BusinessReport.com

When she’s traveling, Leslie Herpin Marx hates to arrive at night.

The trip from the airport to the hotel after dark leaves her feeling disoriented. There’s no context.

“When I travel, I like to arrive at places in the daytime because I want to be able to see my environment and get a sense of where I am,” Herpin Marx says.

Or on vacation at a resort complex: Like a cat, she feels the urge to explore every nook and cranny. She’d be perfectly happy if the concierge handed her a floor plan.

It’s because Herpin Marx, who founded Leslie Herpin Interior Design in 1987, is an extremely visually oriented person, a quality that’s paid off in the profession she’s honed over the past two decades.

Herpin Marx, a self-described “bayou girl” from Thibodaux, doesn’t care if she’s got the biggest interior design firm around. She wants to be known as having the best. Judging from her growing client roster, she’s onto something.

Her firm has designed several million square feet of interior space and selected more than $70 million worth of furniture for clients that include the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, Baton Rouge Community College, Metro Airport, Lod Cook Alumni Center, Baton Rouge General Medical Center and the Bienville, Livingston and Poydras governmental buildings.

Serious clients, in other words, and this list barely scratches the surface. She’s never advertised a lick. It’s all been word of mouth.

How did it happen?

Part of it has to do with Herpin Marx’s personality. She’s always been by nature a people-pleaser. She wants you to be happy. She wants you to like her.

“I think that has kind of overflowed into the business and wanting people to be happy with the end product and satisfied with what we do,” Herpin Marx says. “I think everybody in my office has that philosophy.”

Every project is a collaboration, she says. There are no soloists. Herpin Marx says it can be tough to balance the artistic thing with business. Artist that she is, Herpin Marx admits she’s less attracted to the nuts and bolts of running a business.

“I don’t like invoicing,” she says. “I don’t like the paperwork piece of it.”

It’s been a learning process, Herpin Marx concedes. Early in her career, an architect/mentor gave her a piece of advice. Boiled down, it was this: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Worry about what you can control, not what you can’t. Herpin Marx thought he was nuts.

“That sounded like the most insane piece of advice in the world,” she says. “Just because I can’t control it, how can I just put it aside and not worry about it?”

She eventually gained more experience—and a whole lot more. Herpin Marx’s architect/mentor was right. She’s also learned how to delegate, not always easy but made easier by Herpin Marx’s “awesome staff.”

“I was not good at that when I first started my business,” she says. “No one could do it as good as I could. No one could do it as fast as I could. I have gotten better. Still, nothing leaves this office without me looking at it.”

And finally, patience. As in life, not everything happens when you want it to in business. Herpin Marx’s teenage daughter, who just graduated high school, taught her that one.

“If you have a teenager, you have to learn to practice patience,” she says.