How Home Stagers Can Leverage Business Management Software

Doing Less & Making More Money is Not a Myth

Realistically, I think most home stagers start out as solopreneurs, meaning that you are a one-woman or one-man show. You handle everything in the staging business yourself, ranging from the big things like meeting with clients, staging on site, shopping for inventory to the tedious admin work like filing paperwork away, sending emails, scheduling and chasing after clients for payment.

We had always chosen a lean business operation, which meant that only my sister and I were full-time in our staging business. So naturally, I wanted to figure out how I can leverage technology so that I can invest more time in cultivating long-term relationships with top producers in our target markets for staging. After all, getting staging projects was the real money maker here. Not sitting in the office, typing away on the computer for hours.

Leveraging Technology to Save Time & Money While Looking Good in Front of Your Staging Clients

This was where 17hats came in for us. I started using a time tracker to track my time for the day-to-day, and I realized that I was spending a lot of time on the admin side of things.

A lot of those admin work could be replaced by a software, such as:

• Screening staging clients to see if they are the right fit for us (for example, we only took on vacant staging projects at the end of our operations)

• Setting appointment times (clients can DIY this on our website instead)

• Sending out various reminders like appointment reminders, upcoming invoice due reminders, staging confirmations, etc.

• Populating proposals, invoices and contracts

• Following up with staging clients to see if they had received it

• In general, having a consistent workflow means that we will dot all the i’s and crossing all the t’s

While client communication and paperwork are critical, they did eat up a lot of time. This is why I think it’s important to leverage something like 17hats to make sure that we are not dropping any balls or details that will make the staging client feel that we’ve forgotten about them.

I also think that with today’s marketplace, having a streamlined, professional and great client experience is highly valued by our staging clients. This will also make them more likely to refer you to their friends and family, which will also help to cut down time and resources needed to find new staging clients.

What I love most about 17hats is its time-saving features that lets me automate admin tasks that used to eat up all my free time. Here are a few ways that we used 17hats in our staging business.

Simple but Effective Workflows

I am obsessed with the workflows, because I am able to design the experience my staging client would have, while making sure that I am not dropping any balls in terms of following up and reminding clients of key dates like staging, de-staging, etc.

Ultimately, one of our critical roles as a business owner is to prevent client issues. Having a workflow set up means that you can consistently execute and prevent any possible issues up front, instead of trying to make amends later on where your client relationship already took a hit.

For example, here is a screenshot of our home staging project workflow in our 17hats dashboard. We have a questionnaire (this is called a Lead Capture Form in 17hats) on our site that has a few screening questions to determine if this is the right staging client for us.

Or my assistant will send an email response (which is automatically created with an email template already pre-written for my assistant to field appointment requests) if they had emailed us directly through our website.

(We took our phone number off our website because towards the end of our home staging business, we already had a steady stream of clients that we worked with consistently. Or potential staging clients would come through referral. So by having a form on our website that a potential client can fill out was more preferable for us to handle new client inquiries.)

Customizable Templates

Creating templates for everything ranging from emails to proposals and invoices have cut down my admin time drastically. I am also able to outsource this stuff out to my assistant.

Because I had pre-written all the templates, all my assistant needed to do was double check the information is correct. Oftentimes, because when we set up the client and their staging project in 17hats already, most of the personalized aspects of the template, like the name of the client, property address, etc., were already automatically populated.

This cuts down admin time significantly for both my assistant and I.

I can be on the staging job site when emails and inquiries come in, and I know that my assistant will be able to take care of them without having me double check everything before they go out. It is peace of mind while I am out busy staging houses, meeting with clients, or simply taking a day off recharging myself.

Combined with the automation set up in the workflows, this is incredibly powerful. Here is an example of an email template we used to check in with home staging clients 14 days after the installation project.

It’s already set in the workflow to automatically fire. It doesn’t matter if we had forgotten about it (it is time-consuming to keep track of everything if you have multiple houses staged all at once). The system will remember it for us and make sure that it will be done.

Less Physical Paperwork + Access Important Docs Everywhere

One of the things I also struggled with in my staging business was also the sheer amount of paperwork to keep and to keep track of. By sending everything electronically via 17hats, we have a record of everything and can access them wherever we have an internet connection.

We can also go into a staging client’s profile to privately note certain preferences and things we should watch out for. Even something simple like “Agent John Smith prefers a phone call vs. text.” is important, because we should communicate with our staging clients in a format that they prefer to be communicated with.

How About You?

Do you use a business management software like 17hats in your home staging business? How do you use it? We would love to hear more about it! Tell us in the Comment section below.