?
Nicole Kell: Well, my daughter’s father and I have a healthy co-parenting relationship. I think number one, you must be able to raise your kid with someone in whatever fashion that looks like. I see people with kids, and they’re together and shouldn’t be, which looks terrible. They agree on nothing, and I see co-parenting people, but they also don’t get along, which looks terrible. We both love our daughter, and we both care about each other.
Step one, have a good support system for your children because if you are worried about your kids all the time, you can’t build anything because guilt is a stronger emotion for women. Women put guilt in front of purpose. We have a purpose, and internally, it’s a very strong feeling, but life tells you, well, you should do this, and you should do that. Guilt will always trump it. Not because it’s stronger, but because life is telling you it should be more important or somehow that guilt is your way of saying you are doing something wrong. But it’s not. It’s just other people’s ideas of what your life should look like. You either work late, go home and hang out with your kids, or don’t finish the project that day because you’re going to the dance recital. You always must give something up but knowing that deadlines are fluid, your kid will never be three again. I think it’s also okay that things take longer than you want them to.
Q: You have spoken about having a great partner to raise a child. Is there any other thing you can think about? Your parents? Friends?
Nicole Kell: My mom is my reason for everything, for sure. She’s my rock. After high school, I went backpacking by myself, and all my friend’s parents were like, “We’re so glad you’re not our kid.” My mom’s like, “When can I come to visit you?” Or I did my undergrad in Halifax, and my master’s in the Netherlands. I’ve been gone out of the province or out of the country for eight years. Then coming back was eye-opening, but I came back and got three job offers in a week. Sometimes life just tells you this is where you should be, even if it’s not where you want to be.
My mom is a huge support system, and then having a business partner that you can have hard conversations with because there are lots of hard conversations and being honest and able to be who you are because we are very different. If we weren’t open about how the other person makes us feel in certain situations, I don’t know that it would work as well. We’ve had those, and now we’re aware of each other’s differences and how that makes them valuable.
We lucked out because both grandmas took turns watching her up until last week she started preschool. She is enjoying it and likes to hang out with the kids. We still don’t have to pay for daycare; I have many amazing friends who are always open to babysitting. I have never asked any of them too, because I haven’t needed it.
Q: Healthy partner, mom, good business partner. Is there anything else?
Nicole Kell: Well, we were in the industry for ten years, so we had lots of business partners, and lots of people knew who we were. We had good relationships with engineers, which is important for architectural service. Certain clients. We got a big client early on because of our previous work. One of my favourite quotes is, “It took me ten years to become an overnight success.” That idea is that you can’t be successful if you don’t put the work in before. You’ll never feel fully ready to jump into doing something on your own. But having the background, knowledge, and expertise needed to do your job is super important. Otherwise, you could flounder because there are months where you’re just like, “What the hell are we doing, and where’s work going to come?” The City of Regina is word-of-mouth driven. It’s a small, big city. Who you know is also very important, as being able to get in front of people, talk to strangers, tell your story, being passionate about what you do. Don’t start a business if you hate the work.
Q: Is there a book or movie with huge significance or meaning in your life as you strive to achieve the impossible feat of balance?
Nicole Kell: The Brene Brown, Rising Strong. She’s writing a bunch of books on vulnerability and what that means. It’s more about failure and how to manage failure and to look at failure not as something negative but as part of life and necessary to grow. If you don’t try anything new, you will never fail. You’ll never succeed, either. You need failure for success. They are not mutually exclusive. You can’t have success without trying things first. It’s about being vulnerable and the strength and vulnerability, not looking at it as a weakness. Still, you must have a lot of courage, self-respect, and confidence to be vulnerable in any situation. That’s huge for me.
Q: Do you wear many hats in your business? If yes, which do you love the most? Which takes most of your time, and which would you trade in a heartbeat?
Nicole Kell: When starting our company, we talked a lot about the idea of wearing lots of hats or hiring people to do what they’re good at. Of course, you have to do everything for the first year. But now we’ve hired a business manager to do the accounting and bookkeeping. We’re slowly moving more to her role to focus on the projects and finding clients. The marketing strategy when we first started. We thought we’d hire a technologist first, someone to do the drawings for us. Then, we realized that’s not the part we struggle with the most. The part we struggle with is the business part of it because they don’t teach you that in school. We just found somebody who could fill the gaps we weren’t good at. You will always wear many hats, but we are designers first and then marketing second because our company is really us. We don’t sell a product, we sell us. The experience of designing a space with us is our service. We are the company. I don’t think we could ever fully step away from marketing. Hopefully, we will get into larger projects, and then hiring an architect or a technologist would make sense because they can do the drafting, and then we could focus on more client interface. But I also think it looks like how you break down a day and drafting it is not mindless by any way, but it uses a different part of your brain. You can only be “on” for so many hours of the day until your brain’s like, I can’t talk to another human if my life depended on it. But I can draft or do things on the computer because it’s more of an inward reflection type of work. It’s like the creative brain and then the scientific brain.
Q: What has been the number one highlight of your business in relation to motherhood and the number one challenge of your business in relation to motherhood?
Nicole Kell: We make our hours. I can do work at six in the morning, I can do work at 10, I can work at ten at night. I like that I could drop my child off at preschool every day at 8:45, which in any other job industry, you can’t, or you’re giving up something else later to do it. The flexibility and freedom, the accountability that comes with owning a company. It gives you the freedom to then schedule your day any way you want to. That’s my favourite part. Ironically, the hardest part is not just working eight to five, being able to shut off my brain and the computer, and then just going home because I’m always thinking about work. It’s not so easy to shut it off when it’s yours.
Q: What lesson would you share with young women? For them to learn early to avoid making the same mistakes you made?
Nicole Kell: One, open a business bank account before you quit.
Q: Why?
Nicole Kell: Because you have better credit when you have a job than if you quit, you open a business, and then you try to open a business account, you’re now starting from zero credit. Our software is $8,000, and our credit limit when we first started was 5,000. We had to pay increments even though we had the money in the bank account; we could not pay for things because our credit limit wouldn’t allow us to. It was fascinating and terrible all at the same time. Once you dive into it, you’ll be in panic mode for a couple of months.
Number two: Get a financial advisor. How much money do I need? How do I set up milestones within my company to track progress? It’s exciting before you jump in, and you get those milestones in place, then you jump in, and you jump into the chaos. Those milestones are there for you to strive for instead of just feeling like you’re floundering because that’s normal.
Number three, if you’re not terrified, you’re not thinking about it clearly because it is scary. It is scary to leave something you know, and change is hard for humans. Being a little bit afraid is normal. It means that you’re thinking logically about your decision and then just start, I guess what you’re doing now, really just start reaching out to people and saying, “Hey, I’m new at this.” So many people love to talk about their stories and how they got there. People want to support new people, but they can’t support you if you don’t reach out. Asking for help or advice gives a lot of other people purpose and makes them want to help. Don’t ever think that you can’t ask for help.
Q: Let’s move to parenting. What would you do differently? What would that be like for you to start the journey of parenting all over again?
Nicole Kell: My daughter is my happy accident that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I guess finding a partner that believes in you and your growth. They must be on board with dating a powerful woman and you should never apologize for your busy schedule, or you should never have to rush home at five to cook dinner if they’re not willing to do the same. Don’t give up your dreams for somebody that doesn’t see them. Don’t feel bad for feeling powerful because women are told we shouldn’t. Again, it goes back to the roles and what roles you play. If you’re starting a business, you need to put the time in upfront to have a successful business that gives you more freedom later on. I’m creative, a scatterbrain, but I’m super driven. Those three things are novelties but also outstanding qualities for any achiever.
Are you working on a new space and looking for that special touch with interior design? Nicole Kell and her team at StudioEn can be reached via www.studio-en.ca . Get ready to see results that will enrich and enliven your space while exceeding your expectation.
