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.

Today, I'm sharing what that journey taught me. Not just about technology, but about systems, opportunity cost, and why the right solution isn't always the newest one.

What You'll Learn

• The hidden opportunity cost of forcing software to do a job it wasn't designed to do
• What worked and what didn't with paper checklists, Google Docs, Dragon Dictation, GoCanvas, and Jotform
• The features I was searching for but couldn't find in any existing platform
• Why efficiency matters just as much as presentation when creating client deliverables

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• 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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 positioning, systems, leadership, and building businesses that could actually support sustainable growth.

As we unpack what she learned, we also have two exciting announcements to share. Heather introduces her brand-new mentorship program, The Six Figure Stager, and I share why I've decided to officially pass the torch on something many of you have been waiting for. Sometimes the best way to serve our community isn't by creating something ourselves, but by recognizing when someone else has built exactly what our industry needs.

Whether you're brand new to staging or you've been in business for years, this conversation is a reminder that building a successful staging business takes more than becoming a great stager. If you've also been looking for guidance on building the business behind your staging business, you'll want to hear this conversation from beginning to end.

What You'll Learn

• The four foundational pillars of a sustainable six-figure staging business
• How strong brand positioning helps you compete on value instead of price
• How to identify what makes your staging business different from everyone else
• Why mentorship can accelerate your growth more than another online course
• My exciting announcement about the future of Staging Business – Growth and why I'm so excited to support Heather's new program

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate
• 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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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

• Why the closed-door boundary I set with my kids showed me how broken my business really was
• How going from asking how do I get more done? to how do I make this easier? changed everything
• How I audited my business without a formal spreadsheet, but by focusing on 3 things
• The first operational change I made that began reducing my workload

RESOURCES:

• Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp
• Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerateJoin 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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 email platform, then project management software, then invoicing, then file storage, then proposals. Before we knew it, our clients were living in six different places.

In this episode, I'm giving a name to that problem: the Six-Stack Symptom. I'll talk about why it happens, what it's really costing your business, and why adding more tools is rarely the answer.

What You'll Learn

• What the Six-Stack Symptom is and why so many staging businesses experience it
• How disconnected tools quietly create more work as your business grows
• The difference between automation and true integration
• What a unified operating system for a staging business can look like

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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 see over and over again is that businesses often grow faster than their structure. We hire people without clearly defining the role they're stepping into. We add services without assigning ownership of the operational pieces that support them. And before we know it, everything feels heavier than it should.

Today, I am breaking down three core roles that exist in every staging business—whether you have one person on your team or twenty. Understanding these roles is one of the fastest ways to identify where your business is creating unnecessary complexity and where you may be carrying work that does not actually belong to you anymore.

What You'll Learn

• What the CEO should actually be focused on (and what they should not)
• Why the Admin Ops function is often the most overlooked role in a growing business
• How operational ownership impacts everything from scheduling to inventory visibility
• The hidden mental load many staging business owners carry every day

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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 calendar together, this episode will make you feel seen. I explore why scheduling becomes increasingly complex as businesses grow, where traditional systems begin to break down, and what it could look like when your scheduling system starts doing more of the work for you.

What You'll Learn:

• The two key variables every scheduling system must balance
• How multiple calendars, color-coding, and manual processes can create hidden points of failure
• The difference between client schedules and team schedules in staging businesses
• A simple scheduling strategy Lori used with her first team member to reduce back-and-forth communication

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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 not automatically mean having more capacity. That one distinction is exactly why I built a framework around it.

Today I'm walking you through what I'm calling the Stair-Step Capacity Framework to act as a guide for how to think about hiring at every stage of your business. Once you understand it, your hiring decisions start to make so much more sense, and a whole lot of the frustration and self-judgment disappear.

What You'll Learn:

• The four distinct hiring stages in a staging business and what each one accomplishes.
• Why replacing yourself as the lead stager doesn't automatically increase your capacity.
• The critical moment when your business can truly begin to expand its volume.
• Why simultaneous hiring often creates organizational whiplash instead of smooth 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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.

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 Notebook LM all have the ability to remove friction from parts of the business that normally take hours. The opportunities with these tools are only growing from here.

What is however most important to know is that AI is not actually the missing piece for most businesses. Infrastructure is. A generated layout still needs somewhere to live. Notes still need to be connected to the project. Presentations still need to be easy to find and share with your team. How then do you combine AI and systems to work together to make your staging business feel lighter and more efficient? Come find out.

What You'll Learn:

• Why most people are already using AI without realizing it
• How AI can help you with hiring and capacity planning, image generation, client communication and so much more.
• The difference between AI tools and business infrastructure
• What I am considering in my own staging business about AI while building Harlowe

RESOURCES:

• Join the Harlowe Founding Members Waitlist www./rethinkhomeinteriors.com/harlowefounderapp
• 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 streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd 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. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you.
• Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.