This past Friday, December 7th, I was fortunate to facilitate the Los Angeles Area Home Stagers SIF Roundtable. Generously hosted by the Brook Furniture Rental Showroom in Sherman Oaks, they provided us with a delicious lunch catered by The Corner Bakery (if you haven't tried their cream cheese brownies, run, don't walk, to your nearest Corner Bakery to try them!) .

The Brook employees were happy to address our concerns about the perception they are offering staging services and in competition with us Professional Home Stagers. In a nutshell, they said that they offer furniture for staging, and not staging services. They were aghast when I told them what happened to Karen Dembsky as related in her blog. They assured me that they would take up the matter with the head honchos at Brook Corportate

There were about 25 of us in attendance. I was afraid that the weather (we are not used to rain here in normally sunny southern CA) was going to limit the number of attendees, but I was pleasantly surprised when almost everyone who had RSVP'd showed up. Some of our attendees drove down from Santa Maria which is about a 2 hour drive in each direction!

Brook also gave us each a gift of a very nice candle, brochures and a CD of their catalog.

 (I'm sorry I didn't get better photos)

We pushed all the furniture into a large circle and everyone chowed down during the meeting.

We covered a lot of ground, using the template of questions that Craig Schiller had provided for us. Everyone was very generous sharing information about how they run their business and handle certain situations. The discussions were lively and interesting, and I know I walked away from that meeting feeling like we had all participated in something big that will make us, as individual stagers and business owners, and the staging industry as a whole, better & stronger. Just as an example Annie Pinsker-Brown announced that she would be willing to help out some of the less experience people attending by allowing them to "job shadow" her.

I am very happy to have met all the wonderful people who attended our Roundtable. I think some will turn into friends, not just business associates. I met a number of people I would feel comfortable referring out jobs to. It was a good mix of "veteran" and "newbies", "naked" and "designated". I look forward to the next Los Angeles Area SIF Roundtable, hopefully in February 2008