The Story of Bennett Design

School didn’t prepare me for this.

I’m 37 years old, have a staff of 5 and can’t make payroll.  I have the work; I just don’t have the money in the bank.  I don’t get it.

That was a bad day. But it turns out that the bad days taught me some of the best lessons.

My name is Sue Bennett, and I started and have been running Bennett Design Associates, one of Canada’s largest independent Interior Design Firms, for almost 30 years.  What I realize is that although I went to school to be an Interior Designer, It’s the education that I have had every day since I graduated that has made the most impact in my life.

My career trajectory began when I was 9 years old in grade 4, growing up in Montreal.

As a child, I was enrolled in ballet classes at quite a young age.  It turns out I was pretty good, because by the time I was 8, I was recommended to an elite ballet school that I was required to audition for, and I made the cut.  In my mind, my future career was defined.  I would be a ballerina.

My father had been paying particularly close attention to my play habits, likes and strengths over the years.  He recognized that although I had a few baby dolls, that I preferred moving the play stove, fridge and baby doll bed around to set up a new ‘house’ vs playing with the dolls themselves. At school, I attended North America’s first fully open concept public school where 5 classrooms shared a huge open floorspace that was divided only by movable chalkboards.  We migrated throughout the day by taking our slide-in tote-tray out of the desk and carting it to our next classroom.  My tote-tray had wall-to-wall carpet in it (to keep my pencils and books from sliding around and becoming disorganized).  My father saw this as an omen.  When I would state that I was going to grow up to be a ballerina, my father would just laugh and say, “No Sue, you will be an interior designer, because dancers starve.”  He was right and I am quite sure I wouldn’t have been a successful professional dancer, and although I continued dancing into adulthood as a hobby, I followed his advice and I pursued Interior Design.

In late 1996, I had already had experience as a retail designer, a millwork detailer and a corporate designer with one massive, 27,000 sq. ft residential project sprinkled in.  It was during my maternity leave after the birth of my third child, when a friend called and asked me to design his new offices into a new vacant space he had leased. 

I distinctly remember completing the small set of construction drawings at about 3am and realizing that I had a dilemma.  I had done these drawings on the construction drawing page template from the firm that I was working for at the time.  Knowing I couldn’t send them out from that company, I quickly, and without a ton of thought, replaced their company name in the title block and typed Bennett Design Associates into its place.  I deleted their wordmark and popped a butterfly into their logo frame.  Good enough. 

The next day, I sent copies of the plans for permit and emailed my friend an invoice with the butterfly logo and company name at the top of the invoice.  Two weeks later, I received a cheque made out to Bennett Design Associates.  When I took the cheque to the bank to cash, I was told I needed a corporate account, but to get that account, I had to prove I had a registered company certificate and a GST number.  So again, without much thought, I managed to figure all of that out and get the documents together within a week or so.  I put the cheque in the account and just like that had inadvertently and very naively started a business.  I was 33, had 3 children under the age of 6, and a husband who travelled at least 3 days out of each week for business.  What I realized I needed was freedom.  Freedom to schedule my days to juggle my very busy life.  This is ultimately what Bennett Design provided to me.

Bennett Design and I did a very good job of finding work and in the first 5 years, I went from working alone in an unfinished, concrete basement to having a staff of 5 and having to move after just two years from our beautiful, renovated basement office space into a 600 square foot studio addition over my garage.   The work was flowing, but the cash was not.

Hiring my first bookkeeper taught me the value of cashflow and billing cycles.  The consistency of work meant nothing if we couldn’t get the invoices out in a timely manner to ensure that the client payments were in the bank every month.  I had been running my own business for 5 years and had been completely blind to basic accounting principles.  Looking back, we never missed paying our bills or payroll, but there were days when I frantically drove around and called on clients to pick up cheques that I had begged them to write. Lesson One:

1) Be the Queen (or King) of your financial domain.

The company continued to grow.  I hired amazing, talented people who were all better than me in areas where I knew I was weak.  I continued to learn, but also to sell, design and thoroughly enjoy my time with my team.  We worked hard and played hard, and a theme of celebration and fun became the foundation that underpinned the incredible culture that Bennett Design still has today. We got way better at writing and pricing proposals, our cash flow was steady, we had no debt and things were great.  I was blissfully ignorant that business ownership had highs and lows.  To date, we had mostly been doing okay and the small bumps that we encountered and smoothed out over the years were just that…small.

By the end of 2005, Bennett Design Staff were spread throughout my home, and my then teenage sons were not happy trying to grab a shower after a rugby practice when women were occupying and moving between the basement and the 2nd floor studio space in the house in a free-flowing state.  It was invasive and had to change.

In February 2006, we moved out of my house into a 2200 sq.ft leased industrial unit.  We renovated the space to be fresh and clean.  We bought nice, used furniture and moved in.  Within a month of moving in, my worst business fear was realized; our work dried up.

I was astounded and terrified.  I had just signed a 5-year lease for our new building, I had a team of 7, with the most recent hire being a very senior, very expensive investment.  It was the first time in my life that I stared at the ceiling at night in lieu of sleeping and perpetually walked around with a gnawing stomachache from stress.  This is when I learned Lesson Number 2: 

2) Hire great people and get out of the way and let them do what they are great at.

I sat down with our newest hire, and we walked through the challenge.  Coming from a larger firm, she stated that we needed larger, ‘house’ accounts that would provide consistent and pervasive revenue.  Within a couple of  weeks, through her contacts, we hired a designer who was embedded in a large automotive firm and at the same time, we had secured all of that company’s work.  We took a deep breath.  We had dodged a bullet this time but recognized that we needed to be better at ‘farming’ and growing our business development leads instead of reactively trying to ‘fish’ for them.  Our outlook on finding work had changed. With this new sales philosophy the work began to trickle in at a steadier pace. With this optimistic activity, we redesigned our logo to the letter B that we currently use.

It was in 2007 that I joined the Women Presidents Organization (WPO), a peer-to-peer advisory group that was established by Martha Firestone in New York City and had recently been introduced as a chapter in Toronto. The Toronto chapter of the WPO consisted of 20 smart, driven, successful woman business owners.  Their businesses ranged from AV Equipment to Chemical importing, from $1M to $50M in yearly revenue.  I felt like I had been adrift at sea in a life raft for almost 10 years that had finally washed up on a beach.   These women understood me.  They had all balanced children, husbands, households, careers, employees and business challenges.  At that first meeting, I cried.  I finally had a strong, supportive network of incredible women who spoke my language and appreciated my gorgeous new high heels.  Month by month, these women helped me see and realize a vision for my firm.  They helped me learn what I did not know had been invisible to me before.

As Bennett Design continued to grow, each project was a bit bigger, better or more complex than the last.  We were intent on providing excellence in our drawing detail and our client service.  We also began innovating to create services that our industry desperately needed.  Consequently, we knew that we also had to change and build our infrastructure to accommodate these new service offerings, our growing team and our ability to work right across Canada.  Through my connections at the WPO, Bennett Design became one of Canada’s first certified WBE (Women Business Enterprises of Canada) members. We wanted to make sure that our minority business status was taken into account by those large corporations who were forward thinking enough to have a diversity supplier mandate, and this certification connected us with many corporate clients who were looking for firms just like ours.  During this time, we also reinforced that we were a ‘family friendly’ company, and we committed ourselves to providing our staff with the freedom and flexibility to work in ways that supported a healthy work/life blend.  These IT and business improvements all required cash.

Growth isn’t cheap.  It was around this time, that Bennett Design needed a bit of wiggle room financially, so I made an appointment with my bank branch manager and went in with my business plan in hand and asked him to provide me with a line of credit.  It was, and remains to be, the only time in my career that I was spoken to like a dumb woman (which I am not!).  He asked me what I intended to use the money for (grow the business, invest in better software, etc…read the damned business plan!) and then he pretty much patted me on the head and told me he would authorize a visa card for me with a $5000 limit.  Within the next few weeks, I invited 3 other major charter banks to my office and had them bidding on my work.  We switched banks, moved out of a branch into commercial banking and I have had a very close and trusting relationship with my bank manager ever since. Suffice it to say that my old bank said goodbye to a very lucrative client that day, and I did get my line of credit and so much more.  Lesson 3:

3) Develop close relationships with your banker, your accountant and your lawyers (HR, Corporate, Litigation, etc.)

In 2013 we won a massive 5-year RFP for a firm with almost 1M square feet of real estate over 10 buildings across the GTA.  The day we kicked off this project, they handed us 38 projects of all different sizes and complexities, and we hit the ground running.  We spent the next two years saying yes to all their requests that started with ‘Can your firm do….’.  We were running as fast as we could to stay ahead of the deluge of work. We hired like crazy to fill the seats needed to get this work done and then fired like crazy when we hired the wrong people.  We brought on in-house IT expertise to help us navigate the workload so our team could work capably from site or from home when needed and we established an HR presence within our firm to help us manage the people – all of the people!!  This became Lesson 4:

4) Structure your firm for growth and scalability.

In the following years, we bought our entire building, so now it had about 4300 sq. ft.  We restructured our corporate structure to protect ourselves legally and physically expanded our office multiple times into multiple locations to serve us better as we grew.  We also structured our company from within, creating a management team to look after the different departments of our business.  The role of this team was to help write and execute a success model for Bennett Design.  Still today, this team meets offsite to do strategic planning every year to chart our course for the years to come.  We hold our team accountable in weekly management meetings and monthly strategy update meetings to make sure we hit our goals.  We have learned that if you don’t take the time to write your business plan, you won’t have a roadmap for success and you will never know if you succeed.  We also learned that if nobody is accountable, then the plan won’t work.   Lesson 5: 

5) Understand the difference between strategy and tactics and take the time to discuss, develop and document a strategic plan that you can tactically execute amongst your departments.

Here we are in our 29th year.  We have held fast to our core beliefs of doing the work, digging deeper and providing detail and services that outshine our competition. I credit our lessons learned for being the reason we were profitable and steady with work throughout the pandemic and beyond.  We have had many highs and lows, and I expect they will continue, but I try to consider that to be the interesting parts of running a business that keep me from getting bored.  We continue to be curious and to ask ourselves if there is a better way of doing something, thinking bigger, room to innovate and we commit to constant reinvestment into the betterment of our company, whether that is software, AI, new or improved services, processes or even our own office design. We are leaders in our thinking.  We are consistently looking forward to new ways of getting better and delivering more.   It’s what drives me forward.  It’s so rewarding.

What I know and have learned many times over in my almost 30 years as an entrepreneur is that my strength truly is in the people I surround myself with.  Today Bennett Design has about 55 staff and has plans to grow well beyond that.  We work in what we refer to as ‘an Elastic Workforce’ with no mandated in-office days, so our staff flex in and out of the office and we rely on clearly articulated roles and responsibilities for each person to perform their job.  Our whole company functions based on a platform of trust and autonomy.  Our people are purposefully chosen for fit and talent.  They can work adeptly from coast to coast and in both National languages from virtually anywhere.  We listen closely to what they have to say because they are smart and have a lot to contribute.  Like a good coxswain on a rowing team, we communicate with transparency, clarity and frequency to ensure that we are all rowing in the right direction.   As the leader, I have the responsibility of setting that direction and ultimately making sure that we hit our targets and cross that finish line each year.

The years have flown by.  If I had known all of this back in 1996, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to make the effort to get that first cheque deposited and start this company, but I have no regrets.  I have learned a lot about myself which leads me to maybe the most important lesson.  Lesson 6:

6) Never doubt yourself.  Keep learning, embrace change and go big!

I’m not done, and I can’t wait to be able to write about what comes next.  I have way too much energy to slow down and I still have big plans.

I have been known for saying (and I hope that it’s true!) “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”