Behind Her Empire: Netflix Star Eilyn Jimenez on Launching an All-Woman Luxury Interior Design Studio

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Sire Design Founder and Director Eilyn Jimenez shares her secret to career success and how her immigrant parents inspired her to go after her dreams.

While Jimenez is also known for her hit Netflix series Designing Miami, the self made entrepreneur admitted that she didn’t always have everything figured out.

“A majority of people who are successful will tell you they had no clue what they were doing when they started,” she said.

Jimenez learned the ways of company management like a lot of people – on the fly, and through trial and error. In her first job ever (a receptionist) her office manager quit three days in.

“I knew that this was a moment for me to step up to the plate,” she said. “I had no idea what I was doing. But I stepped up to the plate, and I took that place by storm and I changed processes.”

Having gone through the experience of working under someone, Jimenez understood the importance of treating a company like your own. Now, as an employer of her own business, she said she sees those qualities in her employees.

Jimenez said that when she first launched Sire Design it was a team of one, so she wore many hats.

“I was the person answering the phone, I was the person doing the drafting, I was the person writing up the proposals, writing the contracts, going to the job sites,” she said. “I was everything.”

For marketing, she relied solely on word of mouth recommendations from one client or developer to another. While that path wasn’t easy, Jimenez said her courage and determination was rooted in the hard work of her immigrant parents when they first came to the U.S.

“I took what America has had generationally for years and took my immigrant parents and pushed them together to show that you can come from this really difficult, harsh background mindset,” Jimenez said. “But then take that and convert that to really hard work, knowing sky's the limit to do whatever you want.”

Jimenez is a prime example that you don’t need to have everything figured out from the start.

“If I can be living proof that as a daughter of immigrant parents, as a Latina, as a woman, as a young person, I can do it,” she said. “Anybody can do it and feel that it's accessible.”

dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.

This podcast is produced by Behind Her Empire. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.

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