Melissa Marro appears on Australian Podcast, Foxy Property Chat
Our counterparts in Australia, Foxy Home Staging, recently invited our owner, Melissa Marro, onto their international home staging podcast! Jake Shorter, the show’s host and co-founder of Foxy Home Staging, had some great questions for Melissa about Rave’s pricing model and her 2019 IAHSP keynote speech.
Listen along as we go over a few key take-aways from the show.
Growth Costs Money
This can be pretty counter-intuitive. When you think of growth, you think of getting something. But growing a company means constantly reinvesting your profits into that company.
Rave has grown a lot over the years because Melissa takes the money she could be spending on herself and puts it back into the company. Last year, we reached a million dollars in revenue. We now have a staff of 22 employees and run about 20 jobs a week, but we certainly didn’t start out that big.
Melissa got into staging by launching her first company in Charleston. Interior design had always been a part of life for her. So had entrepreneurship; she found a way to turn every hobby she had into a business.
Two successful staging companies later, Melissa has set new standards for the industry. One of our most innovative practices is our unique pricing model.
Know Our Price
One of the worst feelings is driving all the way out to a home, only to have the job fall through because a client says they didn’t think the price would be so high.
At Rave, our clients always know what price to expect before we ever see their property. That’s because we base our fees off of a percentage of the list price of the home. Once you know your list price, you know the cost of staging with Rave.
This is especially helpful for us, because most of our customers are flippers. Our pricing model makes it easy for flippers to budget for home staging from the very start.
We also offer the ability to pay at close. There’s two ways we could go about pricing this—we could charge a premium for the ability to “stage now, pay later” OR we could give a discount for customers who can pay upfront. Which one sounds better to you?
If You Could Do It All Again…
When circumstances forced her to move to Jacksonville, Melissa thought she was leaving staging behind in Charleston. But as hard as it was to start over, she knew exactly what she could accomplish with the right team and the right resources, so she founded Rave.
Jake asked Melissa what she would change about her company. In founding Rave, she got the opportunity to do it all again after selling her company in Charleston. But she still wishes she had gone about finding a “new Melissa”—an Operations Manager—for Rave sooner.
Sometimes, you spend too much time working “in” the business when you need to be working “on” the business. That’s when it’s time to hire outside help.
These are just a few of the highlights from Jake and Melissa’s conversation. You can find the full podcast episode here. Don’t forget to like Rave Home Staging and Foxy Home Staging on Facebook!
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