Home Staging Marketing Lessons From Paint Colors Befitting a Man Cave

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CIL Man Caves Collection

One of many fab color palettes from CIL Man Caves Collection

Wait until you see what paint company CIL has done to reposition their paint colors for a new audience! It’s a brilliant stroke (pun intended) that I just had to bring to your attention— not only for the marketing genius of it but for the delicious visuals. Are you as passionate about color as I am?

But first, let’s set some context as it applies to marketing lessons you can learn for your home staging business!

If you’ve been following my blog, newsletter or home staging training program for any length of time, you know that I place a  very strong emphasis on the importance of marketing. Aside from the fact that I’ve been recognized as one of Canada’s top marketing experts since the early 1990s, I’m passionate about marketing because it’s THE thing that will set you apart from your competition and win you business.

To put it bluntly, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most talented stager in the world, if you suck at marketing you won’t be in business long!

In the Simple Marketing Plan Companion: A Stress-Free Approach to Promoting Your Staging Business, I share a full analysis of how the 5 P’s of Marketing must work together. These are:

  1. Product – For home stagers, that’s our staging, color consulting and redesign services.
  2. Positioning – How you want your clients and potential clients to think of you and your company.
  3. Pricing – How much you charge, how your pricing packages work and how you communicate about your rates.
  4. Packaging – For home stagers, that’s how you look, sound and act, plus your company name and the appearance of your business logo, cards, advertising and website. In other words, your entire business image.
  5. Promotion – Home stagers, this includes anything you do to showcase your expertise from your website and online activities like blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc., plus all your advertising, newsletter, brochure, special promotions, strategic donations, public speaking, public relations etc. — all the “stuff” I talk about in Course 4 of the Staging Diva Training Program.

Now to our Paint Colors Befitting a Man Cave lesson!

What a perfect example of the 5 P’s of Marketing working together to bring some excitement to business category that hasn’t seen much innovation (except for new finishes and formulations). CIL is a Canadian company (available through Home Depot) that decided to go after the male market. While most paint color decisions are ultimately made by women, men still have a say in mixed households and what better way to get them involved than to cater to their sensibilities and interests?

While I’m the only one making decorating decisions in my home because I’m single, I can imagine it would be much easier talking one’s husband into painting a a powder room “Rust On My Truck” rather than “Classic Liberty Red.” And if I were doing a Color Consultation on it’s own, or as part of my home staging recommendations, I know a man would feel more comfortable agreeing to “Center Ice” rather than “Tracery,” or “Iced Vodka” rather than “Cloud Nine,” for the living room.

So check out the wonderful color palettes inside the CIL Ultimate Man Caves collection. And while you’re there, step back and consider the marketing by noticing how they’ve got the product, packaging, promotion and positioning all working together so brilliantly! It’s in the:

  • layout
  • photography
  • color selections and room choices
  • all the sell copy in the brochure
  • styling of the fonts and text
  • naming of the colors themselves

What do you think? Am I a total marketing and color geek to get so excited about this?

Now, think about how you market your home staging business. Are all your visual elements and your text working together to convey the right image? Please share your thoughts below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould has been writing about marketing for small businesses since the early 1990s as a frequent contributor to Profit Magazine. A home stager since 2002, she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own money-making home staging businesses. Debra is the author of several guides including: “Sales and Marketing Secrets to Boost Your Home Staging Business,” “14 Marketing Ideas to Rev Up Your Home Staging Business” and the “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Color for Home Staging Projects.” These can be found in the Staging Diva Store.

 

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Is Your Home Staging Blog Built on Someone Else’s Property?

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Home Staging Blog - Getting StartedThis is  part two of a series. You can catch up at 5 Reasons You Need a Home Staging Blog to get some more of the basics and also read some helpful tips and comments from home staging bloggers in the Staging Diva Community.

Today I’m going to tackle where you build your home staging blog. Many new bloggers start out with a free one on wordpress.com, blogger.com or activerain.com.

These options are attractive because you can get started right away with their templates and best of all, it’s free! Really you just need to decide on a name for your blog, open an account and within minutes you can be typing the content for your first blog post.

I confess that’s exactly how I got started. I first used Blogger in 2005 after taking a course on how to get started in blogging. Blogger is owned by Google so a cool side bonus is their spiders are going to visit and index your content pretty quickly. If you have a blog with an address like stagingdiva.blogspot.com, then you’re looking at a Blogger blog.

No matter where you build your blog, it’s important to know that every post has it’s own unique URL. Each category of post also has a unique URL This is a good thing because every URL represents another page that Google and the other search engines can “index.” When you look at my blogspot posts for June, 2005, they’re at this URL http://stagingdiva.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html.

The same thing happens on Active Rain. For example one of my 2 blogs there is at: http://activerain.com/blogs/thestagingdiva. An individual post will have an address like this one: http://activerain.com/blogsview/2604711/ladies-is-that-voice-in-your-head-killing-your-business-

Would you build a house on land you didn’t own?

I’m trying to keep this explanation as tech-free as possible, but stay with me because there’s a really key insight coming! Look back at these addresses. They all have “blogspot” or “active rain” in them because they are built on someone else’s “property”, ie: domain.

In other words, no matter how long I blog, I’m building up “Google Juice” for another website, not my own!

I don’t own any of these pages. Google could decide to cancel their free blogspot service or Active Rain could decide to start charging me an arm and a leg for their blogging capability and I’m stuck!

Imagine if you only posted twice a month for 5 years? That would mean you’d have 120 webpages disappear overnight along with all of the content! If you posted the recommended minimum of once per week during that time, you would lose 260 webpages. Actually more because remember I said that each post and each category get their own URL? Imagine, all those pages with your name or company name on them (that you currently delight in seeing) in Google searches suddenly gone— poof!

It was not a happy day years ago when I realized this because I had hundreds of blog posts. I buried my head in the sand for awhile wishing I hadn’t learned any better. Then one day I decided to bite the bullet and start from scratch again. You see the longer you wait, the worse it gets!

Watch for part 3 in this series. I’ll discuss what you can do if you find yourself in the situation of having a blog that’s not on your own domain. In the meantime, check out my home staging blog that’s on my own staging website. As you visit the different blog pages, notice the URLs at the top and how they’re filled with keywords that help Google find Six Elements and know that it’s a home staging company.

I’ll confess upfront that I’ve neglected to update my Six Elements blog since I’ve been so focused on Home Staging Business Report, where I generally post 2 to 3 times per week. It’s really hard to keep up too many blogs at once, no matter how good your intentions!

I have also maintained more than one blog on both Active Rain and Blogspot for SEO reasons, but they are not my main blogs. They are not where my original content goes and if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have all my content safely sitting on my own domains continuing to:

  • Boost my search engine rankings
  • Build relationships and educate others
  • Bring me paying clients

After all, that’s why you’re blogging isn’t it? Please share your questions and comments below to help me know what I need to cover in upcoming issues in this series.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years, she built her first website in 1999 to sell her artwork online; which attracted a book publisher and helped her sell her first painting to an in

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Home Staging Controversy or Effective Marketing for Real Estate Broker

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controversy as marketing tacticHome staging is a powerful part of the real estate industry. In fact as much as a decade ago, Forbes Magazine called home stagers the “dream weavers of the real estate world.” I quite loved that label and quoted it in my very first website for Six Elements Inc., the home staging business I started in 2002, after profitably buying, decorating and selling 6 of my own homes.

Despite the fact that this is not a totally new industry, and it’s not hard to argue that savvy home sellers have been decorating their houses to sell faster and for more money for at least the past 25 years (I know I have!), there are still people who don’t properly understand the role of a home stager.

There are others who misrepresent that role for their own marketing reasons as happened this month on mega real estate site, Trulia.com.

Before going into the truly bizarre claims made by San Francisco real estate broker Tara-Nicholle Nelson, I’d like you to consider her marketing motives! One of the best ways to get lots of comments on a blog post (ie: attention) is to stir up controversy.

If you make crazy or misleading claims while doing it, people will flock to their own defense. If you make wild statements masquerading as education, people who know better will comment in an effort to set the record straight. They’ll also share your content with others and encourage them to visit and make comments too (as I did when I shared a link to the original post on my Staging Diva Facbook page).

In case you didn’t see the original post, the real estate broker was apparently trying to warn gullible home buyers not to fall for the 5 “hypnotic” techniques home stagers use and position herself (and by extension all buyer’s agents) as the buyer’s savior in any real estate transaction.

Let’s face it, with so much real estate information on the Internet and an increasing number of buyers going the FSBO route, the real estate community has to keep reinforcing how essential their services are lest they follow the path of travel agents (another industry completely transformed by the Internet).

As a marketer I take my hat off to the broker, she did a great job of using two important and dare I say “hypnotic” triggers— Generating Controversy and Creating a Common Enemy.

As a home stager, her article was totally offensive. But it was designed to be controversial, so that lots of comments would follow! It’s no coincidence by the way that you have to set up a profile on Trulia to be able to comment, and they make their money by selling contact info.

According to this real estate broker in her post “5 Hypnotic Home Staging Techniques and How to See Through Them”, home stagers employ these tactics to negatively manipulate buyers:

  • Tiny furniture
  • Camouflage and cover-ups
  • Activity props you’ll never use
  • Items used strictly for appearances

And my personal favorite:

  • Neighborhood staging!

Yes home stagers, it seems we even have the power to get everyone on the street to collude with us to hide the fact that there are normally “cars on the lawn and screaming schoolkids” up and down the street! Wow, sometimes I can’t even get my own client to repaint a bathroom, I must be doing something wrong!

I really enjoyed one of the hysterically sarcastic comments left on Facebook by home stager, Susan Pfeuffer-Powell in reaction to the claim that we use tiny furniture, “I’ve been using my daughter’s American Girl doll furniture for years! Not only is it perfect in size to make those small rooms look huge, it also comes in dozen of period styles to fit the house style and target audience.”

There’s nothing wrong with a home stager’s goal being to have the home sell for as much as possible, as long as we’re not deliberately hiding real flaws. After all, isn’t that the goal of the listing agent too? In ANY transaction, real estate or otherwise, the seller wants to sell high and the buyer wants to buy low. It doesn’t mean unethical tactics need to be involved.

So while you may get all riled up reading the Trulia.com story, remember there is a marketing agenda at work, at least that’s how I see it. How about you?

Please share your thoughts below!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

 

 

 

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Home Stagers Make Extra Money with Holiday Decorating

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Sarah Richardson decorating idea featured in the Globe and Mail

Sarah Richardson holiday decorating idea as featured in the Globe and Mail.

Home stagers, the holiday season is definitely upon us and this means a gradual slow down in your home staging business over the coming weeks.

A great way to bring in extra money at this time of year is with holiday decorating. A TV News producer contacted me to appear on camera this week with my tips to “deck the halls.” They know I’m an expert home stager, yet I have never promoted myself as a seasonal decorator.

I declined the tempting offer because it’s totally not my expertise and something I personally feel intimidated by.

Everything I know about holiday decorating is what I pick up from reading news stories, like this one in the Globe & Mail featuring Sarah Richardson’s festive decor tips. She suggests combining orange and pink for an alternate festive color scheme which I found clever.  I also loved what she did with the urns pictured in this post.

For my own media opportunity, I put the word out to Staging Diva Graduates who might be interested in appearing on camera this week instead of me. As always, first dibs went to members of the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers.

If you’re not a member yet, you should be. It’s not only a great place for clients to find your staging and redesign business, but it also leads to media coverage and guest speaking opportunities.

We build a professional webpage for you within 7 days of when you submit your Directory materials for less than the cost of a nice blender (I happened to be reading Christmas sale flyers filled with kitchen gadgets so I know!). You even get a custom company brochure that website visitors can download, and a print version that you can hand out in meetings— it’s included in the cost of an annual hosting plan! Get the full scoop on how to join the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers here.

Anyway, back to seasonal decorating . . .

If you’re more comfortable than I am with the art of decorating for the Christmas season, and you love doing it, consider how many people are too busy or overwhelmed to take this on themselves. You might decorate the inside and outside of their home, decorate for a Christmas or New Year’s Eve/Day party or even transform an office or showroom for the holidays!

Home Staging is not equally busy all year round because it follows real estate cycles.

In the Staging Diva Program I discuss ways for you to even out your cash flow by combining your staging business with things like:

  • interior redesign
  • color consulting
  • professional organizing
  • seasonal decorating

What you choose should not only come from your desire to make money but also be a function of your interests. I don’t believe in starting your own business only to do things you don’t like! If you’re going to make the effort to be your own boss, make sure you consider what your interests and natural talents are.

If you love holiday decorating and have a natural talent for it, then why not go for it?

There are no rules when you’re an entrepreneur. If you see an opportunity that inspires you then why not take advantage of it? The idea that you should only build a business that you’ll REALLY want to work in, is a theme that runs throughout the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, especially in course 4 “Staging Diva Sales and Marketing Secrets to Boost Your Home Staging Business.”

I don’t act on every opportunity that comes my way, but I certainly consider the ones that inspire me. When it’s something that just isn’t “my thing” or I’m too busy to take it on, I refer those inquiries to Staging Diva Graduates as I did with the TV News story for this week.

To be honest, I don’t even plant my own outdoor urns for winter and I always hire someone else to do it for me. I’ve never used little white lights in them but Sarah has given me the idea to try it out this season!

Home stagers and redesigners, have you been approached by potential clients to help them with their seasonal decorating? Do you do any marketing of that service?

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

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Provide Home Staging Tips for New Parents, Help Them Cope With Selling

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home staging tips for new parentsThis was the condition of the living room when I arrived to conduct a home staging consultation. I’m standing on the stairs for a bird’s eye view of the scene for you.

By the way, that’s a great home staging portfolio photo tip for you. You can get stronger before and after photos to showcase your work if you stand on the stairs and shoot down on the scene (with a wide angle lens of course).

I have to admit just looking at all the baby paraphernalia took me back to my own first year as a new parent. It’s really incredible how one tiny baby (who isn’t yet holding up her head) can take over an entire living space!

So what do you do when you have to provide home staging advice to a new parent?

Here are some home staging tips to keep in mind:

Your client is overwhelmed as a new parent and the prospect of selling their home and moving is probably enough to put them “over the edge.”

There are severe limits on how many changes you can request of them. After all, a quiet and happy baby comes first (in their minds), not a perfectly staged home.

They hired a home stager because they recognize they need help, so don’t be afraid to provide it.

Keep your advice to the point. There is limited quiet time, energy and focus to devote to you, so don’t beat around the bush.

Be direct, but deliver your staging recommendations with kindness.

Organize/do whatever you can for your clients in this first visit, so they aren’t left with an overwhelming “to do” list after your home staging consultation. If you’ve taken the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, you know that a home staging consultation should usually also be a working session and how that affects your income and how much staging you will do.

Help your client figure out which baby items can be put away until after the house sells and which ones are immediate must-have’s. In this one room I spotted a bouncy seat, playpen, swing and car seat! Not all 4 are necessary every single day. By the way, where did our own mothers put us down before all these contraptions were invented?

Few parents have the time/energy to run upstairs every time the baby needs changing. Work out a method to keep what they need hidden away on every level of the home. For example, a decorative and covered basket can hold baby wipes, clean diapers, etc. so they are always handy but aren’t spread all over the coffee table.

Eliminate unnecessary furniture when you can’t eliminate baby stuff. For example, in this room I recommended putting the tall wine rack with glasses in storage and pushing the playpen over if that was a “must keep” item. The tall shelf looks terrible where it is, regardless of the baby situation. It competes with the fireplace and looks awkward from all angles.

Home stagers, what other advice would you provide for those of us doing home staging consultations for new parents? Please share your comments below.

 

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Debra bought, staged and sold 6 homes as a single parent, while her child was aged 14 months to 12 years.

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Home Stager Deep in Home Staging Debt – Part 2

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home stager debtIn my last post I introduced you to home stager Kimberly (not her real name), who had amassed enough home staging furniture and accessories to fill at least ten 2-bedroom condos. She is a wonderfully talented decorator and home stager. Her work looks like it could be in a decorating magazine.

In part 2 of this cautionary tale for home stagers thinking of investing in their own home staging inventory, I’ll share some of the classic mistakes Kimberly made so that you won’t make the same ones. And for those of you who know you’ll never allow yourself to get into this situation, you can read on and feel smug about your own business savvy!

Unfortunately, Kimberly didn’t approach her home staging business with a business focus. Instead, she was obsessed with how lovely she wanted to make all her clients’ condos look.

“Creating beauty” was her driving force, rather than making money.

There’s nothing wrong with allowing your desire to decorate beautiful spaces be what keeps you inspired, but unless this is a hobby, it’s also critical to remember that you’re also creating a home staging business that’s supposed to make money!

Kimberly did amazing work. I saw the photos, and honestly they all looked like they were magazine shoots out of decorating magazines. She really did everything up to the nine’s from beautiful furniture and window treatments in every room, to dishes on the breakfast bar. Her home staging projects looked lovely, and she can be very proud of the creativity she brought to it. But her creative talent was not only a strength, it became her biggest weakness.

In her desire to be a home stager and decorator, Kimberly forgot that she was also a businessperson. She needed to make money in her home staging business, not just feed her own creative desires.

She also didn’t understand that the way she structured her staging business meant that she was really in the furniture rental business. Since she didn’t realize that, she also didn’t realize how quickly she was headed for bankruptcy.

The date she had to pay off her debt was fast approaching and she had no cash flow because her inventory was all tied up in open-ended contracts.

Kimberly made the classic mistake of setting it up so that people could have her home staging furniture and accessories for up to a year for a fixed amount. This meant there was no ongoing revenue stream if the items remained with the same client month after month after month.

Unfortunately, she assumed that if her home staging customers only needed the items for a few months, it would be like being paid for the whole year. Which it wasn’t because she was charging too low a percentage of the retail price (her first mistake). She assumed that she’d be able to re-rent the items 3 or 4 times in a single year and that by the time the debt was due she would have made enough in home staging rental fees to pay for it (her second mistake).

Making her contracts so open-ended that way, and not ensuring that she had a steady cash flow coming in, she had nothing to protect her when the real estate market slowed down. Her clients’ luxury condos were not selling, and she had all her home staging furniture and accessories tied up for at least a year with no other income coming in (her biggest mistake). By the way, I should mention at this point that she had a lawyer help her with the contracts! Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have brought a business mind to the task either!

Rather than realizing what was happening, perhaps because she was so driven by her desire to decorate, Kimberly kept repeating the same mistakes.

She’d get a new project, she’d go out and get the furniture and do it again and again. In fact, I distinctly remember her describing a new project where she had inventory from an already sold client project to use. She had it all moved in for the new home staging client and spent a day moving it all around. Then she decided this furniture wasn’t exactly “right” for this particular project and went out and bought new inventory to suit the new project.

Naturally, her expense of moving all her original inventory in and moving it back to storage again, plus the new expense of buying an entire condo’s worth of new furniture  was hers to bear. All she did was bill her originally agreed upon fee. When she described this to me, I knew I was talking to a decorating addict or perhaps a shop-a-holic!

Very scary. When I listened to her I kept thinking, “Is there no one in her life that saw the road she was heading down, least of all her husband?” It was amazing. I couldn’t believe how she got herself into that situation.

I wanted to share Kimberly’s story with you, because if you are going to get into the furniture rental business, then you need to approach that carefully with a lot of business analysis and your eyes wide open to the potential pitfalls.

Not only are you investing in furniture, you’ve got to pay for storage and insurance. Then you have to think about how the furniture is getting from wherever your storage is to the client’s home. So that means you now have to start hiring a truck and movers, etc. It’s a complex way to do things that involves lots of overhead.

In Course 2, The Business of Home Staging: What You Need to Start and How to Grow, and Course 3, Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations, I teach home stagers how to work with their own inventory in more detail. But I also teach you how to work without it (and make lots of money along the way), so you don’t have to get into all these risks.

I’ve run my own home staging business since 2002 and staged many vacant homes as well as ones that people are living in. I have not invested in my own inventory, and I have made a lot of money doing it that way as have many of my students.

Kimberly never took the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program but hired me to help her with one-on-one business coaching after she found herself $100,000 in debt!  I wish she had spoken to me two years earlier because I could have saved her so much grief (and money). I helped her restructure her pricing strategy and develop new terms for future furniture rentals. We also developed a strategy for her to maximize the value of her current inventory and turn some of it into cash to pay down her debts.

I’ve taught thousands of home stagers and personally coached hundreds of others. Their questions, challenges and triumphs provide a rich ground for the examples and tips I share with you in this blog (though I never use anyone’s real name without their permission).

Please share your feedback to this story and any advice you would have given Kimberly to avoid the situation she found herself in. Do you use your own home staging inventory?

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

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Home Stager Racks Up $100,000 in Home Staging Debt – Part 1

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Home staging inventoryIf you’re a home stager thinking, “Gee, if I had my own home staging inventory I could make all these homes look so much prettier,” you need to read this cautionary tale.

Kimberly (not her real name) lives in a major US city and was staging high-end condos, using all her own home staging furniture and accessories. She does not have a “package” from a previous career, an inheritance, or a wealthy husband. But, she has a vision for how wonderful all her clients’ homes could look when decorated properly.

To put her creative vision into action, Kimberly bought everything she needed at stores whenever they were running those “don’t-pay-a-cent” events where you can get what you need on credit, and you don’t have to pay for it for another 2 years.

That’s how Kimberly amassed all this home staging inventory— project by project. Every time she had a new condo to stage, she would buy all the furniture and accessories for that particular condo. Then another project would come, and she’d go out and do it again.

Kimberly believed that since she didn’t have to pay for her home staging inventory for a couple of years, she could make a small fortune in the meantime.

She assumed she was going to rent her furniture several times over the two years.By the time the payment due dates arrived, she imagined she would have made all this profit from renting and re-renting the items out to her clients. At least that was the “logic” of it in Kimberly’s mind.

She never took the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program but hired me to help her with one-on-one business coaching after she found herself $100,000 in debt!

Catch the rest of Kimberly’s story on Thursday. In the meantime, if you’re already a home stager please share your experiences with buying and renting out your own home staging inventory by commenting below!

 

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

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Why Did You Become a Home Stager?

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why did you become a home stager?Running your own business is not all tea and roses. It takes work whether you’re a home stager or any other type of entrepreneur.

It doesn’t help that the economy has been in such horrible shape over the past few years. But, we’re all living in this economy no matter how we choose to earn a living.

It’s important to remind yourself why you became a home stager in the first place and consider what else you could be doing to earn money instead.

  • Would that other thing bring you more personal satisfaction, meet your various needs AND make you more money?
  • Would you be happier doing something else or running a home staging business?

Here’s why I decided to become a home stager in 2002 (in a hot real estate market where most people said, “Why would I need a home stager, my house can sell if I just put a sign on the lawn?”):

  • Knew I loved decorating because I’d been doing it as a hobby since I was a kid.
  • Loved the buzz of real estate, having bought and sold 7 of my own homes, but I didn’t want to be a real estate agent on-call 24/7).
  • Knew from buying houses in 4 different cities that most people don’t have a clue about how to show their homes well.
  • Knew from experience that people will bid against each other to buy a home they’ve fallen in love with.
  • Made solid money flipping homes because of the cosmetic changes I made to them. This proved to me that I had staging talent.
  • Knew that even in a hot real estate market lots of houses don’t sell as fast as they should or for as much money as they could.
  • Knew the real estate market would eventually slow down and people would need even more help decorating their homes to sell.
  • Realized that home staging was a marriage of two “sexy” topics that more and more people were talking about, “decorating,” and “making money in real estate.” I could see that the field would grow (at the time I started there were no TV shows on staging, but HGTV was already huge and decorating shows had hit the mainstream).
  • Wanted to earn money from my creative talents and needed to make a lot of it because I was the sold provider for my family.
  • Didn’t want to work for anyone else (when I was an employee I had to put up with sexual harassment, and bosses with anger management and addiction issues)
  • Needed to have control over my time because I was a single parent of a 7-year old.
  • Knew that having a staging talent that could help home sellers and real estate agents make money would be something I could make money from and get paid very well for.
  • Needed a low-cost business to start because I was in debt when I started.

The first year was especially tough and as my Staging Diva Students know, I wanted to give up many times. Mostly because I wasn’t making enough money. I hadn’t figured out the right pricing and marketing strategies to grow as fast as I needed to. I’m glad I didn’t give up because once I figured out my formula, I was making up to $10,000 a month staging homes. I had also been featured on HGTV, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and many decorating magazines.

This was something I never would have predicted and if I’d know that was around the corner, I wouldn’t have felt so much like giving up!

This week I read the eulogy that Steve Jobs sister delivered. I have been a huge fan of Apple since I bought my first computer in 1989 to start my first solo business. I know that I could not have had all the success I’ve had over these years as an entrepreneur without my various Macintosh computers. When Steve Jobs died I was sad for many reasons and I also couldn’t help but think of what amazing gifts he would have brought to the world had he not died at such a young age (only 4 years older than I am now).

One of the lines I found very poignant from his sister’s eulogy was that “we all die in the middle of our stories.”

What story are you in the middle of? Is it the right one? Do you feel that you’re living some else’s story/life or your own? What should you change right now, since you don’t know how long you have to finish this story or start the next?

Please share your thoughts below. I know it’s hard to stay motivated when you feel like you’re struggling. I know it’s hard to always find our courage. I battle with these demons myself. We need to keep each other motivated to do our best work and live our best life.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

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Stagers, Is the Fall Real Estate Season Flying By For You Too?

by Debra GouldView comments
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Staging Diva SaleWe’re more than half way through the important fall real estate season and I can’t believe how fast time is flying by. Apparently this escalates as we get older and I believe it having just celebrated a birthday days ago.

Time will fly by whether you’re:

  • Doing what you want to or not.
  • Taking action on your dreams or not.
  • Focusing every ounce of attention on your family or you’re also paying attention to what you need to create in your own life.

If you’re a home stager (new or established) and you haven’t been making the money you had hoped this fall real estate season, then I strongly encourage you to check out the many specials on right now in the Staging Diva Store. I’ve slashed prices on home staging courses, “how to” guides, a listing in the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers and one-on-one coaching with me.

I hear from so many aspiring home stagers with stories like these:

“If I could successfully start and grow my own home staging business, it would be a dream come true!

I have just recently experienced the loss of my job of 20 years after the company I worked for recently closed. I made a vow that I would devote my time and energy in pursuing a career doing something that I know I would love, and for me, this would be a life changing experience.

My vision is to be able to work with the two things I love most and that is working with people and using my creative abilities to beautify their home spaces.” Diane F., Indiana

But here’s the interesting part, despite losing her job of 20 years, saying that building a new business as a home stager would be a “dream come true” and “life changing experience”, more than a year has gone by and Diane is in the same place she was when she wrote these words.

You can dream all you like, but until you take action to achieve your dreams, nothing will happen!

Ask yourself these questions to determine if you’re ready to take action in your life:

1. Does your current work or how you spend your time let you feel you’re making a real difference in peoples’ lives?

2. Does your work, or how you spend your days allow you to express your creativity?

3. Are you still passionate about what you do everyday?

4. Are you so focused on money/security that you are willing to sell your soul for it?

5. Do you think anything will change if you keep doing what you’re doing?

If you answered “no” to 3 of these 5 questions, I encourage you to visit my BIG Birthday Sale before it comes to an end at 9pm Wednesday, November 2.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed home staging courses, guides and coaching programs to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love. Prior to becoming a professional home stager in 2002, Debra bought, staged and sold 7 of her own homes.

 

 

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Home Staging Marketing – Do Postcards Work For Your Staging Business?

by Debra GouldView comments
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home staging marketing postcardsWhen you’re running your own home staging business, you have to be really careful about how you spend your limited home staging marketing funds.

Hopefully you haven’t already gone out and spent lots of money printing fancy color postcards to deliver door-to-door because these are largely a waste of money and here’s why:

Your home staging marketing postcard is arriving in the middle of a bunch of bills and other mail. Most people stand over the garbage or recycling box as they go through the stack.

While your postcard is beautiful to you, it’s pretty much junk mail to more than 99% of the people who will receive it.

If they even notice your postcard in the pile, consider that most people getting it have no need of your services. Only 10% of the population is moving at any given time. And of those who are, ask yourself, how many of these people:

  • Own the house they’re moving out of? In other words, would have any vested interest in home staging services.
  • Have ever heard of home staging?
  • Understand that they have a need for a home stager?

Door-to-door flyers typically go to thousands of homes because direct mail gets less than one tenth of one percent response rate when you’re doing well! In other words, with a distribution quantity of 250, an effective postcard would only generate 25% of a single person, in other words, no one!

So if you’ve already made the mistake of printing 250 postcards and delivering them door-to-door, if you get a single phone call from it, consider it a “huge success” because it would be 400% more successful than one would expect!

Don’t sit at home waiting for the phone to ring and projects to come pouring in from this one endeavor. I’ve been a marketer since the early 1980s and an entrepreneur for over 22 years, so I know what I’m talking about from experience and tons of training.

If you’ve already printed postcards and haven’t sent them out yet, consider saving them to hand out at targeted events, or only mail them to people you know will be interested. This will help you get more impact from the money you’ve already spent.

You can learn effective home staging marketing strategies in course 4 of the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program, Staging Diva Sales & Marketing Secrets to Boost Your Home Staging Business. During two hours of audio recordings you’ll learn tons of no-cost marketing tactics you can use that will get you guaranteed results and boost your home staging business. Other resources I’ve created to help you with your home staging marketing include:

14 Marketing Ideas to Rev Up Your Home Staging Business

Simple Marketing Plan Companion: A stress-free approach to promoting your staging business

Before wasting your money on expensive tactics like advertising and direct mail postcards that don’t really work, why not find out the smarter way to market your home staging business?

Readers, have you used marketing postcards for your home staging business? How did you use them and what results did you get?

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould has been writing about marketing for small businesses since the early 1990s as a frequent contributor to Profit Magazine. A home stager since 2002, she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own money-making home staging businesses. There are now 4,000 students in over 20 countries following her formula for business success.

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Home Stagers Pause To Celebrate Your Accomplishments

by Debra Gould Click here to comment
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home stager accomplishmentsI recently wrote a post that has struck a chord with my readers called, Is Negative Self Talk Killing Your Home Staging Business? In it I confessed to realizing that I have been operating from a belief that if I don’t keep pushing myself to conquer ever more challenging business situations, my business will stop growing and I’ll stop accomplishing anything.

Even writing it here, I have a little voice saying, “But that’s true!” Perhaps the difference is “how” we keep ourselves moving forward.

Do we do it with an imaginary whip that says, “Get back to work you haven’t done enough to build your staging business!” Or, do we motivate ourselves from a place of self-love and compassion that says something like, “Remember how important your dream of building a staging business is to you and how much you love decorating houses to sell? Why don’t you turn off the TV and stop looking at Facebook and take that next step you promised yourself instead.”

Since 2005 I’ve dedicated much of my working life to inspiring and empowering others who want to make a living from their creativity. I’ve taken what I know about building a successful home staging business, marketing and being an entrepreneur and I share it with thousands of people every day.

Yet, when I can’t think up a topic for another blog post for the Home Staging Business Report, or my monthly newsletter, Staging Diva Dispatch, or I’m too tired to work on my next home staging training product, I beat myself up that I’m not doing enough.

Deciding to enter the 8th Annual Stevie® Awards for Women in Business was a great exercise in reminding myself of what I have accomplished over the past 12 months. I had honestly forgotten so many of the projects I finished until I had to document it all to prove I was worthy of an award for the 4 categories I entered:

  • Best Coach/Mentor of the Year
  • Best Blog of the Year
  • Best Canadian Entrepreneur
  • Best Entrepreneur of a Service Business Under 100 Employees

I’m proud to say I’m a Finalist in all 4 of these categories and the only non US-based company to be considered for Best Entrepreneur of a Service Business Under 100 Employees! This last category is probably a long shot since my competitors have pretty “big” organizations. I still operate out of my home office with 3 virtual assistants and no employees, but I did make the Finalist list out of 1300 applicants overall!

The reason I “forgot” what I’d achieved until I was forced to document it is that I’m usually jumping on the next idea rather than also pausing to celebrate “the mountain” I’ve just climbed. Perhaps you do that too?

I can tell you from experience that it’s important to celebrate your victories and recognize how far you’ve come.

Otherwise it begins to always feel like “work” instead of the joy of doing what you love. So I invite you to add your comment below. Share whatever successes you’ve had in moving towards your goal of running your own home staging business. Remember that what your inner critic might call a “baby step”, can actually be huge for you. We all start somewhere and every step we take brings us closer to our goals.

If you’ve been a home stager for awhile, share your latest accomplishments and perhaps some words of encouragement to the new home stagers that are coming up behind you! There are so many WOW moments when you’re your own boss and doing work you love. Take a moment now to remember and document some of them.

And if the idea of adding your comments is triggering that little negative voice in your head says, “It’s wrong to brag,” remember that you aren’t bragging when you’re speaking the truth of what you’ve accomplished. Besides, I know this community will get inspired and appreciate your sharing!

 

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Intrepid entrepreneur Debra Gould has been self-employed since 1989 and reinvented her career many times to suit her interests and passions. She knows how to make money as a home stager and developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love. There are more than 4000 Staging Diva Students in the U.S., Canada and 20 other countries. Debra is frequently profiled in the media for her home staging expertise and is the author of 5 guides for home stagers.

 

 

 

 

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