12 Tips

If you’ve toyed with the idea of becoming a home stager, you probably already have the decorating talent it takes to make this your new career.

You don’t need a background in interior design to become an expert home stager. If you have a knack for arranging a room’s furniture to make it universally appealing, you have the basic skill required to decorate a person’s house to sell.

There are a few other items that will help you determine whether home staging is the right fit for you. See if any of the following statements sound familiar:

• I get asked for decorating advice all the time by friends and family members.
• I am addicted to HGTV.
• I don’t have much to invest in a business start-up.
• I can’t pass an open house sign without going in to look around. When I do, I might as well have a bubble over my head that says, “What were they thinking?!” I can hardly resist the urge to rearrange the furniture to make it show better.
• I want to have variety and fun in my workday.
• I’ve always wanted to be able to earn money from my creativity.
• There is nothing left to decorate in my home, and I feel the urge to move so that I’ll have a new decorating project.

If you have the talent and the desire, all you need is the business know-how to start your own successful home staging business.

Please don’t let the current economic news squash your dream of becoming a home stager. This business is surprisingly inexpensive to start. You can run a home staging business from a home office, and you don’t need any inventory or a store front. The only equipment you need besides a computer and telephone is a tape measure and a camera. How much more basic can you get?

People will always be moving, which means there will always be a need for home stagers.

Yes, some owners are losing their homes, but others just need to move because of the usual reasons, like job transfers, a growing family needing more space, retirement, or divorce. In this economic environment, they need stagers even more because all their agents can recommend are continual cuts to their asking prices.

As a home stager, you are a beacon of hope to beleaguered home sellers. They stand to make more money by hiring a home stager, and it costs them far less than a price reduction.

Instead of using up your energy worrying about the state of the nation and what will happen to your future, take hold of the reins and steer your own course. You can take advantage of the current economy and the slow real estate market to build a very successful business that will serve your creative and financial needs.

When you’re ready to take the next step, visit StagingDiva.com. You can be a home stager if you have ten hours to spend listening to our training program. There’s no fluff or untested theories here; it’s absolutely what you need to know based on what I’ve learned the hard way building my own staging business since 2002.

In the next post, I’m spilling the beans and sharing the truth about home staging accreditations.

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

Did you know that Staging Diva Graduates have the opportunity to list their businesses in a highly visited stager directory? It’s been featured on CNN.com and on HGTV’s website. Check out http://StagingDivaDirectoryOfHomeStagers.com

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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You’re taking the time to read this post, so there’s a good chance you’ve determined that home staging is the right career for you. Now the next step is searching for the right training.

If you’re searching for home staging training that will get you some fancy letters to put after your name, there’s something you should know.

Those letters are meaningless.

The home staging industry is not regulated, which means there isn’t a governing body that issues certifications or credentials. The “accreditations” you see offered by some home staging training companies were simply invented by them as a marketing gimmick.

In your search for home staging training, you shouldn’t factor in the accreditation you’ll receive when you graduate. Your primary focus should be on the credibility of the trainer, the reputation of the company and the skills you will learn.

You should look for a training program that’s taught by someone who has grown their own successful home staging business. If a person has only taught and has never actually had a staging business, they are teaching you unproven techniques. Worse yet, there are many trainers who started teaching because they couldn’t make money as home stagers.

Ask yourself a few questions. Is it a reputable company? Are there lots of graduate testimonials available for you to view, and do you have the sense that they are real? If there are only initials, no photos, and there’s no way to check them out, that’s a red flag.

Has the company or trainer been mentioned by the media, indicating that they are a recognized expert? You should want to learn from a leader in the field, not someone who just decided out of the blue to offer training and make you their guinea pig.

It’s also not a good idea to take a program that will spend most of the time teaching about the design aspect of staging. There really are only so many ways you can arrange a living room; the challenge is making money doing that. What you should be most interested in is how to get your business started and how to get it to grow into a successful and profitable enterprise.

Within two years of starting my home staging company, Six Elements Inc., I was making up to $10,000 a month for my staging advice, which doesn’t even include rental fees. So, I do have a track record as a stager and can offer proven ways to grow a staging business so that you can be successful too.

I also know from personal experience how to build this business on a shoestring, so I share with my students how not to waste money on marketing tactics that don’t work in the real world (you’ll get a sneak peek at some of these ways later in this 12 Tips Course).

In the next post, I’ll talk about the income you can expect as a home stager by implementing a smart pricing strategy. In the meantime, you will find tons of free articles and tips that I’ve written for Home Staging Business Report.

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

Did you know that there are over 1000 Graduates of the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program all over the world? You can read many of their comments at http://www.StagingDiva.com/ravereviews-students.html

Want to learn the 15 questions to ask before signing up for a training program?
Get the list here.

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Hopefully you’re not under the assumption that home staging is a scheme to make tons of money overnight with little effort, because it’s not. But with the right actions and consistent effort, you can make far more money than you might expect. In fact, during a two-hour home staging consultation, I take home more money than many people make in a week working full-time!

If you’ve seen those ads promising $31.45 an hour and you think that’s good pay for a home stager, I strongly encourage you to read “Home Staging Is Not a Minimum-Wage Job.”

So many people get into the home staging business excited to start living their dreams straight to easy street. However, many of them end up bankrupt or burnt out because they failed to set up the proper pricing strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes home stagers make is charging a flat fee, followed closely by offering free consultations. And those are only two problems that commonly occur with poorly thought out pricing strategies.

Course 2 of the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program will teach you everything you need to know when it comes to pricing your services. It’s invaluable information that can have you fulfilling your dreams sooner than you think.

Don’t make the mistake of starting up your dream business only to set yourself up for failure with the wrong pricing strategy.

Make sure to read Tip 4, which is about your professional image and how important it is in the home staging industry.

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

Did you know that you can read tons of free articles and learn about home staging jobs at Home Staging Business Report?

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit: http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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Welcome to the fourth installment of the Staging Diva® Course: 12 Tips For a Successful Home Staging Business. This lesson is about a very important (yet often overlooked) aspect of running a home staging business: your image.

It’s essential to present yourself in a professional manner no matter what type of business you have, but when you’re in design, it’s extremely important. Everything from your wardrobe to your portfolio is scrutinized when you’re in the design field. If you don’t look put together, your potential clients will assume you can’t put a room together either.

The following are some items you should take into consideration when you are building your home staging business (and beyond!):

• Do you have a professional portfolio?
• Are you using stock photography for before and after shots? If so, stop!
• Do you have a visually appealing website or web presence of some kind?
• Is your clothing current, or is it time for a wardrobe makeover?
• What type of reception do potential clients receive when they call you?
• Do you have a business-like email address?
• Are you conducting yourself confidently during your consultations?
• How impressive are your business cards and marketing materials?

Some of these items are common sense; others don’t occur to everyone.

For more detailed tips on staging yourself to sell, visit Home Staging Business Report to read a series of short articles I wrote on this topic.

Be sure to read the next lesson to find out how to avoid one of the biggest mistakes home stagers make!

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

Want to find out how to avoid the free estimate trap? Get your copy of the Staging Diva® Sales Script today!

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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Do you think running around from property to property using up your valuable time (not to mention gas) giving free estimates is just a part of doing business?

More often than not, when you finally arrive at your home staging consultation, before you even get your jacket off, you’re bombarded with questions from the homeowner: “Does this couch make the room seem small? Should we do an accent wall? Is the dining room table too big for the space?”

While these are valid questions, you shouldn’t be giving your advice away for free. If you do nothing but drive from free consultation to free consultation all day, what happens if those homeowners take your expert advice and simply apply it themselves?

You’re basically allowing people to take your suggestions and implement them without your help. If you charge for your consultations, this doesn’t matter one bit! You still get compensated for the time and advice you give to homeowners about what you feel needs to be done to stage the home to sell. On the flip side, if you’re doing it for free, you’ll be broke before your business makes it past the infancy stage.

The Staging Diva® Sales Script: How to Avoid the Free Estimate Trap and Turn Homeowners into Home Staging Customers in One Phone Conversation will help you conduct a phone call with a potential client so that you feel confident charging for your first visit to their home.

You’ll be given the exact script that I use when speaking to homeowners for the first time.

I’ve never given free estimates, and I live in a city where there are dozens of home stagers who do. However, I was making up to $10,000 a month just in fees for my time within my second year of business.

In the next post, I’ll discuss an extremely important component of your home staging business: marketing.

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

Ready to take your training to the next level and become a Staging Diva Graduate?

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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Clients can’t hire you unless they’re aware of your services at the precise time when they need a home stager.

How do you go about marketing your business? Most emerging entrepreneurs don’t have wads of cash to spend on advertising, so it’s a real shame when I see home stagers wasting money on ineffective marketing methods.

Purchasing space in the classified section of your local newspaper (or worse, running a larger more expensive ad) or developing a pretty flyer to distribute door to door are both a huge waste of time and money.

Why?

Statistics tell us that a prospective client has to see your marketing message 7-10 times before they feel comfortable enough to purchase your service or product.

Unless you can afford to buy big splashy newspaper ads on a regular basis or a very costly radio or television campaign, a one-time investment is not going to get you very many leads. And a flyer? It will be ignored by 99.99% of the people who get it.

Course 4 of the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program delves deep into all things marketing, including tailoring your marketing strategies according to your definition of success, reaching your 4 key target audiences, marketing on the web, optimizing a website for the search engines and more.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to ensure local homeowners can find you when they search for you online.

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

When you’re a Staging Diva Graduate, you can join the Directory of Home Stagers so that clients can easily find you.

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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If there was a homeowner or agent in your area looking for a home stager, how would they go about finding you? They might look in the Yellow Pages and quickly discover there’s no category for home stagers. Then they would go to Google and do a search.

Would your name come up in their search results?

Because most homeowners and real estate agents in the market for a home stager are going to head to the Internet to search for you, you must make sure you’re easy to find. This means you need to have a website developed and “optimized” for the search engines. Alternatively, or in addition to this, you should list your business profile in a home staging directory.

If you become a Staging Diva Graduate, you will have the opportunity to feature your business in the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers. Traffic is driven to this popular directory from my other highly visited websites (plus important media sites like CNNMoney.com and HGTV’s site frontdoor.com), and it has an excellent Google ranking.

Being part of this Directory is a great alternative to building your own costly website, as it will give you a professional-looking web presence, complete with before and after photos, contact information and plenty of room to provide details about your business.

After your profile has been built on the Directory of Home Stagers, you can purchase a domain name (yourbusinessname.com) and have it directed to your page, creating an instant web presence! You can then promote your site without having to make a large investment in your own stand-alone website right away.

In the next post, I’ll talk about your oh-so-important portfolio.

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

Wondering how to create a home staging portfolio?
Click here to learn more today.

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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We’re now more than halfway through this 12 Tips course, and I sincerely hope you’re learning some valuable information about the home staging industry. In this post I’ll talk about your home staging portfolio.

When you decide to put yourself out there as an expert home stager, the one thing that will really show potential clients what you can do for them is your portfolio. You should not settle for anything less than stellar when it comes to this extremely important tool.

As I explain in more detail in Course 2 of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, your portfolio should contain:

• Client testimonials
• Before and after photos of rooms you’ve staged, as well as exterior makeovers
• Press clippings (if you have them)
• Articles about the benefits of home staging
• Your personal profile, which should include your photo and a compelling explanation about why you’re the right person to hire

If you want to be branded as a professional, the worst thing you can do with your portfolio is to copy other home stagers’ images. This mistake is followed closely by using stock images. If you use stock photography, there could be a dozen other people using those same images. What does that tell a potential client?

The same goes for using other people’s before and after photos. What if a homeowner who is reviewing your portfolio has already seen these photos somewhere else on the Internet? How embarrassing. Or what if they start asking you questions about that particular project and you have to make up something or tell them you didn’t actually do the staging. Once you’ve lost your credibility, it’s very hard to get it back.

If you want to know the secrets to creating a winning portfolio that will “wow” everyone who looks at it, check out the Staging Diva® Ultimate Portfolio Guide: Winning Clients with the Perfect Home Staging Portfolio.

In the next post, I’ll cover another extremely important aspect of your home staging career: preparing for and conducting your client consultation.

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

Curious about how to handle a home staging consultation?
Learn more by clicking here.

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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After a client has contacted you and reviewed your home staging portfolio, you’ll want to conduct a consultation with them to discuss what needs to be done in their home to help it sell more quickly and for as much as possible.

Many new home stagers find this to be a very stressful process and are often nervous before heading to their first consultation because they don’t feel prepared. They worry that they’ll forget things or that they won’t handle the meeting at the right speed. And rightly so! It is a very important meeting, and you want to be as ready as you can be.

Before you schedule a home staging consultation, consider and plan for the following:

• What should you wear? (Remember you want to look like a designer.)
• What items should you bring? (Do you have your measuring tape?)
• How will you greet the client and put them at ease?
• How will you make your recommendations so the client isn’t offended?
• What process will you follow during the meeting? (Plan this in advance so you look confident when you’re there.)
• Do you have a checklist of items to look for as you evaluate the interior and exterior of the home?
• Do you know how to conclude the appointment and pave the way for future work?

This is just a sampling of the things you need to take into account as you prepare for a home staging consultation.

The Staging Diva® Home Staging Consultation Checklist with Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms gives you everything you must know before you conduct a home staging consultation. It’s included automatically when you enroll in Course 3 of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program: Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations.

The next post will be fun. We’ll talk about how to approach color for home staging projects!

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

Ready to learn about selecting colors for your home staging clients? Check out the Staging Diva® Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Color for Home Staging Projects!

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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As you probably know, painting a room is the easiest, cheapest and quickest way to transform it. Now that you know more about conducting your home staging consultations, have you thought about how you will provide color recommendations for your clients’ homes?

As a home stager with a registered business, you’ll be able to approach paint companies to request your own designer’s kit. These kits typically include 2,000 to 3,000 colors grouped into fan decks and organized by group or collection. Unlike the many small areas of color available on a sample strip at the paint store, the swatches in these fan decks provide a larger area of each color.

I always wait to give my color recommendations until the end of the home staging consultation because it’s much easier than having to mentally switch back and forth between talking about furniture placement and color choices. I put away my tape measure and get out my fan decks and go room to room, focusing only on what colors to use.

For staging purposes, I generally use a maximum of 4 or 5 colors, even in a large home, because the same color will look slightly different in rooms of different sizes and with different lighting. It’s also faster and cheaper for your clients to paint with fewer colors since the painter won’t have to keep cleaning brushes and trays and can just jump from room to room.

Generally, I stick to fairly neutral tones for staging, but not always.

For example, I staged one kitchen that was very 1980s with a black and white tile floor, grey high-gloss flat cabinet doors with no hardware, and mirrored backsplash. There was no budget or time to replace the more expensive items, so I went to work with color. We added molding and hardware to the cabinets, and they were painted a warm but light olive grey, while the wall at the back of the kitchen was painted a deep clay red. The addition of a restaurant-style blackboard created a bistro feeling and complemented the black and white floor.

When you first receive your full designer’s kit from a paint manufacturer, it can be very intimidating. With a number of fan decks and over 2,000 colors to think about, many stagers find themselves wondering, “Where do I start?”

That’s why after two years of using the kit and staging hundreds of homes, I spent several days going through it and coming up with my favorite colors to use for home staging, based on all the homes I’ve staged. I also grouped these 80+ colors into color palettes to make it easier to know what groups could be used to paint an entire home. I’ve put all this and more into the Staging Diva® Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Color for Home Staging Projects. The Guide also covers:

• How and when to discuss color during your home staging consultation
• What to do about ugly wallpaper
• When to use what sheen level
• What colors to use for walls, trim, floors, decks, ceilings, porches, stairs and front doors
• 15 Staging Diva Home Staging color palettes
• Specific Benjamin Moore color names and numbers (U.S. and Canadian versions)
• How to use this information when purchasing any brand of paint
• How to find your local Benjamin Moore paint dealer
• Getting your own Benjamin Moore Designer Kit

In the next post, in the second to last installment of this series, you’ll learn about earning money from services other than staging in your home staging business. Yes, there’s more to home staging than just staging homes!

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

Can’t get enough information about designing homes to sell? Check out my e-book, Staging Diva® Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans!

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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Now that these 12 tips are coming to an end, hopefully you’re feeling more confident about your decision to move forward with making home staging your new career. I sincerely hope that’s the case! There are endless possibilities that can open up in your life with this career path.

Many new or aspiring home stagers write to me, worried that they don’t have the physical strength required to be a successful home stager. They haven’t met my oldest graduate, 76-year-old Jean Smith in Florida who had her first two clients within weeks of completing the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program!

There are many services that fall within the realm of home staging, but it doesn’t mean you have to do them all yourself!

We are not glorified house cleaners, packers or furniture movers. In fact, as a home stager, I prefer to think of myself as the creative visionary who knows what needs to be done and then finds others to do the tasks I don’t want to do myself.

I may pick the colors, but I certainly don’t swing the paintbrush. I may recommend a thorough house cleaning, but I don’t grab the mop!

The best part is that you can actually make money on all these extra services without hiring employees or doing the work yourself. I teach my Staging Diva students to form alliances with service providers who specialize in these services and how to get them to pay a referral fee.

Sound interesting? Learn “Over 30 More Ways to Make Money in Home Staging” in Course 5 of the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program. It will teach you everything you need to know about building alliances, including a score card to help you evaluate potential candidates, and how to negotiate win-win situations.

Next we’ll wrap up everything in the last post of this 12 Tips series.

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

Are you ready to start living your dreams of becoming a home stager? Stop putting it off! If you have ten hours to invest in home staging training, you can be your own boss by this time next week.

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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New and established home stagers make the mistake of putting all their efforts towards real estate agents. This is not the best way to build your staging business.

There are actually four key target markets, and agents only represent one of these. The four groups that you must target with your marketing efforts are:

• Homeowners
• Real estate agents
• The media
• Builders and renovators

So don’t put all your “eggs in one basket,” especially in a slow market when real estate agents are least likely to want to hire you directly.

If you want more help in this regard, I spend 2 hours just talking about marketing and how to attract each of these four groups, what messages to use and how to reach them in Course 4 of the Staging Diva Training Program.

This post concludes the Staging Diva Course: 12 Tips For a Successful Home Staging Business.

I sincerely hope that it helped you decide whether this is the right career for you. If you’ve already made a decision, then I hope you were able to take away some good advice and useful tips.

Let’s recap. Over the past twelve posts, you have learned more about:

• Whether home staging is the right career for you and how it fits with the current economy
• The truth about home staging accreditations
• How much money you can make as a home stager
• How you need to “stage yourself to sell”
• How not to get caught in the free estimate trap
• Becoming a client magnet – Marketing your home staging business
• Getting found by potential clients – This isn’t the time for “hide and seek”
• Your home staging portfolio
• Preparing for your home staging consultation
• How to approach color as a home stager
• How to avoid turning yourself into a glorified house cleaner or furniture mover

If you haven’t already started your home staging business, surely you’re ready to dive in and get started. I would be honored to be the one to train you to become an expert home stager, just as I have more than 1000 of your peers from around the globe.

Please visit StagingDiva.com to learn more about the program. You can meet many of our graduates here.

My best wishes for success in your journey of finding the right career to make use of your creative talents. There’s nothing like being independent, doing what you love and helping others at the same time!

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

To thank you again for participating in this e-course, I’d like to share a free recording of Ask Staging Diva Live, an event I hosted with a group of aspiring home stagers. You’ll learn even more about this business from my answers to their questions.

For all the latest products and services to help home stagers, visit:
http://www.StagingDiva.com/store

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