In this powerful and emotionally charged episode, Gail Doby reunites with former community member Susan Feffer to explore the intersection of business systems, personal crisis, and operational grit. Susan opens up about her childhood, where she discovered her natural gift for spatial design and human connection while navigating a traditional academic environment with an undiagnosed learning disability.

Susan recounts how she rebuilt her life after a 2015 divorce, turning her hands-on experience in staging and house-flipping into a full-scale design firm. She shares why she decided to make her first major business investment with the Pearl Collective in February 2024, an operational “insurance policy” that proved vital just months later when a series of major health crises hit her small core team.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

The Currency of Connection: How struggling in school taught Susan to use her social intelligence and relationship-building skills to survive and succeed.
Shifting the Scarcity Mindset: Overcoming a conservative financial upbringing to realize that investing early in staff and structure is an act of betting on yourself.
Preparing to Get “Unlucky”: How a four-month sprint of implementing freight policies and clear contracts allowed Susan’s business to keep running smoothly after her rare blood cancer diagnosis.
Playing Hurt: The incredible cultural alignment that took place when Susan’s lead designer, Ashley, and her sister/operations manager, Patty, were also diagnosed with cancer.
The Future Succession Plan: Susan’s ultimate goal of scaling back to the owner’s seat so her beloved team can eventually buy and run the firm.

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full show notes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s15e3-shownotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV1wzPHLdhM&pp=ygUQcGVhcmwgY29sbGVjdGl2ZQ%3D%3D

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

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GAIL DOBY
Well, Susan, it’s so great to see you. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten together and we are just we miss seeing your incredible smiling face. So thank you for being here.

SUSAN FEFFER
And thank you for having me. This is quite an honor. Very exciting.

GAIL DOBY
Well, it’s a pleasure. Well, I wanna start off. You have been a part of our community in the past and took a little break for a little while. You’ve had some things going on and we’ll get into that in a few minutes. But tell me about your journey of getting into interior design. Was that intentional? What happened in your life to get you here?

SUSAN FEFFER
So as a little girl I loved design. I loved, you know, moving furniture around. I could play in doll houses for days and Fisher Price and Barbie, you know. it came really easily to me and I loved it. And I can’t say that a lot of other things came easy to me. So I had a mother that nurtured that and we would do the show houses and you know, she

For when on my 16th birthday, I wanted Laura Ashley balloon curtains and I wanted a matching bedskirt and you know, comforter. And that’s, you know, I was always that girl. And so school was always a real struggle for me. I was not a great student. I was lived a life with an undiagnosed, you know, learning disability. And I was the youngest of five. So I sort of went where the carpool went. And

During my, you know life as a child, as a student in a traditional environment, I learned I had to learn quickly how to survive and get through and identify who was gonna help me get there. So there was no blueprint, there was no rule you know, template to say this is what you’re supposed to do. I just had to figure it out and I had to find a solution.

And there was a bit of chaos and sense of urgency with that. But I did it. And I would find that, you know, there’s Molly, and she’s in the second row, and she’s got her kilt to her knees, and she’s super quiet. So I’m gonna ask Molly for her notes, and then I’m gonna ask her to tutor me. And my mom’s gonna pick up her notebook, and you know, and then in return, I would ask Molly.

To go to the party on Saturday night. You know, that was my currency. Like that came easy to me. Social things came easy to me. People that was easy, you know, but school was really hard. And I look back now, and it was actually the greatest thing that happened to me because what you know, I feel like it was so hard, and God was like giving this to me, but at the same time, like.

SUSAN FEFFER
This was the greatest gift because I was able to touch into, tap into a part of me that found my strength and it found my strength in the struggle. It found that I was great at connecting people. I was able to figure out how to get through without like on my own. so anyway, I went to design school after high school.

That was also a disaster because I was an interior design major and a textile design major. I’m 54, so this was a very long time ago. And why I was at college, they were teaching us CAD on DOS, you know, and that was like brutal for me. I mean, brutal. So, like again, I was like a failure and I

wasn’t gonna like this wasn’t gonna cut it. And then I remember my teacher being like, you know, my CAD teacher, like, you’re not gonna be an interior designer. Like this is never gonna work. Like you can’t do this. And it was too hard to no one was getting there was no notes to get. There was nothing to Xerox. There was, you know, no one that even wanted to come to the party. They were a different breed of people. So it was like okay. So I ended up like transferring and

through the night school I got into Villanova great school and I, you know, just kind of got through school. thank God I got through by the skin of my teeth. And then I pursued a sales and marketing career. And then I went to New York and Boston and and that was what I was supposed to do because I was good at that, right? Like I loved relationships. I loved finding like win-win situations and I genuinely love people.

But I never really gave up on the design thing. I felt like the dream, I got into real estate. And I should fat go back a little bit. When I was in college at Villanova, I knew design wasn’t gonna work. Interior design, I didn’t think I’d gonna make it. So I got a part-time job at a real estate company, answering phones and booking their appointments. And I wanted this job because this was before the internet and all that kind of stuff.

SUSAN FEFFER
Cause then I’d have the inside scoop on where the beautiful, like, like the open houses at the big mansions would be. So I would have like, you know, I would I would go on Sundays to these open houses and I would like throw on my mom’s mink coat and, you know, just show up. I didn’t have a I didn’t have two nickels scrubbed together and I’d just wanted to see how they were decorated and designed and I wanted to see their bathrooms and their kitchens. And and then I would tell the real estate agent.

Like, I’ll be back with my fiance, you know. And they’re probably like, who is this girl? You know what I mean? Like it just crazy. so anyway, after sales and marketing, business, journey dabbled with real estate, I took a break and was a stay-at-home mom at 30. but I was flipping our own houses and, you know, staging houses for realtors. So in 2015,

when my life sort of fell apart through divorce and I had to just start all over, that’s when I started my business.

GAIL DOBY
Wow, that is quite the journey to get to here. So a lot of no’s, a lot of frustrations getting to this point, but it seems as if it was what was meant to be for you. Was that a shock to you once because you were

SUSAN FEFFER
I think as you get older, like I think as you get older, and then like the more struggles that you have, the more setbacks, the more, you know, loss or heartbreak or you know, whatever it is, it’s gonna look different for everybody. But I think you get better at handling the hard stuff and you know what what you can keep if you can keep moving forward and pivoting.

And healing and learning from your mistakes or your setbacks and putting you in a position of growth and a path forward, you you realize that all of those things were put in front of you to get you where you are today, right? So ...