Staging Sips

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...

A missed renewal, a lost proposal, a delayed payment… we often brush these off as "one of those weeks." But often, these tiny, mundane moments are actually red flags pointing to a much larger problem. Working more closely with staging CEOs lately, I've noticed a pattern: a quiet drain on time, energy, and money. It's not that these Stagers are disorganized; it's that their systems are failing them...

Today, let's dip into the world of mindset to talk about something I see come up over and over again as most CEOs grow their staging business. Not strategy, not pricing, and believe it, not even systems. It is guilt. And not in the way you might think. I am talking about the guilt that creeps in when you try to step back, when you hand something off to a capable team member you trained really well...

Think of client filters as your business's "red velvet rope." They're not about turning people away. They're about creating alignment between your home staging services and the clients who benefit most from them. When that alignment is clear, your staging projects run more efficiently, expectations are easier to manage, and your team can focus on delivering the high-impact results that you actuall...

If you feel like you're solving the same problems on repeat, this episode is your wake-up call…in the best way. In this staging CEO Reset episode, we're unpacking a powerful shift: moving from reactive problem-solving to intentional leadership. When your staging business grows, your old ways of fixing things stop working. And what once felt productive can quietly keep you stuck in cycles of overwh...

If your business feels harder to run than it should, it might not be your strategy. It might be your capacity. This week, I'm sharing a real-time decision I had to make when I hit a wall with my own staging business capacity and why I chose not to push through. Overextending yourself doesn't just happen in big, obvious ways. It shows up in squeezed calendars, last-minute yeses, and the quiet press...

Let's break down a pattern that quietly creates friction for staging business owners: how clients pay you. What seems like "being flexible" can lead to delayed cash flow, extra admin work, and unnecessary mental load. Every payment method comes with a built-in workflow. Some create ease. Others create chaos. Still, you are in charge of what your business allows and what it no longer supports. When...

Renewal Pricing Is Where Profit Can Be Maximized Some numbers in a staging project feel more defined than others. The initial staging fee is usually built with care. It reflects scope, inventory, labor, and experience. It has structure behind it. Renewal pricing tends to sit in a different category. The number is there, but the reasoning behind it is not always as clearly outlined. It can be influ...

What happens when a stager with a tech background gets tired of duct-taping together Trello, QuickBooks, and a CRM that wasn't built for her? She builds something better. In this episode, I sit down with Kate, co-founder of Hutch — a purpose-built project management and inventory platform designed specifically for home stagers. Kate shares her journey from SaaS startup life to staging side hustler...

Last time, we talked about overhead allocation —the cost of just turning the lights on in your business. Today we're continuing with the other two pieces that make up the three checks every staging project needs to write for you: the people check and the furniture check. The people check covers what it actually costs to deliver the service. Your team's time, movers, truck rentals, fuel, all the ad...

If you've ever posted in a Facebook group asking what other stagers are charging, first of all — no shame. We've all done it. But you probably walked away more confused than when you started, because pricing a vacant staging business is genuinely complicated and a comment section just can't hold that conversation. This is an expensive business model to run, and if the pricing isn't right, it can r...

Running a staging business means dealing with all kinds of client requests. Some reasonable, some feeling like they are meant to test your boundaries . " Can you install tomorrow?" "I'll give you a lot of business, so can you give me a better price?" "We don't like the art—can you come change it before photos?" If requests like these stress you out or leave you feeling devalued, you're not alone....

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been sharing some things in my business that were genuinely challenging. The systems that stretched me, the decisions that felt uncomfortable, the seasons that required me to shift my thinking. I've talked about what was hard and the mindset shifts that came from it. But what I realized I haven't really talked about is how I got to those mindset shifts in the fi...

There's a business season that doesn't get talked about enough; the one where growth stops feeling exciting and starts feeling heavy. It's a different phase from when you are the only person and you are tired from being overwhelmed. Here, you're no longer doing everything yourself. What you have running are systems, training, and leadership, but these feel harder than any work you have ever done....

Heather Russo is building a luxury staging business in the Boston area. And her path here? Eighteen years in insurance first. I know, right. She is like most of us out there who didn't set out to build a staging business. Today, Heather and I talk about what it really looks like to grow a staging business intentionally. From learning how to manage seasonality and capacity, to making decisions that...

We love to say we want things to be simple. Simple workflows. Simple systems. Simple days. But if you've ever felt exhausted by something that looks straightforward on paper, please come closer. On Staging Sips today, I am pulling back the curtain on why "simple" workflows in a staging business often feel anything but simple. Also, why that doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. Rather, it mea...