Why We Expanded Beyond Home Staging And How It Changed Everything

Betting our whole income on one service leaves us one market swing away from a real crisis, especially in real estate. We walk through how staging evolved into interior design and why having both creates stability across boom and bust cycles. 

• real estate market swings as an unavoidable reality for service businesses 
• how staging conversations naturally open the door to interior design 
• losing builder and agent staging demand when homes sell too fast 
• homeowners choosing to stay put and investing in design instead of moving 
• staging and design as counterbalances across economic seasons 
• diversification as a strategic playbook rather than doing everything 
• questions to pressure-test risk exposure and add a second revenue stream 

Love design, but think like a business owner? If you're ready to leave your nine to five and want to do something that's buildable and scalable, check out linden-creek.com/franchise and see if Linden Creek is the right fit for you. 

If you found this episode useful, share it with somebody who's in the early stages of building. 

Transcript

One Service Is One Big Risk

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If your entire income depends on one thing, one service, one market, you are just one bad season away from a very real crisis in your business. In our industry, which is tied to the real estate market, diversifying your service offering isn't just smart business strategy. It comes down to survival. All too often in the real estate market, we see massive fluctuations. That's how the real estate market is, and that's not something we're going to change. But being able to diversify your services is something that allows you to stay strong and stable year after year, cycle after cycle. Let me take a step back and share with you a little bit of my journey when I started Linden Creek. There were some accidental things that happened along the way that turned out to be the biggest blessings in my business. When I started Linden Creek, I started by offering staging services. We would go into a home, we would make the home beautiful, it would sell quickly for more money, we would remove our furniture and be on our merry way. But something happened in that transaction and in that conversation. The sellers oftentimes would go, hold on a second, I have never seen my house look this good. And now I'm selling it and leaving. And I'm moving into this new house, and I want my new house to feel and look as good as this house is that was staged. And so they would ask the question, Alisa, can you come help my forever home look good too? And with those conversations, an entirely new service offering came through, and that was interior design. Suddenly we were transferring the skills that we had learned in staging and offering them for permanent forever living for our home sellers as they were transitioning into their new space, and it was beautiful. But here's what was interesting about that. That sort of organically and naturally happened. But just a couple years after that, the market shifted. You see, when I first started my business, half of my clients were real estate agents and half of my clients were builders. But then the market shifted. All of a sudden, houses were flying off the market, and two things happened because of that. My builders stopped calling me to stage their houses. Not because they decided they didn't like Linden Creek anymore, not because they didn't love staging and see the value in it. They stopped calling because their houses were selling before they were ever finished. And so suddenly 50% of my client base completely dried up just because of the market. Love design, but think like a business owner? If you're ready to leave your nine to five and want to do something that's buildable and scalable, check out linden-creek.com slash franchise and see if Linden Creek is the right fit for you. The other thing that was interesting is all those relationships I had built with my real estate agents also changed. Some of them would still call, but the calls were becoming less frequent. Again, not because necessarily they didn't believe in the value of staging, but they needed to get these houses on the market as fast as possible. And they knew that pausing, calling a staging company, getting them lined up to come and serve and provide furniture to a vacant house was just gonna slow the process down for them. And they wanted this house sold quickly because they had 17 other people that were ready to list their house too. They were simply overwhelmed and inundated and didn't have the time or the capacity to bring staging into the listing too. The other thing is during that time, that house was gonna sell$200,000 over asking with 10 offers. It was a feeding frenzy. So what was interesting is this vacant staging service that I had started, although it was still doing okay, we were seeing massive shifts in our customer base and in our demand and need because the market had completely shifted. But what was also interesting is at the same time that was happening, something else was happening behind the market. There were all sorts of homeowners that said, I can see this chaos that's happening and I don't want to be part of it. I have zero desire to move right now and to have to be one of 10 offers and have to just say yes and throw money at a house and hope that I made the right decision in a matter of hours. So I'm just gonna stay put. I'm gonna live in the home that I have right now, but the home I have right now is not working. It's ugly, it's frustrating me, it's not functioning the way I need it to. So if we're gonna settle in, I want it to look right. And that's where our interior design services really truly flourished. We all of a sudden saw this massive growth of people saying, hey, listen, if I'm gonna settle into this house, if I'm gonna say this has to work another three or four years, I need it to actually work another three or four years. And so with that, our interior design services grew significantly, while staging maybe sat a little bit more plateaued in that season. You see, these two different services end up acting in reverse of each other. When one grows, the other one sort of slows down, and vice versa. When staging booms, interior design tends to slow down a little bit. Suddenly we shift into a different position where people are a little bit more conscious of the money they're spending. They don't have these massive budgets, they want to be cautious about their cash. And so design services slow down, but staging completely booms. But having these two different services to offer to kind of counterbalance each other in each economic season that we hit is something that has been a massive blessing for us as a business as we've built and grown. So here's what I would tell someone who is just starting out. Diversification is an age-old concept around investing. You know the saying, don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? There's a reason for it. My challenge to you is this when you think about your business, consider that same concept. Are you putting all of your services leaning just on one thing to sell and offer? And if you do, what happens if the economy shifts and changes? Or are there more eggs you can be putting in that basket? Are there more services you can offer that can allow you the fluidity to transition between real estate market ebbs and flows that happen over the years? The point of building a business is not to just hit it big when the market is hot. The point of building a business is to build something that withstands the test of time year after year, cycle after cycle. The real estate market is not in your control. Interest rates, inventory, home buyer confidence, none of that is in your control. But the one thing that is your control is your ability to expose yourself to that risk. The only thing you can control is how exposed you are to those conditions when they change. Managing this with diversification is key. Diversification doesn't mean doing everything, it means being strategic about what cards you want to play when the right time comes. There may be times in your business where you're gonna hyperfocus on design. There might be times you're hyper-focusing on staging or aspects of staging, but giving yourself a playbook or a deck of cards that you can play at any given time, that's where the strategy really matters. If you're building a business on one single revenue stream today, I'm not here to scare you. I'm here to invite you to think one step ahead. What would your business look like if you added a second revenue stream or even a third? What protections do you have in place should the economy change or shift from where it is today? Those are the questions that are important for us as business owners and founders to answer. If you found this episode useful, share it with somebody who's in the early stages of building. This is the kind of thinking that just doesn't get enough attention and isn't thought about in those early stages. Do them a favor, have the conversation earlier than later. Until next time, this is a good space.