This week on the Creative Genius podcast, Gail Doby welcomes Mike Ufferman and Catrina Cooper, the principals of Loczi Design. Mike and Catrina detail their professional pivot from the restaurant and auction house operations fields into the design world, and how they eventually came together to lead a high-growth firm in San Francisco.

The conversation explores the complexities of “internal sales,” specifically how they navigated the process of buying the company from the original founder, Paige, after years of working as her leadership team. They share the raw, “brothers and sisters” dynamic of their leadership style and how professional coaching helped them move past emotional friction to achieve true operational alignment.

Hear about the strategic “miracle” team of advisors—from valuation experts to business attorneys—that allowed them to complete a full company transfer in under six months. Mike and Catrina also discuss the “unreasonable” client service strategies they’ve implemented to drive their current record profits and why they are already planning their own exit strategies.

Key discussion points in this episode:

The Pandemic Pivot: How the team managed the dual upheaval of a global pandemic and the founder moving across the country in 2020.
Alignment over Accuracy: Why learning to work as a leadership team was a bigger achievement than simply mastering markups and financial data.
Buying the Legacy: The emotional weight and “healthy scramble” of New Year’s Eve signatures to officially take over the founder’s “baby”.
The Non-Negotiable Paperwork: Why you must discuss the “no-fun” topics—like buy-sell agreements and key person insurance—while you are still in the honeymoon phase of partnership.

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full show notes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s14e8-shownotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVzTVu0bks

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

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Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Mike and Kat. I am so happy to see you. It’s been a while and it has been an interesting journey for you two and I can’t wait to dive into that today. First, I want to start with how did you two get into design and start working together and just tell us a little bit. I’ll start with you, Katrina. Okay.

First off, thanks for having us. We’re excited to be here with you. It’s our first podcast, so we’ll do our best.

Yeah, holy, you’re virgins.

So how did I get into design? as you already know, Gail, I was in the restaurant business for a very, long time before I started doing this. And at some point just realized I didn’t want to do that forever. And a good friend of mine said, you know, you’re kind of a natural designer. Why don’t you go to design school? So I took that advice and went to school for a few years and then just started working and, you know, have kind of built my career from there.

So it, yeah, I mean, it kind of happened nice and organically, but a little later in life maybe than other people.

Okay, yeah, well I didn’t go back to school till I was 35 for design so yeah.

That’s about how old I was too, yeah.

And I graduated, I think, two years later. yeah, it was good to go back. I think everybody needs to decide what it is that they’re called to do.

Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, it’s nice to have a second career and have some to do it later in life to it was more intentional. I mean, I was able to do a lot better than I think I probably would have right out of high school.

sure. This is such a different industry anyway. And of course, you’ve gone from being an employee to owning the firm. We’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. But Mike, about you, how did you get into design?

boy, that’s a long journey for me. I grew up in Ohio in Cincinnati in this small town and went to school for business at the University of Cincinnati and worked my way through college working at a hospital there and was sure that I was gonna go on to medical school and I really wanted to work in labor and delivery. That was the field. I got accepted there and studied a little bit and just decided it wasn’t really for me.

Did a couple things and ended up out in California and I was working operations for an auction house out here. At the time it was called Butterfields, it was a very famous auction house in California. Another company bought them and I was running a lot of operations. I was seeing art every day. I was just getting a master’s degree in art education every day I came to work. I fell in love with design from that. And I had…

You know, a change in life happened there and a friend of mine called me while I was literally vacationing on a beach in Mexico and said, Hey, I’m starting an interior design firm, get in your car and come back up here. Uh, and I did, and I turned around and I went back up and I ran his business with him for seven years and, um, he owns a building downtown and Paige, the previous owner of the company here was doing a photo shoot with Katrina and some others there. And I showed up and we talked and we ended up working together and.

A couple of years ago, I went back to Berkeley and studied a design there and we’re here now.

It is so crazy. Yeah, I think it really makes a difference if you have a business background too or some other experience coming into this and for you Katrina just having that hospitality background is perfect for interior design. Tell me a little bit about your firm who’s on the team, what the roles are, the responsibilities. I know both of you are the principals and the owners now, but what about the rest of your team?

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we’ve got six people in our San Francisco office. Of course, Mike and I work there and Ava is our senior designer handling some of the larger projects. We’ve got Diana and Jennifer who are both working as associate designers and then Eric is our staff designer. Samantha is hand in hand working with Mike. She runs our whole office and his whole life.

And we also have Olga, who doesn’t work in the office with us. She’s our controller. She’s a big part of what we do at LOXIE.

Well, that’s a good size team too. Yeah. I’m sure you’re feeling a little bit stretched because it sounds like you’re busy right now.

Sure are, yeah.

And we are having that conversation right now too about hiring a couple staff members, maybe another senior designer and also another staff designer.

That’s great news. like hearing that. What was going on in your business? When you reached out a few years ago, we determined there was probably somewhere in the range of five to seven years ago when you reached out. And at that point, you weren’t the owners of the business. So what was going on that caused you to do that?

I’m sorry.

Yeah, there was a lot. We were growing quite a bit and there were three of us that were leading the firm. We knew what we wanted to do, but we were going in different directions with it. We all wanted to grow, but we were growing differently. We were having a hard time sort of coming together with what our plan looked like. And it was really sort of important for us to reach out to you at that point, just to

to save the company really, to really figure out what we were gonna do next with the company, where we were gonna go with it. And that’s how we got to you.

Yeah, and you said it was a friend of yours and I don’t even know who it was that you knew, but…

Yeah, that friend of mine said, mean, going back to that, my friend, we were looking for a business coach and a friend of mine knew you or knew of you somehow, suggested that we reach out to you. And he said to me, you need to talk to her. She is the inter-design coach of the stars. We knew right then that you were who we needed to speak to and we never looked back after that.

my gosh, that’s so funny. I have no idea why anybody would say that, but okay. Yeah, my little secret is that I try really hard to not work with the celebrity designers. They, it is a no-go for me.

for.

You

Hmm, interesting. I hear more about that someday.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s another story all by itself. Some stories I can’t really say, so I’ll just leave it at that. But anyway, so you had a lot of chaos going on and let’s talk about that crazy day that we had. So I flew out there and met with three of you and I remember meeting or waiting for you all at the office. I was there on time and everybody was a little bit late and I was standing outside and all these guys were out there.

Brutal pruning in front of the office.

Yeah, we had a plumbing issue, I guess, that day and they were trying to break into the plumbing line and they had jackhammers outside and they were really making a mess of it. So it was a no-g...

Doubling Down on a Design Legacy (Mike Ufferman and Catrina Cooper)