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 burnout for you and your team.

Let's talk about how overextending actually happens in staging businesses, why it's often rooted in fear (not strategy), and how to start leading from a place of intentional capacity instead of reaction.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• How overextending leads to team burnout and inconsistent delivery
• The difference between operating your business and leading it
• A simple decision filter to check your real capacity before committing
• How capacity-aware leadership supports long-term growth

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 generous, but every exception adds complexity your team has to manage.

If things have felt heavier than they should lately, this might be the shift that changes everything. Your payment method is a double-edged tool. It can create convenience for your clients or quietly complicate how your business runs. You can simplify it in a way that supports you both.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Why checks, Zelle, and Venmo add more complexity than you think
• The hidden cost of free manual payments
• How to shift your payment policies, simplify your systems and cash flow without losing clients
• What to do about estates, trusts, and complex payment situations
  
  

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome
  

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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, we continue the vacant staging pricing series by focusing on how to approach that number with more precision. This is a closer look at how renewal pricing can be grounded in the ongoing value of your inventory and its role inside your business.

Because even when nothing new is being installed, your assets are still actively allocated. They continue to influence capacity, availability, and what your business can generate next.

The opportunity is in understanding how to translate that into a number that is intentional, consistent, and financially sound.

We walk through:

• The difference between "what makes this profitable" vs. "what makes this powerful"
• Why standard renewal math often lands at the bare minimum
• How to shift your thinking from monthly pricing to total asset value
• The 8–12% renewal model that creates stronger margins, flexibility, and cash flow
• How renewals can quietly become one of the most impactful drivers of your bottom line

This episode also addresses the internal tension many owners feel when raising prices.

Because pricing is never just numbers. It's belief, identity, and decision-making. When you anchor your pricing in clean math, you create stability and confidence that ripple through your entire business.

Renewals are not an afterthought. They are a strategic lever.

And when used well, they fund your growth, your team, and your ability to actually enjoy the business you've built.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Why most renewal pricing models leave money on the table
• The difference between baseline profitability vs. strategic pricing
• How to use the 8–12% inventory-based renewal model
• The real role renewals play in cash flow and business stability
• How to think like a CEO when pricing—beyond fear, competition, or guesswork

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 they're actually worth.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• How Kate went from staging side hustler to software co-founder
• Why so many stagers are stitching together tools that were never built for them and what that's costing them
• What Hutch does as an all in one staging business tailored platform
• Why your average inventory investment per stage might be the most important number you're not tracking
  
  

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome
• Hutch Staging Website: hutchstaging.com
• Hutch Staging on Instagram: @hutchstaging

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 putting thousands of dollars of inventory into every house, and that inventory needs to earn its money back over time.

When you add these together with your overhead allocation, you get your pricing floor—what you need to charge before you ever add profit.

Understanding these numbers is what separates staging businesses that grow and thrive from ones that work themselves into the ground.

Let's now walk through the real numbers so you can calculate your own pricing floor.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• How to calculate your people and furniture check
• What inventory recovery means and why every piece of furniture needs to earn its money back
• How to calculate your true floor pricing before adding profit
• How to stair-step pricing increases without scaring yourself

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 your vacant staging service, and I'm starting with the pillar that I know trips most of us up: overhead allocation per project. It's the piece of the pricing puzzle that took me the longest to understand, and once I did, everything started to make a lot more sense. I'll walk you through what it is, how to calculate it, and what the real numbers look like for a staging business that is built to last.

Listen in! My goal is that you walk away with clarity on at least this one piece of your pricing.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Why pricing for vacant staging is genuinely complex and why that's not a reflection of your skill.
• What the three pillars of pricing are and their importance.
• Why you should be pricing for the business you want and not the one you have right now.
• How your contract term length (30, 60, or 90 days) directly impacts how much overhead each project must carry.

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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-page client agreement.

In this episode, I'm talking about how grounded communication can better help you respond to client requests from a place of emotional neutrality instead of frustration or fear. I also walk you through the four key components of communicating your policies effectively, plus share a FREE plug-and-chug communication template that you can use right in your own business!

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

• The three critical components of grounded communication
• How to separate your personal identity from your business identity so client requests don't feel like personal attacks
• Why deciding your communication plans ahead of time keeps you out of emotional reactivity
• When to create exceptions to your policies using client filters and when to hold firm

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• Join the Staging Business School Growth Track Waitlist: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/growth
• Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool
• Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome
• Download your copy of the Communication Plan Template
  

If you want to learn how to market and grow your staging business, enrollment is open for Rethink You Accelerate. This is a year-long mentorship program, where I help you and other staging business owners plan, grow, flow, and thrive with the results that you've always wanted. The doors are open and I would love to see you in the classroom!

ENJOY THE SHOW?

• Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.