I started my interior design/staging business with a great hand up. I passionately loved my thirteen years working as a legal advocate and lobbyist for abused women and kids, but social services in Canada had moved toward a contract approach to hiring and with low funding there were never guarantees for renewal even though the glass ceiling on wages was touching my head.
It was time to reach for the dream I had been studying for and doing on the side for years. I took a huge leap of faith and with eligibility for unemployment benefits in place after the end of my last contract at a large legal clinic, I enrolled in a do or die self employment training program offered by the government. It made all the difference. I got a brilliant business coach who taught me among other things, how to write an aggressive business plan. I jumped in with little or no safety net on a shoestring startup budget and I was pumped, but terrified that I was doing something crazy that might compromise those who depended upon me.
I attempted to market my staging services to many agents and I got a lot of interest but no sales. Four agents approached me and said they needed stagers and asked for my marketing material. We had meetings, I gave them brochures and we talked about how it works and what it costs.
I regretfully admit I was one of those stagers you all hate here on active rain who was desperate enough to give it away to try to get my first listing and get seen. So much so that I actually did a two hour consultation for a local realtor followed up by a ten page detailed written report with every resource needed to do the work and I didn’t charge him a dime. He never called me again. Even in retrospect, I know the analysis and plan I offered him were excellent. His owners were divorcing with animosity and if anyone had the skills to mediate and move forward, it was me. I still don’t understand that. I do know that he had an expectation that I could somehow present that very dirty, cluttered home in disrepair successfully for two hundred dollars. Where do they that get that figure?
Of course my first formal staging assignment came without solicitation and by referral and I was well paid for my work. It sold the day it was listed for eight thousand over list price and I made a great alliance with the agent. Since then it’s been slowly but surely all uphill.
But to agents who are still struggling with whether they believe the investment in a stager is worth it, I would like you know that when you approach us with enthusiasm and then disappear, it is very disheartening.
Has anyone else had this experience? I have tried to ruthlessly and honestly look at what there might have been about the impression I made that contributed to this experience, but unless I am way up the river of denial, I don’t think it was me. I think maybe they approached me because at the time they were worried about a slow moving listing which may have then sold (it’s a very fast market in my part of the country) and then never gave me a second thought. Ah well, it’s a new industry and maybe it’s all growing pains.
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