Staging Sips

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 losing track of a renewal payment, and why reminding clients harder never seems to work.

Bringing in a little...

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 the thinking behind the work.

Using the example of scheduling a vacant staging installation, Lori walks through how to turn years of experience and instinct into a...

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 Flexibility Trap and Growing Businesses." Flexibility can be wonderful, especially in a dynamic industry like home staging. But when every exception becomes an unwritten rule, your team may...

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 chasing you.

You may have more clients but less time. More revenue but more pressure. A bigger team but more decisions landing on your desk...

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 owner, trained another team member to step in and confidently take over.

That's the kind of delegation that creates re...

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, started giving 50-cent baton lessons after school, and eventually found herself with a growing business of her own.

Over the next five decades...

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 overwhelm, frustration, and a business that feels reactive instead of intentional. That's why better boundaries matter.

Boundaries and policies...

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 when a home stager chose to listen.

You may have been driving to an installation, packing the truck, walking, folding laundry, or washing dishes while trying to figure out what the next season of your...

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, hospitality, and excellent customer service.

But every custom accommodation also adds another layer of complexity to your business.

As your project volume grows and you begin hiring a...

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 normal part of growth.

I've experienced plenty of them in my own staging business—from quiet summer and winter seasons to credit card de...

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 filled with mover coordination, client messages, invoicing, item pulls, and last-minute fire drills, your brain adapts to that environment. Reactivity becomes its default setting. Even as...

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 of business experience in Houston, Texas, while Erin is approaching her first anniversary as a staging business owner in Colorado. Although they entered Harlowe at...

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 payment method has a price tag, even the ones that look free. 

I'm walking through the hidden labor behind manual payments, the leg...

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. I'd built a collection of tools that didn't know the others existed.

That's the moment fragmentation clicked for me. None...

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 staging admin work hiding in contract renewals, follow-ups, and invoicing.

I also talk about why patchwork tools – my old Zapier workarounds included – were never going to hold up long-term.

L...

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 of those steps into one. The very first time I sent it, the agreement came back signed within the hour. It was one of those...

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 fit the way staging businesses operate. What I didn't realize was how much opportunity I was losing while trying to force tools to do a job they were never designed to do.<...

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 spending the past year helping stagers with marketing, Heather discovered that the real challenges weren't content calendars or Instagram posts. They ran much deeper. Business owners were struggling with brand...

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 changed everything about how I run my business.

What You'll Learn

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 three, usually more.

The reality is that most of us didn't build these systems intentionally. We solved one problem at a time. We added a booking tool, then an...

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 were running a company with real complexity while still trying to wear every hat ourselves.

What I...

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 more team members, more service types, overlapping appointments, public booking links, warehouse logistics, and multiple moving pieces that all need to stay connected.

If you've ever felt like you're the glue holding your...

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 work. Her spring felt better personally, but the business still hadn't truly expanded capacity.

Not only her, but that is what most staging business owners do not realize: having a team does...

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 altogether.

This week, I'm walking through the AI tools I'm personally seeing used well inside staging businesses and sharing practical examples of how they fit into real workflows. ChatGPT, Canva Magic Studio, Plaud, and...

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, client communication, bookkeeping, and operations through systems that were never actually designed for the way staging businesses function. 

The responses to Harlowe echoed "I thought it was just me." But like I hav...

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.

Running a staging business on fragmented, disconnected tools creates a massive, hidden mental load and operational bottleneck. Instead of trying to "duct-tape" a broken backend, it's time to...

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, and then you become what I can only describe as a weirdo lurker. Checking in, hovering, making sure it all...

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 actually want to render,

If your staging business feels harder to run than it should, your client mix may be the issue. In this episode, I talk down what client filters are, when to use them...

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 overwhelm, rushed decisions, and temporary fixes.

This conversation will help you pause, step back, and ask a better question: What is this problem actually a symptom of? From missed items on...

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 pressure to "just make it work" for your clients.

Here's the truth: what feels like good staging service can slowly create stress, inconsistency, and...

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 you tighten your payment processes, you're not being difficult. You're building a business that can handle more volume, more consistency, and less stress behind the scenes. Flexibility might feel...

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 influenced by instinct, habit, or what feels reasonable in the moment.

In this episode...

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 to software founder, and walks us through exactly what Hutch does, why the staging industry has been underserved for so long, and how better data can finally help stagers price their services for what the...

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 admin work from the first client call to the moment that last throw pillow is back on the shelf.

The furniture check is about inventory recovery. You're pu...

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 really hurt you. It does not matter whether you're brand new or you've been in business for years.

In this episode, I'm kicking off a three-part series on pricing yo...

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. But here's the thing: most of these aren't actually boundary violations. They're just questions from people who don't fully understand how staging works or who skimmed your 20-p...

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 first place.

The truth is, those shifts didn't come from thinking harder or powering through or honestly even journaling. They came from my decision to invest in...

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.

This episode is grounded in what that season looked like inside my own business, because it's a phase so many owners experience but rarely name out loud.

I walk...

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 allow the business to support long-term goals instead of constant burnout.

We talk about the moment success starts to stretch you, why hiring...