The More Things Change . . .
Hi friend!
A lot has happened since we've talked. Or maybe we've never talked, and if that's the case, then I'm so glad you're here!
If you've been following Rough Diamond for awhile you know that for years we've been a duo - Jes and Amy were synonymous with Rough Diamond! But the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And so just like it started, Rough Diamond is now a solo operation again!
I know your next question - 'Oooooooooooooo what happened?!?!'
(The internet loves its gossip.) 😅🙄
But here's the thing, absolutely nothing "happened." 🤷♀️
Jes and I are still best friends and soul sisters, and she's still the best designer I've ever had the honor of working with.
But we have slowly and gradually diverged paths over the last few years when it comes to our needs and goals. And in the end, while Jes is still a HUGE part of my life, she'll be stepping down from Rough Diamond to focus on being the BEST mom and wife in the universe.
The heart wants what it wants. 🥰And nobody loves their family more fiercely than that beautiful human - it's an incredible thing to behold.
In the meantime, my heart is more on fire than ever for creating unforgettable, unique, and memorable designs for my clients! After all, Rough Diamond is my brain child, and while my cat can be quite high maintenance 🤣 my business is really my baby.
So then there was one.
But it's also been awhile since I told the story about how I/we became home staging & design influencers/mentors, and more importantly, why.
So buckle up, and let's take a walk through time.
I was in my early 30s, living in a 3-story walkup outside Chicago with my husband, and working in an insurance cubicle after graduating with my Master's Degree in International Relations - a career I already knew I was no longer interested in pursuing. (That's a story for another day, but suffice it to say that grad school cured me of wanting to work in Academia forever.) 🙄😅
I decided that enough was enough and I had to leave the rat race when I ended up on the floor of my bathroom sobbing one day, wondering what in the hell I was doing with my life, and how I was going to find fulfillment when every path I took felt like a wrong turn.
My mental and physical health were both suffering, and I felt no direction or purpose at all.
One day my husband and I went for a long walk and after talking it out for maaaannnny hours, we agreed that quitting my dead-end job was step one (I was making peanuts anyway) and that step two should be starting my own design business.
After all, I had a degree in Interior Design which I'd gotten right before the '08 crash that had never led to a traditional job, but my skills were still top-notch from freelancing over the years, and I knew I could make something in the world of design and construction work. It just felt right in my gut.
So after some research, I landed on home staging! I figured I'd work fairly anonymously out of home and do occupied stagings where I rearranged other people's stuff, and make a moderate but decent living doing something I knew I was good at, problem solved!
I'm sure that if you already know this story you're laughing your head off right now at those expectations. But what can I say, God works in mysterious ways. 😆
Nevertheless, I dove in head first.
We already knew we wanted to move back home to Northeast Ohio where all our friends and family were, so I started building my reputation digitally by selling handmade home décor on Etsy and building my local e-mail list until we could physically be there and I could start building my staging portfolio.
I read everything I could get my hands on about home staging, and started stacking my skills and knowledge.
After moving home, we quickly realized that in my area, clients needed vacant staging more than occupied staging, and that if I wanted to make any money or be taken seriously as a stager I needed to think bigger and start collecting furniture inventory and get a small warehouse. (Years later I realized I probably should have focused on consulting instead of occupied staging first and I could have operated without a warehouse for years while building up my client base, but that too is a story for another day.)
I'm a total introvert and the idea of cold calling or door-to-door sales at brokerages felt like an insurmountable task.
So I thought outside the box, and instead started teaching free courses about staging to Realtors in the area - how to use it, about the industry, and how it could make them money! Having come from a family of teachers, I stepped naturally into the role and began to gain local Realtors' trust AND build my reputation extremely fast.
Between the leads I got from teaching, and one HUGE client with a ton of volume, things got out of hand fast! I knew I needed help if I was ever going to keep up with demand. However I was constantly buying inventory, so I was still struggling financially. Hiring was a stretch, but I figured I had to do it to handle the constantly increasing demand.
I hired an old acquaintance from high-school (that's Jes!!) and she immediately jumped in like she'd been staging her whole life!!
Even though we had traveled in different circles back in high school, Jes and I recognized one another as soul sisters, and became best friends practically overnight.
Not long after, we agreed to become equal business partners because we were such an amazing team, and we got ready to rake in the cash...as soon as we caught up from all the debt we had acquired to purchase enough inventory to keep up, especially because we were gonna add wedding styling to our services!
But pretty soon we realized it was absolutely impossible and insane to run two completely different, hands-on, demanding creative businesses (who knew) 😅 so we abandoned the idea of events to keep from losing our minds, and decided to take a leap of faith and lean back into staging in a HARD way, even though the business simply wasn't there yet to support two of us.
But we stayed in our lane and had faith.
We thought it was smooth sailing from there on out, but we couldn't have been more wrong.
Several of our staged listings were broken into and all of our best inventory, much of which we had JUST bought or built from scratch was suddenly gone forever. We ate tens of thousands of dollars.
We put even MORE inventory on our credit cards to replace what was stolen because we felt bad for charging our clients for the full loss even though our contract held them financially responsible, so we undercharged them and kept pushing through just trying to catch up. Eventually our reputation started to grow, we were getting back on track because the break-ins had finally stopped, and things were looking up!
FINALLY we were on the road to stability.
...Right?!?!
Wrong.
Our biggest client (the one with the crazy volume) started getting sketchy, paying late, doing worse and worse work in their flips, being generally disreputable, their other vendors and contractors were quitting left and right, and they started complaining about our prices constantly even though they were already too low. And so we made the VERY painful and scary decision to cut ties and walk away from them.
We had other loyal clients and a fairly full schedule so we knew we would be okkkk financially, but definitely not great.
We started to sort through the chaotic mountain of mediocre inventory we had bought out of desperation when we were crazy-busy-but-crazy-strapped-for-cash, and started paying off the debt little by little with the clients we had left. We got to work rebuilding so we could FINALLY achieve our goals and keep the wolf from the door.
We also realized when the dust settled that the big warehouse, the burden of employees relying on us, and the packed calendar hadn't been improving our lives...instead we had been nervous wrecks.
We took that opportunity to begin scaling back down, tweaking and perfecting our systems and processes to work in a slower, smaller business, and we finally began to find our footing.
We had looked for training along the way to help us, but every course we invested in left us just as confused and overwhelmed as before, not to mention the expensive and complex systems and software they recommended ate into our profits like whoah. So we started to ignore the advice of industry experts, and do what worked for us and our lives.
We kept pushing, stuck it out, continued to stay in our lane, and kept on keeping the faith.
And bit by bit, staging by staging, our schedules got more predictable, and we had more time for our friends and family.
We raised our prices to where they should have been in the first place, cut as many costs as possible, reworked our business from the ground up in a way that worked for a lower-budget area and a smaller operation like ours, reorganized our warehouse, streamlined our inventory, and started focusing on finding ideal clients who appreciated our work and didn't call us at 10 pm. 😆
We had FINALLY hit our groove.
We had cracked the code, and now we were ready to share it with other stagers so that others like us - people who wanted a slower, softer life - could still find success in the staging industry.
We still had some old inventory to sort through and replace or repair, but otherwise we were feeling fine.
Then COVID hit.
And nearly overnight, 90% of staging in our area went away.
Which meant that every single piece of inventory we owned also suddenly came back into our warehouse AGAIN - practically overnight - so it all got chaotically stashed in piles and a lot of it died there for years until we could sort through it all. 😭
We had to let the last of our employees go, and we even stopped paying for movers and did the heavy lifting ourselves. We were forced to get a loan from the SBA just to keep our doors open, and we spent our newfound free time posting our tips & tricks online.
We limped our way through lockdowns and an upended real estate market, and slowwwwwwly but surely got back on track...again.
One day out of the blue we went mega-viral on TikTok for a staging hack, realized how many other stagers were out there struggling because the educational resources that exist were created for stagers in big markets with big budgets, and so we started sharing all the hard lessons we learned along the way, and shifted our focus to giving back and helping others.
It took a lot of patience and a lot of faith, but as time marched on and the world opened back up, our business was finally successful and steady. We had mastered all the major issues of running a staging business in a small city, and we continued to share our tips online while our following and reputation grew.
And as the market slowly shifted all the way back in our favor, our staging business that we had been marketing like crazy for years while we were slow during Covid finally took off again like wildfire.
Remember my dream of a little anonymous Occupied Staging side hustle out of home?
You know what they say about best laid schemes. 🙈
Instead I was suddenly a wildy successful vacant stager with a global audience. And it couldn't have been more different from what I had first envisioned when I set out to build a design business.
But I said God works in mysterious ways for a reason...
Because here's the thing.
- If we hadn't gone through all those trials we wouldn't know how to talk other stagers through them.
- If we hadn't grown so burdensomely large as a business, we never would have been able to teach others how to streamline and maximize profits.
- If we hadn't had all free that time during Covid, we never would have gone viral or pursued teaching staging online.
- And teaching others how to create businesses they love that love them back has been one of the great joys of my life.
We stayed in that groove and enjoyed a rare moment of peace in our business for several years before we started hatching new plans.
But we never stay in one place very long. 😆
We began to fall in love with the idea of offering Airbnb Design, however we knew from past experience that doing too much at once was a recipe for disaster.
But the phone began to ring with requests for it, and so eventually we gave it a whirl.
And we fell in love again.
Staging Airbnbs was such a fun, fulfilling outlet for all our energy! We had always loved staging real estate listings - especially because of the creative freedom - but dreaming up and implementing designs that real people will actually use and make memories in - that was so SO fulfilling for us.
We got our Airbnb side of the business off the ground and running smoothly, and then started teaching other stagers how to add it to their businesses as well!
And while Jes loved the process too, she eventually decided that it was the right time to focus on her family and not waste a single second with her girls. 🥰
Now, while I continue to stage here and there on a case-by-case basis, I have transitioned to nearly 100% Airbnb Design, because while I absolutely loved staging, I was - and am - ready for new challenges.
Airbnb Design has been a perfect fit for my current needs and goals, but who knows what's next for me!?
For now I get to create gorgeous spaces and educate, encourage, and inspire Home Stagers and Airbnb Designers all over the world after cracking the code on making a stable living doing what I love!
A few years ago Jes and I created Stager Starter together, an affordable, super-practical-but-fun staging course that teaches others how to build a business that loves them back, even if they have zero startup funds! So I continue to enroll new students, teach stagers how to get started, how to add Airbnb Design to their business, how to book more clients without feeling salesy, and sooooo much more.
Jes and I have had a hard and winding road, but we both absolutely love where we've ended up. 😍
I'm so honored to have the privilege of designing beautiful spaces, and helping other creatives build successful businesses for themselves in an uncertain world where creativity and artistic vision often get pushed to the side in favor of more practical careers.
It's been a wild ride, but I wouldn't change a thing.
And you'd better believe my story isn't over.
Much Love,
-Amy 😊
