How to Know When You're Ready to Scale Your Staging Business

Are you ready to scale your staging business?

Can you make money in your staging business while you're vacationing, Netflixing or sleeping?

You bet!

And it is so important that you create a business that you own vs it owning you.

In today's episode, I dive into the difference between growing your staging business and scaling, or leveraging, your staging business to that magical place where you aren't needed so much in every aspect of your business.

Listen in to learn more about that sweet spot and how you'll get there!

Click here to sign up for the waitlist for the next enrollment period for Rethink You, the year-long mentorship program to help staging business owners see the road ahead, plan for it and grow, flow and thrive.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

What's the difference between growing your staging business and scaling your staging business
The 3 things you should be focusing on when you are in the growth phase of your staging business
Why is scaling your business a magical, happy place to be
How you can scale your staging business so it makes you money and runs smoothly without you

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

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How To Scale

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy to be here again with you this week, sharing my lessons learned mistakes made and giving you a look ahead at things that you can anticipate in your staging business and your staging business growth.

Because truthfully, that's one of the most important lenses we can have is what's coming at us. Right. And what's what we can expect and sort of what can we begin to plan for?  Right. So that's what today's podcast is really about.

We're talking about growing your staging business. And then what does it look like to go from growing your staging business to scaling your staging business?

And I guess the kind of overarching theme of this is can you really make money in your staging business while you're on vacation or while you're Netflixing or while you're hanging out with your family or sleeping.

And the answer is absolutely totally. Yes, you can. You absolutely can.

And it's necessary. It's necessary to get your business to that place so that your business can serve more.

People can put more good in the world and really most importantly, so that you, as a business owner, don't burn out because when you are starting your business, you are wearing all the hats, right?

You're the chief executive officer. You are the chief marketing officer. You're the chief operating officer. You're the chief financial officer.
You're the lead stager, you're the assistant stage, or you're probably even the moving guy, right? You're wearing so many hats and you can only do that for a certain period of time.

You can only be a business directory of one, or maybe even two for so long in our staging business, because we are a time based business.

Your time is how you make money. So we're trading time for dollars all the time. But one of my goals for you as a business owner is to obviously show you the road ahead, help you set your business up from the very beginning to scale.

That's one of the things that I see people make a mistake with all the time. They create services that aren't really scalable services.  So I want to make sure that we are thinking of your future business and what it will look like when you're operating today.

What are the policies, procedures, operations services you have that you can leverage as your business gets bigger. I want you to elevate your business skillsets before you need them.

I don't want you to always feel like you're on your heels. Like I think I felt for a long time to my business.  There's certainly an element of that because there are so many scenarios that come at you that you're not necessarily anticipating typically that's related around client requests and things like that.

But There's also a lot of being on your heels when you start to get busy and get effective at selling your services, And you're not quite ready to handle the influx of clients.

And I really want to make help. You make the transition from growth to scaling your business so that you Create a Leveraged business so that you can get to that point where you're making money while you're on vacation.

So Maybe just based on that little preamble that I gave you, that Little diatribe there, You ask some questions, you know, you might wonder what is the difference between growth and scaling and a staging business.

And we'll go over That.  What are the steps To transition from growth to scale? We'll cover that as Well. And how do you know when you're ready to prepare your business for scaling?

So we'll go into all of that, but I think it's really important for us to start off with some definitions.

I think I just want to start By Really painting the picture Of what growth looks Like and what, how was that defined?

How am I thinking it's defined what that can look like and what can, what can you be focusing on during your growth Phase to set you Up more effectively for when you scale?

So Growth really means adding revenue at the same pace that you're adding your Resources. So this is Very true in a staging business that You'll add resources as You grow in the form of people and inventory and your revenue will grow in kind.

So this means that your financial growth really comes only with greater expenses. So your Profitability is Lower in the growth phase of your business.

It might even just be break even. It's just really, really important to know That you Are going to have this Period Of ramp up where You're Going to keep needing to add people.

And again, if you're doing a vacant service, you're going to Accrue Inventory, Storage, Insurance Supplies to store all of Your inventory,

things that you need onsite for an installation in the form of, you know, vacuum cleaners, steamers, Ladders, tools, Equipment, all that Stuff, right?

So there Will be an outlay of Cash That you're going to need in the beginning of your business and during growth.

But the Cool thing is that There Are some benefits To this Growth thing. So it might feel like you're in hustle mode, which Is Normal, because again, you're wearing all the hats.

You're not only, you know, being the administrative assistant to onboard a client. You're also The lead stage, or You're also the marketing person who's out doing networking and presentations and all of that.
So During growth, you increase the time and energy and effort you're putting into your business, But you're also At the same time growing your expertise About Your business, you're growing your expertise About, You know, How, what, how, what your processes look like for each area Of your business.

So you're going to going to find out, you know, what is the best way to onboard a client?

What is the, what are the things you need to have in your client agreement?

How do you do everything that you do, right? So how do you conduct yourself at a consultation or what we call a styling evaluation in my business?

How do you conduct yourself on pulling inventory or selecting inventory for a given project? What are the steps to that?
How do you install? You know, what is the process that you like to go through to be the most efficient you can be?

So it's really great that you're getting to see every little department in your business and beginning to see what works and refine those processes, but you'll also become excellent at selling your services because you're going to start to see results.

You're going to see what happens with your clients. You're going to see the value you bring into the world, the results of, you know, fast sales, the money you make for people.

So you become really, really excellent at selling your services. So that is where growth can get a little scary for us is when you get really good at selling what you do, it's like a double-edged sword.

If you're not prepared. And the growth phase you'll already really need to be thinking about hiring because of that. So I want you to begin to marinate on that, even if you're still not fully booked and your calendar isn't totally full, you will be hiring people because you are going to get better at that selling of that process.

So in order to do that, the main jobs and the earliest days of your business are not only to begin to dial in your processes, but to document them.

And that part is really key and literally documenting everything as you learn, you should be documenting it because the only way that people will be able to implement what's in your brain is if your brain is documented.

And I always think of the example of whenever we bring on a new team member. And in the early days, when I brought on a new team member and we had a styling evaluation to go to, for example, every single of my first hires, before I really knew to document this, every single one of the

new hires that would come with me on early styling evaluations would show up dressed, beautifully dresses, heels, all the things.

And I realized, Ooh, I need to, after it happened a couple of times, I was like, oh, I have to document this because we want to wear low heeled shoes that have a rubber sole that are easy to slip on and slip off.
We want to be dressed nicely and put together, but not so pristinely because in styling evaluations, first of all, in terms of our shoes, lots of people are no shoe household.

So we'll need to be taking our shoes off at the door. We want them to be easy to remove, or we may be on a wood floors and we want to make sure we're protecting those wood floors.

We're not damaging them. We also want to Be easy To go up and down stairs. If The appointment turns into, maybe we're helping shimmy some furniture around and it's active.

We don't want to be in heels and dresses for that. So That's not something that a new hire necessarily knows, but I know because I learned it because I Did that when I started, I Dressed Super nicely.
And then I was like, oh, wait, this isn't really practical To Be up and downstairs wearing heels in people's Houses, or I'd have to have them removed.

So again, I needed to document what was in my brain and what was in my learning process For A future team.

So even when you're just a directory of one, this is really, really important. And the other Key to That is you want to make sure that you are documenting in a place that can be shared.

In the beginning. I had some word documents That Were stored on my computer. Not helpful when you start to bring on team, you need it in a shared space.

And actually it's better for you anyway, because as somebody who had a computer crash and lost all of my data that was on my computer, it would have been much better for me to have Had it Stored in a cloud based system like Google Drive Or in something like a Asana or Teamwork or any one of those project management software.

But the key is to have your processes Documented in a shared space. And it's great Because If you're using something like a sauna, you can attach supporting documentation, whether that is, you know, if you want to say for your administrative assistant, send this email to welcome our clients, you can attach The exact Email or the exact document That Goes along with that.

If You want to share A little video, like a, A loom video To Show something, you can attach That to the Step inside of something like a sauna, super, Super helpful.

So that's The first thing. And all of that, That is to help you prepare Your business To,  Higher. The other thing is that I mentioned is creating services That are scalable.

You want to think about Services that Can be Scaled later. Talk about that when I talk about scaling, but that's another little piece there, and then you want to develop a hiring mindset.

This is really, really important Because You're going to need to Be ready to hire first of All. But you're also going to need to manage your brain as you hire and bring people on.

First thing I want you to know is hiring cost money in the beginning because you're getting somebody ramped up. So you likely Will maybe have A Loss in profit, not a total loss.

Sometimes you might, but It Will cost you money. So all the more reason to be thinking about your future business and how you're pricing your services, What Do you think you'd pay A lead stager to Take over consultations per hour, then how do you build in to have 50% profit margin?

When you're hiring somebody to do all of those steps of a consultation or a styling evaluation, hiring slows you down in the beginning, it's going to take time to onboard team members and get them up to speed.

It will slow you down. It will maybe frustrate you. There will be a lot of questions you'll have to answer, which will help you refine the documentation you have around your processes, but it definitely will slow you down in the beginning that said that slowing down will make you tons of money.  Over time.

Hiring takes a lot of effort and care and thought in the beginning, you do need to make yourself available to your new team members.
You need to be there for them checking in with them on a regular basis. But the cool thing is once you invest that time, many people can, can be completely autonomous.

And the cool thing in our business is that I don't even train and onboard our team members anymore. We have that as a combination of automation, we've created a video library for our client, our new team members, and my lead stager takes on training of all of our new assistant stagers.

So there isn't any training that I actually do any more because we've created the documentation. And I have created someone who is so dialed in on our process that she can train every one of our team members in the rethink way, the rethink home interiors way.
So that is really growth. So you're, you're definitely going to be one wanting to think about documenting your processes. If you aren't already and beginning to get your mind ready to accept that there are some early costs associated with hiring.

Maybe I'm not sure cost is exactly the right word, but there's some short-term pain for some long-term gains. So there is that little bit of river of misery that Brooke Castillo talks about.

All right. So let that brings us to scaling. So you're going to get to a place in your business where you've hired team, you're continuing to grow, and you're going to be refining processes.

While you go through that, you'll be bringing on team members that are going to ask questions, going to have gaps in their knowledge that you're going to be able to plug by refining your processes, right?

So it's a very kind of fluid dynamic thing, creating your systems and dialing in your processes for awhile. Once you get them dialed in and they are running like clockwork, that's when you really can get to the place of scale and scale is about increasing revenue without adding extra expenses at the same time, or you're able to deliver more in less time.

There's also part of scaling could be processes done in mass at little to no extra effort or room for a lot more clients without having to add new research sources.

I also like to think about scaling as creating a wow experience for your clients simply generated by something that is part of your process and systems that even if you're not there.

So like I was saying, having a team member or several team members trained exactly in your method means that you can deliver a wow experience without you even being around and available, which is super, super cool.

So in staging, we really develop our scale by leveraging repeatable services, processes, and automation. That's how we create scalability in our businesses.

So let me just share a little bit about that about what that looks like in my business.

So for us, when we have a consultation or styling evaluation, for example, we'll use that as an example, when we noticed that it was taking our administrative assistant, our office queen, as we call her when it was taking our office queen a lot of time and a lot of back and forth between realtors and clients for booking and scheduling and getting on our calendar and then spending time invoicing.
And then following up with people who were forgetting to pay, we decided that we would use a scheduling app to automate that system first.

So we moved to using something called Acuity scheduler acuity then allowed the clients to have access to our calendar of open appointments and choose a time that worked for them.

When they booked that appointment, we had a little intake form, or we have an intake form that we capture some necessary information for our team and for the project.

And then they pay right there at the time of scheduling. So that cut out a lot of administrative time where our office queen could be focused on other things that are of higher value for us, like helping us market our business by helping create, you know, emails and social media posts and things like that, that help us spread the word about us versus getting in the weeds of trying to get somebody on our calendar.
So then once we have our appointment and it gets assigned, it gets put automatically on the right team members calendar, they are notified.

So all of that again was taken out of our admins time. So then once we have the appointment, we created an app in something called GoCanvas.  There's also something called Ucalc there it's fillable forms. There's also a Stagingconsultations.com I believe has a version of this.

And we created an automated form where it's a lot of check the box sorts of things. So with the ability to add notes as needed, but that really shrunk the amount of time.

It took us to create what we call a Selling Success Plan in my business. So we used again a software tool in order to leverage the business.
So the cool thing is that takes less time, right? So we're able to deliver the same service in less time, both on the front end and on the backend of that service, which makes it more profitable.

The cool thing for me is that I can be on vacation or anywhere, and I'm getting notifications that we have booked a new appointment that we have new revenue coming into the business.

That is what it looks like to have a leveraged business. It took us a while to get there because we needed to refine all of those processes.
But once we did now, it's like clockwork. It's super, super easy. So the right time to think about scaling is in the very early stages of your business.

As I mentioned before, when you're in the growth phase, you actually want to be thinking about scaling. So when you think about creating services, I want you to consider this, can you teach and train this to someone else?

So one of the things that I see a lot of people doing is that they will shop for clients. That's really great, but can you teach and train somebody how to necessarily shop for your clients?

That's a little tricky, right? Because there are some nuance to that, but you also want to make sure that you that there's a time finite, like a finite time, that will happen for that deliverable.

So can it be completed in a standardized amount of time because your profitability obviously depends on you being able to determine how long something takes, right?

So, I mean, you could charge a client hourly for shopping, but you know, you want to be able to say, okay, we're going to spend two hours shopping and know that for the most part, two hours of shopping is what's going to happen.

That's not always the case. Right. Another thing to think about is would the service make sense when my team and I are super busy, so example, several years ago, I worked on a house where the homeowner had had another stager come in head of me and that stager brought in inventory and then every week or so would come and take that inventory out so she could use it in another house and then bring it back to this client if she had a showing.

So this stager was running all over the place, putting a little bit of inventory in several houses. Is that something that you can operationally schedule?

The logistics of that just don't make sense? They don't make sense when you're a team of one. They definitely don't make sense when you're a team of two.

So you want to think about if you're going to put inventory in say you do a occupied styling with your inventory, which is a whole other Podcast, because that is a big Beast.

And there are a lot of potholes And speed bumps on that one that I'll have To share with you.

But If you're going to do an occupied with inventory, you actually need to think about the minimum amount of inventory that would need to go into that House And a finite or defined rental Period of whether It is a month or two months Or two weeks, Two weeks.  To me seems again like a logistical nightmare when you get busy. So 30 to 60 Days of rental would have to be a minimum.

So those are the things you want to be thinking about As you Are creating your services. Is there a clear Deliverable and outcome For what the service will be?  Right?

So is it Very defined finite things? So we do something called Photo Styling instead of doing kind of occupied, full occupied Staging.

We don't really do much of that Because we Have very strong client filters For Those kinds of projects, but we do something called photo styling, and it Is An appointment up to two Hours With a team of two Where we will Do the finishing touches.

This is for clients who have already had a styling evaluation with us, and they have been identified through our client filters As people who would be appropriate for the service, the photo Styling.

But it's two Hours up to Two hours and the delivery, We will style to like the T all of the spaces That we can within those two Hours.
Obviously <inaudible> Those rooms that are highest return on investment For our Photography and for the real estate listing and for showings.

But it's Very Defined. It's a very defined deliverable thing. It's not it's not unclear to the client, what they will be getting.

So Anything that you do can be completed in a standard way, anything from the way that you select inventory within your warehouse, To How you even store things in your warehouse to make it the most efficient, the most standardized way.

You know, I've talked about in the, in other content I've created that you can create Lookbooks. So if you want Your Assistant stagers To Pull inventory, or even your movers to pull inventory, there can be A lookbook of How, you know, pillow mixes that You Have, how to make a bed and styling them in all different ways so that somebody can pull, Take a look, Book and plug and chug there's Absolutely You can standardize anything.

In fact, my son was just telling me That he Is working in a part-time job, you know, help prepping pizzas For a pizza place.

And they literally have the exact number of pepperoni slices that go on how Large the pie is.  Like it's Dialed In so Tightly, so that the Same Quality is delivered Every single time, no matter who is doing it.

So Like I said, you can Really Leverage and the example of our silent evaluation technology to automate just about anything in your process, that isn't hands on working with the client just to make it simpler and more efficient to deliver.

So The right time to transition to scaling, as I mentioned, is when you've brought in team and you've spent time cycling through all of Your Processes and smoothing them out and dialing, dialing them in To see what w how it works best for a group of people.

And you, once you found like the gaps in your Processes, More training opportunities better Ways For getting things done and likely this is going to hit you around a 100 K in revenue.

It may hit you a little bit Before, Just depending on your pricing structure, but around a hundred K in your businesses, when you can really begin to scale and leverage, and you, As The business owner can sit back and begin to Just watch the fruits of all of these, Your labor and all of your learnings.

It's a really, Really Exciting time. So I Want to encourage you to be thinking about all Of this as you're Developing your business for today and What It looks like, and whether the Services You deliver and all of that, This will help you create a super Scalable business For When you've hit through That period of Growth and early hiring, which is Super, Super exciting.

So That's what I have for you today. Hopefully There's a little gem in there for you, and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next episode!

Are you ready to scale your staging business?

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

How To Scale

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