From Interior Design to Entrepreneurship: Lauren Popish
Getting her dream job straight after college, Lauren thought she would stay there until she retired. But when that dream started to feel like a nightmare, she began to take deliberate action to find the right role for her. Through planning, experimentation, and leveraging her expertise, she was able to make the leap from interior design to a tech startup and now runs her own business, a podcasting company for women.
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Q: Tell us about your current work roles.
I recently made the leap into entrepreneurship after spending the past 10 years in interior design and real estate tech. My company is called The Wave Podcasting, and we help women tell their unique stories through podcasting. We offer educational resources, events-based community, and my personal favorite, a recording studio space exclusively made for women (our first location is in Los Angeles).
Q: What led you to that career?
When I graduated from college, I got my dream job at the largest commercial interior design/architecture firm in the world based in New York City. I was convinced that I would stay in this role and at this company until I retired. Three months in, I was miserable - working 80 hour weeks, getting paid peanuts, and producing work that senior staff would take and present to our clients. School hadn’t prepared me for what the day to day experience of being an interior designer was really like, and it turns out that despite being a creative person, it wasn’t the right role for me.
I stayed at the company for nearly 3 years, strictly to beef up my resume, and after months of research and experimentation, I decided I wanted to work at a tech startup. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to switch industries and roles, so I searched for tech startups within the industry of commercial interior design, architecture, or real estate. I was able to use my domain expertise to get a role at a startup that was building a new floor plan software tool. In exchange for providing logic on how the design process works, they let me run a client-facing arm of the company called Customer Success.
I learned just how enjoyable a job can be when you are doing what you are good at with people you like.
Since then, I’ve had many roles at the company, learned a lot about tech, and even more about how small businesses are run. The company culture is amazing, and I learned just how enjoyable a job can be when you are doing what you are good at with people you like. I cultivated my interest in podcasting first as a hobby, and then over time, as a business. Seeing the worst example of a workplace and the best example gave me the confidence to start my own business by combining everything I’ve learned about space, tech, and people.
Q: What is your educational background?
I went to Arizona State University in Phoenix and got a major in Interior Design and a minor in Architectural Studies.
Q: Did you have any life-changing experiences that led you to what you’re doing today?
I did actually. During my time at the startup, we were acquired by a large real estate company, and I moved from Customer Success to Sales. The sales team went on a huge roadshow to offices all over the country promoting our products. I was covering the Southeast and had to visit 22 cities in 4 weeks. During my very last presentation of the tour, I had a panic attack and had to leave the room mid-presentation. I had been a confident public speaker to that point, but the incident was so traumatic, that it sparked a phobia-level fear of public speaking in me.
I had to leave my role in sales, and stop volunteering for speaking opportunities. What I realized is that when you are afraid to speak up, you lose influence. Your ideas never see the light of day. Someone else steps up in your place. It made me think of all of the women who are afraid to raise their voices to share their unique stories and perspectives. I felt that podcasting was a safe way to practice those skills and gain confidence in speaking. From that idea, I was able to develop the concept for my company and build out a safe podcasting studio space where women could come share their stories and gain confidence in doing so.
When you are afraid to speak up, you lose influence.
Q: How has your family and upbringing influenced your career choices?
My dad is a veterinarian who took over his clinic from his father. He worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 30 years until he retired, and my grandfather did the same. When it came to advising me and my sister on our careers, the advice was to find a good, reliable company as soon as you can and stay there as long as you can.
Like the good daughters we are, we always want to make our parents proud. Had I felt a bit more freedom to search and experiment with what kind of career I wanted to have, I might not have spent as much time in a job I hated. I think the concept of a gap year is so smart and allows young people to try on different life paths. That being said, it’s hard for me to see my current path and all that had to happen for me to get here and regret any of it.
Q: What are you most proud of accomplishing?
All of my proudest moments came from overcoming something extremely challenging. Right now, I’m proud of the self development work I’m doing to regain my confidence in speaking. It is probably the hardest thing I’ve had to do, but I know it will be the most rewarding.
Q: What would you say motivates you most to do what you do?
The idea of helping just one woman believe in the power of her voice.
On Making a Career Shift
Q: How did you find the courage to leap from one field to another?
The dissatisfaction in my current role gave me the motivation to make a change, despite knowing it would be difficult, and I suspect that is the case for a lot of career switchers. Eventually, the pain of staying in your current role becomes greater than the pain of making a change. The beauty of searching for a new job is that it is extremely low risk - the worst thing that can happen is you don’t get the job and you stay in your current role. Trying becomes your best option.
Q: What has been the greatest challenge for you when it comes to switching careers?
Most employers prefer experience over education. That can make career switching difficult because you are basically starting from the beginning of your career, just like you did when you came out of school. When I was applying for roles at tech startups with only interior design experience on my resume, I had to paint a very specific story of how my existing skills and experience would benefit their company. This takes a lot of research about the projects that a company is working on, who their clients are, what their goals are, and where their weaknesses lie.
You can’t necessarily leave the hiring manager to connect the dots on what you can bring to the company, you have to present the vision for them.
Q: What advice do you have for others who want to switch careers?
I think that the old concept of finding one single career or calling doesn’t represent the complexity and ever-evolving nature of people. Instead of looking for one job to rule them all, search for the role and company that will help you meet your current goals, whatever they may be.
We will never know exactly what the experience of being in a new role is like until we do it, so we shouldn’t assume a company job description or website will tell us if a role is right for us. Instead, approach a new role the way a scientist would. Form a hypothesis - for example, “I think that working as a graphic designer will bring me more job satisfaction because I will be able to use my creative skills,” and instead of assuming your hypothesis is correct, confirm or deny it with experiments.
Approach a new role the way a scientist would. Form a hypothesis, and instead of assuming your hypothesis is correct, confirm or deny it with experiments.
These experiments can include speaking to people currently working in the role you want, job shadowing, taking online courses, freelancing, etc. By using an experiment, you will be able to prove whether your assumption is true or false. It might be that while graphic design allows you to be creative, it is also very production-centric, and you would prefer to be in a more communications-type role. From there, the experiments can start all over again until you prove your hypothesis true.
Q: What’s next for you, what are you looking forward to?
I am looking forward to watching my company grow, gaining confidence in being a founder, and hopefully inspiring some other people along the way.
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Learn more about and connect with Lauren at:
Website: https://thewavepodcasting.com
Instagram: @laurenpopish, @thewavepodcasting