Growing A Successful Staging Business Part 2

Second Phase of growing a successful staging business

What I learned from LeBron James

LeBron says, “You've got to want your goal, more than what you want right now.” And honestly, that is literally what kept me going during the second phase of growing a successful staging business–the Accelerate Phase.

The Accelerate Phase will throw a lot at you as a staging business CEO. And I want you to be prepared as you head into it, but also to normalize what you are experiencing if you are already there.

In today’s podcast episode, I walk you through what you can expect to see in your business during this phase, and we will take a look at growing your team for the first time.

Listen in to find out how you can become more efficient as your business accelerates, with scaling and budgeting, automation, and creating a “you not needed” business plan.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

How to be committed to solving the problems that your business was designed to solve.
How to plan your cash flow for quiet seasons.
The importance of automation.
Why you need to engineer your pricing from real numbers.
… and more!

If you want to learn how to market and grow a successful staging business, sign up for the waitlist for the next enrollment period for Rethink You. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that they’ve always wanted.

RESOURCES:

Save your spot here for the FREE Masterclass “3 Simple Steps To Make More Money In Your Staging Business”
Join the Rethink You Waitlist here
Follow Lori on Instagram
Book: E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber.
Book: That Will Never Work, by Marc Randolph.

ENJOY THE SHOW?

Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEO's can uplevel their business too!
Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

join the rethink you waitlist here

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

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003 | Second Phase Of Growing A Successful Staging Business

First Phase Of Growing A Successful Staging Business

Staging Sips, Episode 3
Transcript

You’re listening to the Staging Sips podcast with Lori Fischer. This podcast is dedicated to helping real estate staging CEOs build healthy businesses that grow, flow, and thrive.

Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am in a really good mood today and I'm so excited for this podcast. There's a lot in this. We are talking about the accelerate phase of business. This is the second phase of business. Once you've started to get a little bit busier, you're running out of time to service the clients that are coming in, this is when you start hitting the accelerate phase of business. There's a lot in this podcast, and don't worry, we're going to unpack a lot of these concepts or these issues on a deeper level as we go through the podcast. So, today is really just an introduction to give you a road map for what you can expect in your business, what's coming ahead.

Now, in the podcast episode #2 about growth, I mentioned that this phase, accelerate, has some hustle, and that hustle will happen, and I really want to address, before we dive into all of that, this idea of hustle in this phase, because right now, we are in a very anti-hustle culture, and I think that's amazing. I am all for us not having hustle as a mantra or as a symbol of pride, and that we're so awesome because we're hustling all the time, and it's a very different thing. It's very different hustling over long periods of time with real no gain. It's more ego-driven than hustling to grow your business, grow your dream, and going through periods of time like this accelerate phase, where your business growth, your business skillsets, and your corporate infrastructure are not aligned, because that's what's going to happen is, you're going to hit this level of business growth where going to be up-leveling and needing to up-level and work on business skillsets, and in particular, corporate infrastructure, because you very likely don't have the infrastructure in place that you need in order to get you through the accelerate phase.

This accelerate phase is really about this messy middle that is all about moving from hustle and wearing 1000 hats, to finding your right fit processes and your right fit team to take some of those roles off of your plate, because your ultimate goal as the CEO of your business is to be working on taking on CEO-level tasks and responsibilities, like setting the vision and creating the strategic plan for 3/5/10 years out in your business. I call this the creating that “you not needed” plan, because in the beginning of your business, you're taking on a lot of jobs in your business. You are filling a lot of job descriptions, and what we need to do is help you create situations and scenarios, and processes, and documentation, and training so that you are making yourself obsolete and somebody else is taking on those roles for you.

This is why in the growth phase, I think it's so important to document everything that’s in your brain. A lot of times, people come to me and say “well, how are they going to know how I like to have certain things done?” and essentially, what people are asking is “how are my new team members going to know what's in my head?” and the only way that they will know what's in your head is by you taking what's in your head and documenting it in great detail ahead of time.

I just want to say that, in full disclosure, because I'm all about being transparent and honest with you about my own business growth and what's going on, this was my least favorite phase of business in the beginning. It became one of my favorites as I was moving through it and heading on to my leveraged business, but this phase of business for me, in the beginning, and for, I would say, a period of a good couple of years, really sucked, and I want to help you avoid the suck. I want to help you see the road ahead of you so that you can plan better than I did and you can be prepared, whether that is prepared from getting all of your ducks in a row preparedness, or preparing your brain and your mind to deal with this, because this is the phase of business that truthfully I feel like is a very vulnerable time in a business, because it is so challenging and it is so difficult, and it seems like there's no end in sight to the hustle.

I recently heard an interview with Marc Randolph, one of the co-founders of Netflix, who also wrote the book, That Will Never Work, and what he talked about was that there are going to be times in your business that are not ideal and you don't love them, but one of the things that you have to remember, and one of the things that you have to stay in love with, you may not be in love with the logistics of the day-to-day running of your business, but you have to be committed to, even more than anything, is solving the problem for your client that your business was set up to solve for in the first place. So, the business itself can really be a downer at some points and you can feel like you're living in the river of misery in your day-to-day, but if you're really committed to the idea of helping sellers, helping Realtors, helping investors make the most money, be super successful, if you want to keep solving that problem and not, obviously for sellers, not struggle with not selling and the stress that goes along with that, then you will get through this phase and you'll deal with this river of misery, as Brooke Castillo calls it. You'll deal with it much better just knowing that you're so committed to the the end result of solving those pain points for those clients.

Anyway, so you’ve got to go through this messy middle and this messy middle is going to require a lot of minds at work. It's also going to require money, and we'll talk about that in a minute. This is why, in your growth phase, and if you're passed the growth phase and you’re in accelerate, this is why you really have to be diving into the expenses in your business and pricing your services accurately because you're going to need some profit because of what we'll talk about in a minute. You're going to need extra dollars, you're going to need a rainy day account with some buffer for you as you grow your business. Anyway, let's move into what accelerate looks like and how to prepare for this phase, and then how to manage yourself and your business when you're in this space because a lot of it is self-management and self-regulation.
Let's look at the departments in your business first. I look at 4 main divisions and departments in your business. Those would be your marketing department, your operations department, your delivery department, and your finance department. I'm sure there are other departments like sales that you could tease out of there and things like that, but in general, let’s start and keep it relatively simple for ourselves and say that those are the four key departments: marketing, operations, delivery, and finance.

In growth, you are going to be spending the majority of your time in marketing, and then the delivery of your service is going to grow overtime, but in the beginning, the thing that you're going to spend the most time on is your marketing. You are pushing that boulder up a hill to create momentum for your business, so that means your days are spent marketing, with much less time in delivery, and then as you go through growth and your delivery starts to spin, think about it as spinning plates, your delivery starts to hum a little bit, you're getting more appointments on your calendar on a weekly basis, but you still have free time, that's when you're going to start working on your operations and all of the things that you do to on-board your clients. All of that's in podcast episode 2 about growth.

In the accelerate, you're actually going to be spending more of your time, or most of your time, in delivery, especially if you're still operating as a solopreneur, if you haven't brought on any stagers or assistant stagers or junior stagers, or whatever you want to call them in your business, or even a lead stager, you are going to be spending a lot more time in delivery. You're probably going to have much less time to focus on marketing in this phase, which is something that you might need to get more strategic in because you have such limited time. If you have been spending your time trying to post on social media across several channels, you might need to look at what is the one that drives the most traffic and interest to your website or where you get the most feedback, and just focus your efforts on that, or even if it's not, just you enjoy it the most.
You'll also be spending, like I said, that time in operations because you really want to be dialing in and getting ready for your hiring process and be documenting whether it's in written form or video form, or all that, you want to be preparing your business for bringing on new people. At this point, too, that's where you're going to be spending most of your time, in this that's what that accelerating business looks like, so your business may be growing faster than you’re actually prepared for. You may still be operating as a solopreneur, and your calendar’s getting full, but then it’s getting too full. You’re starting to book out, you’re also taking evening appointments, you’re doing weekend appointments, you’re working very late in the day, you’re finding that you’re just getting burnt out and exhausted, and you’re feeling like you’ve got to go into people-pleasing mode, so you’re sacrificing yourself in order to meet the demands of the business growth. You also probably haven’t hired anybody, and this could be your first time hiring someone so you're not actually confident about it in any shape or form, and you are still probably experiencing the cyclical nature of the real estate industry, so you've got busy springs or busier springs, busier falls, and quieter months in your summer and winter, depending on the part of the world that you are in.

If you have our experiencing those highs and lows in your market, the challenge that you are going to be presented with as you think about hiring somebody is, who is the candidate that is able to work like a crud ton during the spring and fall but who is fine to not work very much during your your summer and winter months, your quieter months. It's a really interesting staffing dilemma that you can get into if you don't plan accordingly, if you don't market or market your positions or talk about your positions or set expectations accordingly, and that could happen for every business at every level. As you grow your staging business and it becomes a 6-figure business or beyond, you are going to, depending on the part of the country you’re in, your business volume is just going to go down in those those off times of the year.

So you've got to be prepared for the seasonal nature of your business and really look at it head on and be honest with it. In the book, Good to Great, which is an amazing book, if you haven't read it, Good to Great is a methodical approach to looking at companies that went from good business results to really amazing business results and became the iconic brand, and how do they compare to companies that stayed either stagnant or ended up going out of business. The one thing that they said early on in the process was that the CEO's of the companies that went from good to great were so clear in looking at the actual reality that they were in. For example, Kodak and Fuji. Kodak, who actually developed digital technology, digital photography technology, they were the developers. Listen to this craziness. They developed the technology for digital photography, but they resisted going all in as they saw that digital photography was becoming the way. They were so committed to their film and their niche market of photographers who like to shoot on film and not digital, and they ended up falling into bankruptcy while Fuji, at the same time, who also made film, looked at the digital landscape and looked at the the emerging desire for digital photography, and went all in on creating products that were aligned with what they were already doing for that market, and they soared, and to this day, they own that marketplace.

So, we have to look at the reality of our businesses. If you are experiencing, even in the fledgling years of your business, this seasonality, it's likely going to stay with you for your entire business growth. You're going to be making more money in those off times as your business grows compared to your fledgling days, but you're going to have those levels. You have to plan accordingly, you have to set expectations for your hiring team, for the team you hire accordingly.

You may also, in this period of time, need to increase the inventory investment, and not have enough storage space available for the quieter times, when that inventory comes back, if you're operating a vacant staging business or even if you're operating an occupy staging business where you bring inventory into the properties. This period of time is when you really may struggle with cash flow throughout the year because you may not really understand the in's and outs of the money in your business, you may not be planning and marketing services for those quieter times of the year that are not dependent on the real estate market to help you get through those quieter times, so if you are looking at operating a strictly staging business in a location that has that seasonality, you need to be making sure that you're charging more throughout the year, and/or you have services that you can kick into overdrive marketing several months before the lull that you want to start booking in that period of time that aren't dependent on the real estate market. I hope that makes sense.

Maybe this is where you offer redesign service or interior arranging or things like that. I'm not a fan of holiday decorating but that's also a thing that you could do as well. Just because that's not my wheelhouse doesn't that mean that isn’t somebody else’s, but those are the kinds of things you want to be thinking about as you're planning financially for your business, because your whole job as a CEO is to protect the revenue and keep it coming in, and you should be prepared with an inventory system if you're growing that vacant staging business because you really don't want to be in a position where you are, as you grow and you have multiple properties out, you have no idea where anything is and all of that, so you really want to have in place an inventory tracking system earlier in your business because then you're not having to inventory a warehouse full of items, you're maybe inventorying a few storage spaces full of things, and you'll also need to raise your prices in this timeframe because most likely the prices that you set in growth were to really accommodate a much smaller operation, and that's another reason why we want to encourage you to think about, if you're in growth, setting your pricing as though you already have a team in place, as though you already have warehouse space, as though you already have a truck that you're paying maybe a monthly payment on or something like that.

You want to come out from the gate charging more early in your business so that you can capture some of those funds, put them in a rainy day account so that when your cash flow may get strapped during this accelerated phase, you don't have to take jobs out of scarcity and you don't have to be nervous to grow because you've got that buffer.
Anyway, that's what that looks like. Let's dive into your operations and delivery, and what are some of the things, the to-dos, that you will want to do as a result of what this accelerate landscape looks like. You're definitely going to want to be perfecting your processes. This is the time, again, where you want to systematize as much as possible and you want to look at your services and go “are these doable if I hired somebody else to do it?” and so like my famous thing is shopping. Shopping is not scalable at all unless you can systematize that where it's like “we only shop at these stores and you have two hours in which to do this, and this is how we shop, we start with pillows, and then we go to artwork, or vice versa,” whatever, that is as much as you can systematize that process.

In our team, for example, for occupied staging is, when we do a styling evaluation, if we want to recommend throw pillows or whatever like that, that the client can purchase for install because we don't put inventory in occupied listings unless we have a very strong client filter. Most people don't fall into that filter for us. Client filters is another topic we'll talk about in future podcasts. So, what we have done is we have created Pinterest boards where we have the links or whatever to all of what our look is, and occasionally those things need to be refreshed because things come and go at Target, but it's all done remotely, We don't step foot out of our office in order to make those selections. Everything is done online and because we allow for a consultation, believe it or not, we have up to 8 hours to work on that, which we don't do, but in order to have a greater than 50% profit margin, we have that wiggle room in our pricing, but we like to travel to and from the styling evaluation, the styling evaluation, and the deliverables all done in under 4 hours. Because we know that, and we have the Pinterest board available, our team literally goes and picks from the Pinterest board rather than having to go out and recreate the wheel and shop from start online for what we need. That's just an example of trying to create a system out of if you want to shop for your clients and advise them, create a Pinterest board or create a Canva mood board, or design files mood boards where your team can pull very easily from what your aesthetic is or what the aesthetic is that needs to be put in a place.

Automating as much as possible. So this is where probably my tech nervous, my tech averse people are probably going to be stressed out, but I will tell you what, automation, when you start to see it in operation and you can get support for that, you can go to Fiverr, you can go to micalaquinn.com, you can find virtual assistants who can help you with this automation process. You will flipping lose your mind with joy and happiness, rainbows, and unicorns, and all the things when you start automating some processes. An example from our business is, styling evaluations get booked from a link and they get paid for by a link, so a client wants to book a styling evaluation? They click the link, they are sent to our payment link first, they pay, and then when they pay, they are redirected back to a page that says who do we need to send our calendar to because we had to solve for the fact that sometimes Realtors purchase on behalf of their clients. Sometimes sellers do, but it's really the seller that needs the calendar not the realtor, so if they get redirected back to a page where it says who should get our calendar, the realtor if they're paying, can put in their clients name and e-mail address, the client receives the calendar, they scheduled the appointment based on their availability overlapping with ours, we’re already paid for that appointment, and then that cascade, that appointment, sets up a series of automations to prepare the client for the appointment and remind them of the appointment.

Then for example, with our styling evaluation, we'll keep going with that once we've had our styling evaluation and we create the deliverables, which is our selling success plan. As soon as our team submits that through the app that we use for that, which is Canva, that triggers them to be added to a list inside of our CRM, our customer relationship management tool, which is in our case, we use AWeber, but that puts them on a list that sends a series of appointment emails following the appointment saying “we hope it was a great appointment. If you have any questions, please reach out. If you love working with us please give us a five star review here,” and then they get followed up with several more touch points then to sell our next service, which is our photo styling service, and they can again go through that scheduling process through the links, so it's all automated.

So, there will be a whole podcast on automating because there's a lot there. You want to look at things that you do repeatedly over and over again that rather than manually doing them, can you create an automation? That speaks to creating ways to be more efficient. So, creating ways that if you have an inventory place, how do you pull inventory? Where are the things located in your storage facilities, your warehouse facilities, to allow you to take the fewest steps possible to get everything pulled? Is bedding put together all in one bag together? Do you have a bedding standard? Is there a standard way that you do bedding, for example, for a vacant, so that every time it gets done to the same standard? All of those things are helping your team be more efficient.

One of our things is we have our delivery team deliver to the site the day before our styling team gets in there, and we have furniture delivery from an outside company, so this is a little bit different if you have your own moving team coming in, but for us, inventory gets delivered the day before so that when we get on site, we're laying down carpets, we're vacuuming them, we are doing all of the bathrooms, we are getting bedding packaged, we are laying out art, while our furniture delivery is arriving or during preparation for that, so that once the furniture is delivered, we're pretty much out of there because we've already set aside what the accessories are for the coffee table, so once the delivery company puts it in place, the accessories go on, boom, it's done. You can keep moving. So, that's creating more efficiency.
You are probably going to be handling issues with clients at this point as you grow. A variety of clients. You're probably going to experience some clients that are requesting revisions to the work that you've done, they forget to notify you that the settlement is happening and haven't let you know ahead of time to put the de-stage on your list, you might experience damage or loss of your inventory due to all kinds of things, so you're going to want to be prepared with some communication plans and we'll be talking about that actually in the very near future. You want to have some really good thoughts around what will happen and how you will handle issues in a really professional way that enables you to operate from your highest thinking versus your fight-or-flight because when we're in fight-or-flight, because we've received notice of an issue, we're never really making the best decisions or communicating from our clearest, most neutral, grounded state.

This is also the time, like I said, when you'd be hiring team. One of the things that I did that was very helpful in the beginning was I hired administrative support first because I knew I'd be in delivery mode the most. Now, my administrative team would handle, at that time we weren't automated and scheduling appointments, so that took a lot of that off of my plate, which was great. that time wasn't billable to clients, so I had to increase my prices at that time in order to accommodate for the fact that I was bringing on somebody who wasn't actually revenue generating in their role.

You're going to be training team so you need to be prepared for training your team. We use a lot of Loom videos to do screen captures, you can do loom videos to capture just yourself facing the screen so that if, for example, one of the things that we used to do was sit with our new team members on the first couple of days of meeting them and we would have them add all of the the key apps that we use in our business to their phones. Their Gmail apps, their Google Drive, their time tracking app, there are the forms that we use, those apps, and what we realized was we were doing that repeatedly. We could simply create video tutorials and they could do that ahead of the first meeting so that they were told ahead of our first initial kickoff training day to have all of those things completed and they had the video tutorials to go through to get that added onto their phones, so that's just an example of getting together some training libraries and thinking about, again, the way you do everything in your business.

You're also going to be doing some team building and some team managing. What I think you're noticing is that in addition to the fact that you are still probably the chief marketing officer, you are still likely the the lead stager in your business, you’re the operations manager, you are now also a middle manager to your team, so there is this whole extra added role that you didn't have. So, your your plate was already feeling full, and this will make it feel even fuller, and this is part of that ‘drinking from a fire hose’ experience you're going to likely have at the beginning of these accelerate years.

Here's how to prepare for this phase of business. First of all, you need to get a full picture of your expenses and the cost to deliver services as though you have a team in place. I know I keep saying that, and I can't say it enough. In this, you want to include your salary. I know that often most advice is that you you take your salary out of profit, and that's great, but if you don't know what your salary is and you're not setting your prices for that, you're going to get the leftovers, so put it in as a fixed expense early in your business so that you are in the habit of paying yourself because if you're not in the habit of paying yourself, if you get to accelerate, you're definitely not going to be paying yourself.

When you're in, especially, this early phase of accelerate, you want a budget for inventory every month, so add a line item for purchasing inventory if that is part of your business model every single month for your monthly expenses. This will help you price for your future business.

I would say when you're thinking about your monthly expenses, look at what warehouse space in your area goes for if that is what your looking at. Look at what it costs to get sprinter vans or whatever those are. You can often get them pre-owned but you're probably looking at you know a $30-50,000 investment in a moving vehicle if that is where you're going. You're going to want to think about what you would hire if you had an in house moving team. If you have an assistant stager, what would that cost? If you had a lead stager on every job, if you had a team where there’s a lead stager, an assistant stager, and two movers, what is that going to cost you to deliver? How long do you think it will take to do an install with that amount of team? Guesstimate it. Guesstimate high. Say six hours and then start engineering your pricing from that. We want to engineer from actual numbers and math, not drama in our head, not what we think it might cost. As business owners, we need to look at what the numbers are, and those numbers might stress you out and freak you out a little bit, and you might have to do some self-coaching around that. We'll talk about that in a minute when we talk about the mindsets and the thoughts you need to have.

Again, documenting all those steps in your process in detail and in a cloud based system, so you could do that. We use Google documents in our business, and we use Asana for all of the these steps in the process and in each step, if there needs to be a supporting description or supporting video tutorial, or a supporting file or folder, that all gets added into that step inside of Asana. Inside Asana, you can write a task and you can have a description, and you can put links in there, you can upload images, whatever it is that you think somebody's going to need.

For example, if the task is to set up a folder when we receive notification that a client has booked a styling evaluation, the first step would be to create a folder for them. Create a folder for them in Google Drive. This is how we want it to be named, and this is where you find it, even the steps. First step is Google Drive, then in our case, it's 111 Team Documents. In 111 Team Documents, you will find the styling evaluation Clients folder. That's where that folder gets created, and it needs to be labelled “SE”, which is Styling Evaluation, the client’s name, phone number, e-mail address, and the name of the realtor. That's what that folder gets called in our space. That is all written out very, very detailed, and the link to the Styling Evaluation Clients folder is in that description, so they don't actually have to do thatm but we have it written out so that it is so clear that there is no mistaking where that folder needs to be created and how we want it to be named, and then of course what do we want inside of that folder available for our team. We want a folder for before photos, we want a folder for after photos, so that's all created before our team goes out to the appointment. That is that. So, documenting all of this. Every little minute detail you can think of.

Then, you want to create hiring profiles. You want to think about the description that you want. If you have never read the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, excellent book, and it talks about getting those things prepared because you, right now, are likely you’re the job of lead stager in your business. You are holding that position down but you eventually want to not likely be in that lead stager position. You want to hire for that, you want to think about what are the qualities of that person. First of all, you want a personality fit, so you want to make sure that comes through very clearly in your hiring profiles, and then what are day-to-day responsibilities, what are the things they need to have, like a valid drivers license, for example, reliable transportation, their own vehicle, and that's if you don't provide all of that.

You want to gather your hiring documentation. This is where you want to put together an application. We have an application that people need to fill out before we ever have a conversation with them, weed out a lot of people, it's outstanding, and we have that inside of Rethink. Get that application. You want to get together an employment folder that has W-2s, has employment agreements, maybe want a non-disclosure and non-compete agreements. I would definitely recommend the non-disclosure non-compete. I feel like there's still not enough stagers in the world. There's more than enough to go around, so that is an optional thing. You want to plan for how you onboard and train your new team members, so you'll want to think about what would the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days look like for your new hires, what are the benchmarks you want them to be hitting, and how do you need to help them get there. You want to plan how you'll give feedback for new hires. This is something that you want it, again, if you have a 30 day, 60 day, 90 day benchmark, you're going to have those check-in points along the way. You want to plan for when your team will meet for various purposes, like team building. Maybe it's weekly team huddle or team sync to let everybody know what projects are coming up, keep them abreast on any new training topics, that kind of thing.

You'll want to determine a payroll provider. A lot of us in the industry use ADP and Gusto, but there are a lot out there. Paychex is an example of one. You'll want to start investigating which one you'll want to use because when you bring on employees there are going to be taxes and things that need to be taken out that you don't really want to be responsible for. You'll definitely want a payroll provider to do that.

You want to understand how to insure your team, so making sure that your general liability covers your employees and workers compensation. All going to be very important. Those are things while you're in the growth phase, and you've got a little more white space in your calenda when you're not marketing and delivering your services, you want to start getting these things in place.

So, that is a lot of stuff, and like I said a lot, many of these we’ll be breaking down in more detail as the podcast continues to roll out to you, but what I want to offer to you before we close, some thoughts that will become very helpful, because as we know based on the results triad from episode one, if you haven't listened that go back and listen that episode, we've got our knowledge, which is a lot of that stuff I've started to give you, just a little scratching of the surface. Knowledge, and then we have actions and results, but bridging the gap between learning these concepts and implementing them and applying them is your beliefs in the middle, your brain. Your knowledge, beliefs, actions equal your result, so we need to be really examining our brains and our thought processes and really calling ourselves out on stuff because our brains lie to us. Believe it or not, they lie to us all the flipping time. All the time. Let’s not get ourselves into creating unintentional thoughts. A lot of us do on a daily basis have a lot of unintentional thoughts spinning in the background of our brain, and we want to be thinking very strategically about the thoughts that we want to focus on, and practice to get through this phase.

The first thing is, you can hire amazing, dedicated, incredible team members, who your clients love. You can do this. I spent a lot of time in like “they only want me,” and my business isn't even named after me. It's not like they were hiring Lori Fisher Interiors. They were hiring Rethink Home Interiors, but there was nothing in my business name that suggested that they were only getting me, but I spun in, “they only want me, they only want me, and they're not going to tolerate somebody else” and all of that, so get that out BS out of your head. Because if you're going to grow a legit, grown-up ass business, getting real tough love here, you will need to hire other stagers. You can hire a team that is better than you at styling. My lead stager blows me away. She is incredible. She spots things quickly and she loves training people, and she is really good at it. So, she has trained our team so that there is a standard how Rethink Home Insteriors stagers go out into the world and work with our clients. Again, you can hire team that your clients love and it's so fun for us to see because we have our calendar to see there are Realtors who are just drawn to certain team members that they love them and we hear it all the time, and we hear it from the sellers all the time, I get daily “we love Kristen,” “Lisa was amazing,” “Eileen was so incredible,” “the detail was amazing.” People love the Rethink Homes Interior team because hired amazing, incredible people.

Your clients won't necessarily stop working with you if they can't have you on a project. Another fear that I had, and did I lose a couple of clients when I stopped being their stylist? Yeah. I did. I needed to outgrow them because they were already clients that were demanding, had a hard time honoring boundaries, always wanted to cross the boundaries, always wanted to tweak our services to fit their needs, emergencies all the time, so you could lose some clients. You're not going to lose all your clients. In fact, you won't lose most of your clients. So, just put that worry out of your brain right now. Your team can pull and install to your standards without you involved in any of them. I haven't stepped foot in probably 99.9% of the listings that our team does for the last four or five years. My team is incredible. I have rarely on occasion had to pitch in for a pull or a vacant or an eval just because of vacations or somebody was sick or something like that, but my team does everything, every step of the way, to an incredible standard without me in it.

Hiring someone who isn't a right fit is a learning experience and it can be fixed. This was another experience that we had. We hired a team member, who for a whole host of reasons, wasn’t a great fit, and we had to let them go, and I was very stressed out about it. I had to let someone go when my lead stager came to me and she said this person is very toxic on the site, it’s very difficult to work with them and “I don't know if I can stay working for you if I have to be working with that person.” That was a big wake up call. Did the sky fall? No. Did the person handle it poorly? No. All the things. Did it help us find a new amazing team member to fill that role? Yes, we did, and there is so much joy and happiness on our team, and that we love spending time together, and do our happy hours in meetings, and all that stuff.

The investment your clients make in your business is worth every penny, so as your brain begins to freak the hell out over the pricing that you probably need to charge and you get worried that you're going to have clients leave in drones, jump off the you train because you're too expensive, just remember that they make thousands of dollars from their investment with you. Thousands of dollars. So, you have to keep reminding your brain of that every time you want to freak out over the fact that you probably didn't price in the beginning, and that you're going to have to raise your prices to accommodate your new infrastructure.

So, that, my lovelies, is what I have for you for this week. I will see you next week on the podcast, and you have an amazing week.

Bye for now.

Thank you so much for listening to the Staging Sips Podcast. If you love what you've learned here today, and you want to learn more about how to market and grow your staging business more strategically, I would love to see you join us inside of the Rethink You mentorship program. If you want more details and get on our waiting list, you can go to https://Rethinkhomeinteriors.com/waitlist. Looking forward to seeing you in the classroom.

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003 | Second Phase Of Growing A Successful Staging Business

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