If you are a home staging business owner looking to increase the number of jobs you’re able to complete each day, then this article is for you. We’ve compiled our experience-based knowledge to help you be more productive and efficient with your time.

TIP: Look out for the tip icons scattered throughout the article, they contain real-life advice that you can implement in your own business.

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We’ve turned our five-step system into an easy to remember acronym:

S.T.A.G.E.

Set the Foundation

Truck Schedule is Key

Advanced Planning

Great Inventory Management

Early Start

If you want to create success in business, laying a strong foundation is vital. Just like a house would sink without a properly built foundation, a company without grounding principles would crumble at the first sight of adversity.

How to train your staff to be faster & more efficient?

• Hiring – The very first step is making sure that you get the right people in. We look for things that cannot be taught, like attitude, personality and whether they fit in with the team. You can read more about our philosophy on this topic here – “Building an Elite Home Staging Team”.

• Training – It’s important to instil the right values in new employees straight from the start. That is why “The Foxy Principles” are a huge part of our training manuals, highlighting character-based qualities and mentality attributes that are important to us.

• Efficiency-based Incentives & Bonus – To keep our team motivated to perform at the highest level, we’ve incorporated a bonus structure into our quarterly reviews. When they hit a certain benchmark or specific timeframes (based on their own speed & efficiency), they get paid extra. It’s a simple system that benefits everyone.

Read “6 Things to Consider Before Starting a Home-Staging Business”.

In this business, everything revolves around the truck schedule. How many jobs you can fit into a day depends entirely on the truck run, which is why the planning needs to be done with pinpoint precision.

When we’re booking in jobs and deciding on schedule, we need to ensure the truck route makes sense so they’re not wasting time on unnecessary driving, crossing paths from north to south and back north again. We also try to cluster the jobs in the same area to prevent driving for longer than 30 minutes between jobs.

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On average, we can fit in 4-5 jobs per truck a day, sending one truck to the northside and the other one south.

Read “What’s the Hidden Business Behind Your Business”.

TIP: For the most effective results, we try to organise the jobs in the following order:

1. The biggest install first – fully loaded truck leaving the warehouse, emptying everything at the first job
2. Pack-up
3. Install – using the big furniture pieces from the pack up (but changing it enough so it doesn’t look the same)
4. Pack-up – unload in the warehouse

Yes, we are on install site for about two hours on average. But what a lot of people don’t see, is that we spend an equal amount of time at the warehouse, getting everything ready. We choose the furniture, define bedrooms, and select decorations, preparing everything for a fast and seamless process on site. That way we keep the truck moving fast and alleviate the stress on the team, because with the right preparation they all know what needs to go where.

Read “Our Selection Process from Start to Finish”.

TIPS for a fast install:

• Stylist to be on site 15-30 minutes ahead of the truck to get everything ready (sort out the access, bring in their accessories, etc.)
• Keep and the quilt covers on the linen, all bagged up for an easy selection process
• Stylist to give a rundown of furniture layout to one of the Removalists upon their arrival (this will speed up the unloading process as the logistics team will know exactly where to put everything, preventing double handling)
• If the selections were done by another Stylist, photos have been taken and shared to an accessible community folder

We have talked about the importance of having good internal systems in this article – “Working ON vs IN Your Home-Staging Business”. Why is that? Well, when things get busy and you are forced to spend more time working IN the business, your systems will be your safety net.

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When it comes to managing inventory, Jake has single-handedly created a very handy Excel Spreadsheet, that helps us keep track of what furniture is currently in the warehouse, which items are due to come back and how many times has each furniture item been used.

It gets updated regularly and is used by all our Stylists who do furniture selections, who absolutely swear by it as it has made their job so much easier! There are a few similar programmes like this floating around, but if you want to give ours a crack, you can download it completely for FREE!

One way to set yourself up for success is to start your day right. That is why our Logistics Team starts and finishes a bit earlier than the rest of the team. It gives them enough time to get the truck ready in the morning and plan and prepare for the day ahead.

Read “3 Online Tools We Use for Team Communication”.

Sometimes when the work gets extra busy and not even early starts and late finishes* cut it, Phoebe and Jake step in to help carry the workload. As business owners, the responsibility to get the job done falls on their shoulders, which is why it’s not uncommon during the busy period to see Phoebe coming in to select on the weekends, or Jake starting extra early to pre-load the truck.

*early starts and late finishes don’t happen all that often, but if it’s required, all the extra hours get rebalanced in the leave (as RDO’s or early knock-offs)