Our motto is pretty simple. “Exceptional Home Staging, Made Easy.” But it has not always been that way.
Spade and Archer has been staging homes since 2009. For those of you counting, that’s 13 years. For the first ten years, we used a fairly traditional system to price our projects. A client would call us or click on our “schedule a site visit” button and have one of our staff come out to meet with them on site to review the project. The team would then head back to the shop and put together a custom price based on that project. The entire pricing process took around a week or two and required the seller or seller’s agent to put in a least an hour of meeting time plus any travel time.
We started hearing complaints that we were difficult to work with. That was the last thing we wanted. “The pricing process took too long. There was too much correspondence. Our emails were too detailed.” To figure out where the largest breakdowns in our staging process were we started tracking each and every phone call. We found that 90% of the phone calls received asked the same question: “How much?” or some variation on that theme. We heard the term “ball park” a lot.
We needed to find a way to get a price in our clients hands quickly. This was how we developed the instant pricing tool. It took months of research, digging through historical data, finding first one, then two, then three, then ten different types of software to make it work. Once it did work, we had to convince our customers to trust it.
We launched the Monday after the COVID lockdown started. We had planned to call it “Instant Pricing” for months, but when COVID hit the biggest thing on everybody’s mind was not touching anything that somebody else had touched before. At that time we all thought COVID spread through touching surfaces. Over the weekend prior to the launch of instant pricing 1.0 we changed the name to “Touchless Pricing” and emphasized the fact that it was still safe to work with Spade and Archer, even if nothing else in the world was.
Very slowly, as we started to go through lockdown and learned more and more about COVID, we continued to emphasize how “safe” our new pricing tool was while at the same time also mentioning how fast it was. By the time the world started to normalize again, instant pricing had become a comfortable, reliable way to price home staging projects.
Every once in a great while we get a new customer who wants us to see their property prior to us giving a price for home staging and we gently explain that we would be more than glad to come out and take a look after they see our price and decide they would like to move forward. They almost always agree that the old system is more familiar, but the new system make more sense. In the end our clients in Seattle and Portland always find Spade and Archer provides “Exceptional Home Staging, Made Easy.” What more could you ask from a home stager?
COVID was hard, but it changed the entire way Spade and Archer operates for the better. How did COVID effect your business? Did you keep the changes or did you go back? Comment below.