Deciding what to charge for your home staging consultations at the beginning of your business can feel like fumbling around in the dark trying to find the light switch even if you have taken a staging training course.
That's totally normal.
When we're first starting out, we often set our pricing based on ourselves as the employee and what we would like to make per hour. The thought process looks something like this, “I'd like to make $75/hour. The service will take 3 hours to deliver so I'll price it at $225.00.”
On the surface, that logic makes perfect sense. However, the problem with setting prices this way is that it doesn't take into account what your business needs to sustain itself and grow profitably in the future. Like when you start to bring on a team to help you. You can see that if you have to start sharing that $225.00 with even one team member, your profitability starts to go way down. I wrote in more detail about how you can plan like a larger business even from the beginning here.
I just want to stop here and reiterate that at some point, you will likely have a team if you want to serve as many clients as possible and keep your sanity. Haha! And to truly get to a place where you have time and financial freedom, you will absolutely have a team (and probably stop being the Sr. Stager in your business!).
Ok so at this point you may be getting the inkling that you need to raise your rates. But I get how that can feel stressful.
For many of us, the thought of raising our prices brings a shizz ton of drama. It definitely did for me so that's why I want to share with you how I calmed myself down and moved through it.
The Method I Use to Charge More for Home Staging Services
Perspective
The first thing we need is some perspective and I'm about to lay some down. Some of us spend more on shoes or getting our hair done than we charge someone to help them sell their house!!! And I don't know about you, but my hairdresser never sends me an email telling me the price of my cut and highlight is going up. It just happens and I as the client recalibrate and pay it. I love my hairdresser, I trust her, we have a relationship and it is totally worth it to me.
Now let's circle back to you….you help people make thousands! Multiple thousands! Based on your beautiful brain and gifts! That's worth something! That's worth a lot even if it feels like it's easy for you. Not everyone knows what you know or can do what you do. It's worth a lot even if people question it or ask you for a discount. Their money story isn't your money story and the only one who can and should value you the most is you. So stand in your value, my friend, and raise those rates!
And yes, you may lose some clients and that's amazing! You want to get yourself into alignment with people who value you beyond what you charge. Deep breathes….you've got this!
Create A Value Stack
Create a what?! This may be a new concept to you in your business but you have definitely been exposed to value stacking before. A value stack is the psychology behind infomercials (but yours will not be cheesy or yelly!) where for the same price you get this and this and this as well. We can apply this to our businesses and it can really help you when you are struggling to find your inner mojo to raise your rates. I actually did a FB Live training on this that you can access here.
In my business, I decided to create my very first value stack in our Styling Evaluation service (our version of a Home Staging Consultation) in order to serve our clients better but also to make myself feel better about raising our rates #truefacts. I decided it would be nice to provide our sellers with:
- a Styling Guide which walks them through how to style coffee tables, etc
- access to our photo gallery of rooms we had staged to show them how to style every room
- a social media post to spread the news when their listing goes live
- an email that goes out to our list of local realtors when their listing goes live
- a list of moving supplies with links to purchase them
- and honestly, as cheesy as it sounds, so many more goodies
Once I created this value stack, it felt so much easier to sell my services at a higher price point because I knew that our clients were getting so supported in a way that made the service even more valuable and tangible. Now you don't have to do all of this, but if you even do a couple of them, think about how fun it will be to share this with your prospective clients!
So that is how I have been able to wrap my mind around increasing my prices without stressing out so much and I hope it helps you too! I teach these concepts and more in the RethinkYou mentorship program, so if you want to learn about how to charge more for home staging services, please join us! You can get on the waitlist by clicking the button below.
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