Design for Entrepreneurial Success Includes Learning When to Let Go, Delegate

COSTA MESA —  A degree in cultural anthropology isn’t a traditional route to business success, but that’s what Dana Eggerts studied in college, so that’s what she was stuck with when she launched her career in the late 1970s.

These days Eggerts, owner of Creative Design Consultants, is a force in Southern California’s new-home industry. Clients of her interior design company, which specializes in interior space design and the decoration of model homes and sales offices, include some of the Southland’s leading developers.

And she is taking her business overseas as architects Eggerts has worked with here and in Hawaii--where CDC does a lot of work for Castle & Cooke Inc.--have begun recommending her to builders in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Eggerts, 47, is pleased with where she’s at--but confesses that she still has to work a lot of 18-hour days to stay there. She says she has kept her sanity by teaching herself to delegate critical tasks she once jealously guarded as her own--not an easy thing for any entrepreneur to do.

“That’s probably the critical management lesson I’ve learned,” Eggerts said. “You have to know when to start letting go.”

Eggerts didn’t start her business career until a divorce at age 30 pushed her into the work force. Cultural anthropology wouldn’t pay the bills, so Eggerts, with two young children to support, became a real estate agent.

“I hated it,” she said, “but I learned a lot about sales and home design.” Eggerts next took a series of jobs with Orange County interior designers, obtaining the training and confidence for the next step.

In 1981, she teamed up with two partners to open Creative Design Consultants. Eggerts was the designer and her partners handled the business end of the company.

But by 1985, just as people in the industry had begun recognizing CDC’s name and its work, the partners feuded and Eggerts bought out her associates.

That’s when Eggerts--who helped introduce the “country look” to the new-home industry in the early ‘80s--found out that knowing design wasn’t enough.

The business was $750,000 in debt and she was advised to file bankruptcy. “But I owed it to my clients, and to myself, to keep trying,” she said.

Eggerts hired a consultant to help her learn the financial end of her company and says that such a successful experience probably makes it easier for her to delegate authority these days. She also hired a full-time controller to manage the financial end of things. The results have been spectacular. By 1989, CDC posted revenue of $8 million and was employing 60. Even in the worst of the recession, with her payroll slashed by 50%, Eggerts generated $7.2 million in business. And by the end of 1992 she had boosted employment back to 45 people as billings swelled to $8 million--a figure she said she expects to top this year.