No Need For Shame

I was recently at an event co-hosted by the RESA Richmond and Greater Capital Area Chapters. We had invited speaker Angela Brooks-Osborne to host a workshop with us on pricing. One thing that she said at the beginning of her presentation was (something along the lines of) “…I’m not going to stager-shame…” The thought was, and the basis for her coaching on pricing, that everyone prices differently (and should) due to the needs of their companies, their clients and even their families. We will all have different pricing and because we all have different needs, no one price is right!

So let’s take that a step further, most of us in the staging industry are entrepreneurs. We are business owners, decision makers and investors. The common denominator is that we get to decide for ourselves. What we each decide will be different, and there ain’t no shame in that.

From our RESA Greater Capital Area chapter members alone we have one-woman shows, teams; stagers who focus on occupied homes, stagers who won’t touch them; stagers who haven’t staged a house yet and stagers who staged before it was called staging. We are all different. The one thing that might make me raise an eyebrow is the norm for another stager in our chapter.

The point is, that while there are good and bad stagers (I’ve seen the pictures), there are different price points throughout the country (I reside in a lower-end area), and everyone has different tastes and budgets for inventory, we shouldn’t play the stager shame game without knowing that person or business. Everyone starts somewhere. We should, instead (as a chapter, an organization, or as a friend), learn about other businesses so that we can help them and, in turn, help ourselves. When we share “the better way”, the higher price, or the source for furniture, we are helping uplift other stagers. When we, as people, see value in ourselves, we demand that from others. The same is true for staging. When we see the value in our businesses, we slowly demand the price point, or the signature, or the fee, that we deserved in the first place.

I have a long way to go. I have a lot of cheap (distasteful) inventory to purge, because I had a lower budget for it when I started. I have fees to add to my contract. I have an inventory system that needs implementing and some inefficiencies that need to be managed, but if it weren’t for surrounding myself with other stagers, I wouldn’t know where my weaknesses lie. I might not have raised my price.

 Some use feather, some use fluff. If the house sold in the same amount of time, there ain’t no shame in either!