Kate O’Hara spent nearly two decades at O’Hara Interiors, the residential design firm her mother founded. As its second-generation CEO, she helped grow the company into an eight-figure business of nearly 40 people across three markets, doubled revenue during her tenure, and led through expansion, restructuring, leadership development, COVID, rapid growth, and ultimately the intentional wind-down of a nearly forty-year family business.

That experience gave her a close understanding of what happens when a business decision is also a leadership decision, a people decision, a family decision, or a question about what comes next.

Today, through Lake House Group, Kate advises and coaches founders, owners and executives in home and design when success has created more options, more complexity, and more consequential decisions.

Clients come with questions about the business, their leadership, or what they want from the next chapter. Often those questions are more connected than they first appear. Kate’s role is to bring an independent perspective: to find the question beneath the question, notice patterns that are difficult to see from inside, challenge assumptions, and offer a direct point of view when it helps.

She also brings that perspective to home and design brands and organizations that want to understand the design professional more intelligently: as an owner, buyer, employer, decision-maker and partner, not simply an audience to reach.

Kate owns the Design Influencers Conference and speaks nationally on business, leadership and the decisions that shape what comes next. She holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a master’s in education from Washington University in St. Louis.