Staging Sips

How Home Stagers Can Stop Chasing Payments for Good What if getting paid on time has nothing to do with how good your follow-up emails are? In this episode of Staging Sips, Lori kicks off a new series on the parts of running a staging business that never make it onto Instagram, starting with the money. She digs into why so many stagers worry about collecting the balance before the install, or losi...

Staging Business Growth Starts With Team Training What if the reason you can't delegate certain decisions is that you've never taught your team how you make them? In this episode of Staging Sips , Lori explores a powerful shift in how staging business owners approach training and delegation. Inspired by a lesson from Alex Hormozi, she explains why growing your business requires teaching your team...

Before You Automate Your Business, Decide What Doesn't Change When you're thinking about automation or AI agents, it's easy to start with the tools. But before a system can move work forward, you need to decide how your business works. What's the happy path? Which policies apply most of the time? And when should a request come back to you? In this episode, Lori connects the conversation to "The Fl...

The real driver behind staging business growth. When you want to focus on staging business growth, it's easy to look outward. More clients. More inventory. More bookings. More revenue. Those things can certainly signal growth. But they aren't the whole story. Because if your business is growing faster than your capacity to lead it, growth can start to feel less like success and more like something...

Could Your Staging Business Run Without You for 30 Days? What would happen if you disappeared from your staging business for 30 days—and your team couldn't call, text, email, or send a carrier pigeon to get your help? In this episode of Staging Sips , Lori shares a powerful story from an Accelerate client whose operations manager went on vacation and, instead of handing everything back to the owne...

What does it take to build a business that lasts 50 years? For this episode, I'm sitting down with someone who has shaped so much of the way I think about business: my mom, Gina Hutchinson. Fifty years ago, she started what would become the Red Stars baton twirling program. She wasn't setting out to become an entrepreneur. She was a schoolteacher who agreed to coach a high school majorette team, s...

Are your business boundaries working for you? As your home staging business grows, the way you work with clients, your team, and your schedule may need to change, too. Early on, saying yes to everything can feel like good customer service. You answer messages after hours, accommodate last-minute requests, and make exceptions to keep everyone happy. But eventually, too much flexibility can lead to...

50,000 downloads: The quiet decisions changing staging businesses Staging Sips is approaching its 50,000th download, and this episode is a celebration, a thank-you, and an invitation. It's easy to see 50,000 as a statistic. How does it compare with last year? Are downloads increasing each month? What does it say about the podcast's growth? But those downloads represent 50,000 individual moments wh...

The flexibility that helped grow your staging business could now be keeping you stuck. In the early stages of a home staging business, saying yes can feel like a competitive advantage. You accept a different payment method, squeeze an installation into an already-full week, skip a step in your standard process, or create a special arrangement for a longtime client. Each yes feels like flexibility,...

A slow season may be exactly what your business needs. Every business owner experiences slow business seasons when ideas stop flowing, outreach goes nowhere, cash feels tight, or the systems and team you built suddenly feel messy. It's easy to panic during these seasons, especially when we're constantly told to keep pushing, stay consistent, and never slow down. But slow business seasons are a nor...

Your brain may be the reason you can't escape the daily demands of your staging business. You hired the team. You built the systems. You finally have enough revenue to get some help. So why are you still answering every question, managing every installation detail, and stepping in whenever something goes sideways? Your brain has become really, really good at keeping you busy. When your days are fi...

What happens when business owners stop accepting scattered systems, manual follow-ups, and time-consuming workflows as "just part of running a business"? In this episode of Staging Sips, Lori sits down with Harlowe founding members Kishah Langham and Erin Galvin to talk candidly about the frustrations that led them to search for a better way to run their staging businesses. Kishah brings 15 years...

Let's talk about a topic that sounds boring but isn't: how you get paid.  I started this episode wanting to talk credit card processing fees, but the deeper I went, the more I realized the fee is the smallest part of the story.  The real question is what it actually costs your business to collect money, most of which is invisible. Checks, e-checks, Zelle, Venmo, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay; every p...

One Saturday morning, doing my New York Times Spelling Bee (don't judge me, it's a whole ritual), I decided to write down every piece of software my staging business runs on. I even had to dig through my bank statements to remember everything I was paying for. Nine or ten tools. Every one of them doing exactly what it was supposed to do. But staring at that list, I realized I hadn't built a system...

This week I'm continuing our series on how I simplified my staging business and how fifteen years of lived experience is directly shaping how Harlowe is built. I walk through the full project life cycle for vacant staging: prospect, preview, proposal, sale, planning, install, and monitoring. Mind you, that last phase, monitoring, is nowhere near as passive as I used to think. There's real home sta...

For years, every time a client wanted to move forward, I found myself jumping between multiple tools , entering the same information over and over again, and waiting for the next step. I'd send the proposal, wait for a response, send the agreement, wait for a signature, then figure out payment. It was just the way I thought the process had to work. Then I tried something different. I combined two...

For years, I was convinced I just hadn't found the right tool for our styling evaluation reports. So I kept searching, rebuilding, and starting over. Every new solution fixed one problem while creating another, and every switch demanded more time, money, and energy than I ever expected. Looking back, I wasn't really searching for better software . I was trying to create a workflow that actually fi...

When you think about growing your staging business, it's easy to assume the next step is better marketing, more social media, or a steady stream of leads. But what if those aren't the exact things holding your business back? This week, I'm joined by my friend Heather Cook, founder of Social Savvy Stager , to talk about a realization that completely changed the direction of her business. After spen...

Some moments stop you cold. This episode is about one of those moments and it came in the form of four words written in my youngest son's handwriting, slipped under my closed office door on a Sunday night. This is one of the most personal episodes I've ever recorded, and I hope it lands for you the way that night landed for me. Because what started as a wake-up call became the question that change...

Have you ever opened your computer in the morning and immediately found yourself clicking between six different tabs just to figure out what's happening in your business? As we've been onboarding founding members into Harlowe, I've been asking our staging business owners a simple question: How many tools do you log into every day to run your business? The answer is almost always the same…at least...

I want to talk about a question I get asked all the time: Where does the admin role stop? Where does the lead stager role begin? And where exactly does the CEO fit into all of this? The truth is, most of us never learned to think about our staging businesses this way. We started because we loved staging. We learned the craft. We got clients. We grew. And then one day we looked up and realized we w...

Most staging business owners don't wake up in the morning excited to think about scheduling. Yet somehow, it becomes one of the biggest invisible jobs in the business. As I've spent countless hours mapping workflows and talking with staging business owners, one theme keeps showing up. Most scheduling systems work beautifully when the business is small. The challenge comes when growth introduces mo...

If you've ever hired someone and still found yourself overwhelmed, still turning away work, and still wondering why your capacity hasn't moved, this episode is for you. We were recently talking about hiring, growth, and capacity when one business owner shared that she had successfully hired and trained team members, stepped back from doing everything herself, and yet she was still turning away wor...

AI has become one of those conversations that instantly makes people feel either excited or completely overwhelmed. This episode is for the staging business owner sitting somewhere in the middle. The tools available right now are changing the way businesses operate in real and practical ways, and there is so much opportunity in learning how to use them intentionally instead of avoiding them altoge...

There's a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes with running a staging business.  People often see the finished installs, the styled shelves, the walkthrough videos, and the polished final product.  What they rarely see is the operational side happening late at night after the installs are complete, where the CEO is trying to hold everything together with proposals, invoices, scheduling, cli...