Confident Home Stagers Are More Successful

Debra Gould
Your professional image, your public perception and essentially your success as a home staging professional depend heavily on the amount of confidence you have in yourself and your abilities. This point is conveyed perfectly in a quote about leadership from Adlai Stevenson, an American politician appointed by John F. Kennedy as Ambassador to the United Nations: "It´s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse."

How much faith would you put in a seemingly inept professional?

Home staging expert, Debra Gould, says, "I fired a real estate agent I worked with during one of my moves to a new city because she seemed like she didn´t know what she was doing just because of how she handled seemingly ordinary tasks like being organized for showing appointments." Gould adds, "Whether she could have negotiated well for me or not, I´ll never know because she didn´t inspire the trust I needed to have from the start. As a professional home stager you have to look like a professional stager by how you look, what you do and what you say."

Whether or not you´ve done a paid staging project before, you must project a confident image.

The Staging Diva says, "If you arrive at your home staging consultation with butterflies in your stomach, that´s normal, but you mustn´t let your client know about them! As a professional home stager, you have to look the part. And in order to look the part, you have to feel like you have it all together."

The Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program makes aspiring stagers more confident in their abilities by helping them build the proper foundation to support those abilities.

"I know what it´s like to have self doubt but to push through it anyway," says Gould, founder of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. She adds, "So I´ve created all the Staging Diva home staging products and services around helping you take that talent you´ve possessed your entire life, and teaching you how to build a successful career on top of it. The program´s five home staging courses will teach you all the nuts and bolts you need from pricing your services and reaching your target markets to conducting home staging consultations and building alliances with other contractors."


In addition to the full Staging Diva Program, Gould has developed many other products that give home stagers confidence:

The Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide will take care of any fears you have when the time comes to actually stage a home. It features before and after photos from my own projects and advice on how to handle every single space in a home.

The Staging Diva Sales Script will give you the actual word-for-word script I use on the phone with prospective staging clients. It will teach you to own the call and make sure you never fall into the free estimate trap which is the quickest route to bankruptcy for a home stager.

The Ultimate Color Guide will give you confidence when it comes to choosing color for your staging projects.

The Ultimate Portfolio Guide will help you wow your prospective clients from the get-go with better before and after staging photos in addition to teaching you how to write about yourself and your talents. The exercises in this book alone will give your confidence a real boost.

When all else fails, you even have Accelerator Business Coaching to turn to, to work through challenges you´re facing and move past them, straight to success.

"If self-confidence wasn´t such an important element of being a home staging professional, I wouldn´t have invested the time in developing all of these products to help you believe in yourself, in all areas of starting your business," says Gould.

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained over 4000 home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Debra has gained international recognition through features in major media in the US and Canada including: This Old House, HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, Global TV, City TV, The Wall Street Journal, Women´s Day, Reader´s Digest and more.
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Debra Gould

Debra Gould, aka The Staging DivaŽ, is President of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company. Inspired by many requests from aspiring home stagers wanting to start similar businesses, Gould created the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.

Gould has trained 7,000+ Staging Diva students in over 21 countries to start their own businesses. All shared a natural talent for decorating and interest in real estate, but didn't know how to make a living in their own house staging business before learning her secrets.

Debra Gould's mission is to inspire and empower others to use their natural talents to earn a living. She followed her dreams and wants to teach others to be able to do the same.

Gould pursued an MBA in Marketing and began a corporate career before moving to advertising. In the 1980s, she launched one of the first integrated marketing firms, which she ran for 10 years. Wanting a more creative life, Debra gave it up to design home accessories. She created the Debra Gould Home Collection, landing a magazine cover story and book feature, followed by her first of several HGTV appearances.

Buying decorating and selling six of her own homes in four years lead to an interest in real estate staging which she turned into a new staging career with the launch of sixelements.com in 2002. Since that time she has staged homes for hundreds of clients in addition to providing home staging training.

Gould is the author of "Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home staging tips, tricks and floor plans", "Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The easy way to pick colors for home staging projects", and "Staging Diva Ultimate Portfolio Guide: Winning clients with the perfect home staging portfolio".

In addition to HGTV, Debra Gould's media coverage includes: CityTV, GlobalTV, CBC, CBS Radio, CNNMoney, Wall Street Journal, Woman's Day, Reader's Digest, MoneySense, Entrepreneur, House and Home, Home & Decor, Style at Home, Centre of the City, USAA Magazine, FabJob Guide to Become a Home Stager, Home Style, National Post Homes, This Old House, Home Business Magazine, Globe & Mail and others.

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