"We want staff that share our ideas and mentality; we really want to bond"

“Christian Dyrman and I started as designers who had dreams of making furniture and focusing on craftsmanship. Then we found out that if our designs were to be as good as we wanted them to be, we had to hire people and teach them how to manufacture. All of a sudden, we were leaders.

We hadn’t thought about that when we started out. Christian and I really love to stand there and make our own furniture, to dig deep into the small details ourselves. But the problem with doing that is that you’re not able to develop a company. I think that’s perhaps the biggest challenge for many small businesses: It’s difficult to delegate.

From the day we quit our jobs, we focused 100 percent on our company. When you do that, you wear a lot of hats. In the beginning, for example, we were also th...