To-The-Trade Episode Summary
Marcy Sagel of MSA Interiors and Designer Bank joined Laurie Laizure on To-The-Trade for Interior Design Community to talk about the gap she kept finding between what design school teaches and what her 25-year commercial design practice actually needs, and the education company she built to close it. Sagel is the CEO of MSA Interiors in Baltimore, and Designer Bank is the course platform she launched this year to teach Revit and rendering to working designers.
Sagel built her firm around large-scale commercial work, multifamily housing, affordable housing, senior living and student housing, work that requires the software her large architectural partners already use: Revit. She kept hiring designers who had never touched it in school. Rather than keep retraining every new hire from scratch, she and her team built their own Revit interior design library over 13 to 14 years, then turned that training into Designer Bank, which launched with 13 courses in February and will have 35 within its first year and a half.
The courses run from Revit fundamentals through Enscape rendering, taught by working designers on real projects. Sagel has found that renderings do more than help internally. They get clients emotionally attached to a design before it is built, which shortens the path to a yes.
That same instinct for closing a gap shows up in how Sagel talks about commercial interiors. Rather than default to sterile, repetitive finishes, she carves out lounges, cafes and gaming areas that feel residential, an approach Laurie calls resommercial design. The goal was never to spend more. It was to make sure people feel proud of the building regardless of price point.
Sagel pushes back hard on the idea that asking a client’s budget upfront is manipulative. A budget range, she argues, is simply where two sides start communicating what they actually want, and it is not optional on large commercial jobs, where clients are funded years in advance with no room to ask for more later.
She is equally direct about specifying versus purchasing. Her firm specifies more than ten million dollars a year in materials her clients never realize she is choosing, from decorative lighting to paint to flooring underlayment. Her signature story from this episode: scratching a client’s wood floor sample with his own key to prove it was the wrong choice for a high-traffic event space, then sourcing him a commercially rated floor for less money than he was already planning to spend.
In running the business, Sagel credits delegating to a VP of Operations she trained by bringing her to every client meeting, and credits her membership in an entrepreneurs’ organization for the accountability a CEO does not otherwise get from anyone.
The episode closes on two points IDC listeners will recognize. Asked if new designers should market themselves before they have projects, Sagel’s answer is yes: market who you are as a person. And Laurie names something rampant in the industry, imposter syndrome, pointing out that no contractor waits to get published in a magazine before calling himself a contractor.
“No contractor waits to get published in a magazine before calling himself a contractor. Designers do this to themselves constantly, and it holds the whole profession back.”
Timestamp Guide
00:39 – Meet Marcy Sagel, CEO of MSA Interiors and Designer Bank
02:31 – Designing across the US and Canada, and navigating tariff-driven cost changes
06:14 – The Revit gap in design school education
08:53 – Building in-house rendering (Revit plus Enscape) to help clients say yes faster
13:43 – What commercial work taught her about residential: resommercial design
17:22 – Personal residential projects, including a 130-acre farm restoration
18:25 – Why the most profitable designers are systems-driven
21:00 – Budgeting years in advance on large commercial jobs
28:59 – Early warning signs of a difficult client
30:35 – Why asking for a budget upfront is not the dumbest question
33:11 – What MSA specifies annually, and protecting the spec with vendors
36:12 – The wood floor key test: scratching a client’s floor sample to prove a point
40:00 – Delegating as CEO: hiring and training a VP of Operations
42:32 – What she learned from her entrepreneurs’ organization (EO)
46:50 – Why designers struggle with people-pleasing, and how to set boundaries
49:45 – IDC’s Question of the Day: marketing yourself without projects yet
50:25 – Naming imposter syndrome in the design industry
52:00 – Fun round: favorite room, what she collects, and life on the water
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