Alisa Sparks  - Linden Creek

On Realizing Your Own Success: "I kind of had this moment where I paused and realized I had accidentally worked myself out of a job, and that should be a good thing. My team had it covered, my clients were happy, things were rolling well, and I kind of scratched my head and went, what do I do next?"

As business owners we often have one speed: Go.  We run relentlessly, sometimes with action without actual accomplishment, and other times we find ourselves with an empire we built and we realize we can idle down a bit and not work quite as hard.

This is the goal, of course.

Selling houses is big business.  Like anything of value, the better it is presented the higher the sales price.  This is why staged homes sell for more than empty or lived-in homes.  But who has the skills and furniture to stage a home?

Alisa Sparks started her home-staging business, Linden Creek, and was successful.  Then she built that business into a franchise empire that took success to another level.

Listen as Alisa explains what it takes to make start a home staging business, what it takes to build a franchise from scratch, and what can be done when you have the systems and people in place and things are actually running well.

Enjoy!

Visit Alisa at: Linden-Creek.com

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Podcast Overview:

00:00 Discovering a passion for staging

9:22 Real estate staging process

15:42 Learning to delegate effectively

19:25 Shifting demand from staging to design

26:04 Considering a franchise business

28:37 Franchise owner support and coaching

33:07 Ensuring brand consistency across franchises

40:10 Evaluating franchise prospects

48:24 Navigating software development challenges

51:37 Importance of honest sales communication

59:48 Program sponsor and listener call-to-action

Podcast Transcription:

James Kademan [00:00:00]:

Tell me about the art or pictures. And most people's houses you'll see pictures of family or graduation pictures or grandma or whatever. Are you including some pictures like that or is it more art or maybe it's nothing.

Alisa Sparks [00:00:11]:

Yeah, definitely do not include family photos when you're selling a home. Now, you could have a really cute family and they could be fantastic, but the problem is the moment they see a picture of your family, the conversation in their brain changes from this is this could be my home. I can imagine myself living here to. To somebody else's living here. And all of a sudden it changes that emotional connection. And so we highly recommend you don't have photos of your family in a home.

James Kademan [00:00:39]:

You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found https://drawincustomers.com we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls on call Extraordinary Answering Service, the Bold Business Book and Live Switch. Today we're welcoming, preparing to learn from Alisa Sparks of Linden Creek. And Alisa, I believe we're talking home staging here. So how is it going today?

Alisa Sparks [00:01:11]:

It's going great. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm excited to be here.

James Kademan [00:01:15]:

Yeah. I'm actually very excited to talk with you because I've met some home stagers before, but I have never met a home stager with a company that's beyond many offices or even beyond really their home office. So I'm excited to talk to you, talk to you about your business growth. That's huge.

Alisa Sparks [00:01:35]:

Yeah, it's been a really fun journey. This is an industry. You're absolutely right. Most individuals in this have their one stop location and so expanding outside of just our four walls has been a really fun adventure over these last few years.

James Kademan [00:01:49]:

Nice. So let's go to the way back. Right. When did you first start this?

Alisa Sparks [00:01:53]:

I started Linden Creek eight years ago. My background has nothing to do with interior design or real estate. I have a background in finance, so I love numbers. Give me an Excel spreadsheet and I will entertain myself for hours. Right. Like that is my. My bread and butter. However, with that being said, I found myself in this place where I was always trying to fulfill this creative itch.

Alisa Sparks [00:02:15]:

So. So when I would finish my day job, I would spend time buying the ugliest houses I could find and renovating them, building furniture in my garage, whatever I could do to kind of fulfill this creative itch that I had until finally I had this aha moment of like, maybe I should take this passion that I have and this hobby and build it into something that's a true business.

James Kademan [00:02:36]:

How cool is that? And when were you working in finance industry before?

Alisa Sparks [00:02:41]:

I was in the finance industry and actually supported the Department of Defense for nearly a decade, managing their aircraft budgets. So again, nothing at all related to what I do today. But so many of the skills that I learned from that experience, whether it came from systems and operations to managing financials, have been crucial for the success of where Linden Creek is today.

James Kademan [00:03:03]:

Nice. And what was the major contributing factor to make you shift? Saying, I gotta go off and do this on my own. Government, you got health care and whatever. W2BI weekly paycheck, whatever.

Alisa Sparks [00:03:16]:

All the great benefits, all the safety nets. And so much so that I had a good friend of mine that I worked with two years into me starting Linden Creek. We caught up and grabbed coffee, and she looked at me and she goes, why did you leave such a safe, stable job with such good income? And I was like, there's something more to this. So, yeah, it was a big shift in change to get faster of make this massive jump. It actually all came down to a book. I was at the gym listening to an audiobook of Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I'm sure many are familiar with that one, but he talked about the value of building a business and how that becomes an asset. It's not just a job.

Alisa Sparks [00:03:54]:

And there was something about that that struck for me when it came to just that ownership of what you have and the work that you're putting into something. And as I started kind of scratching my head going, okay, what kind of business could I start? I'm playing with aircraft, right? Helicopters and things like that. That's not transferable to my own business. And as I was really thinking about it, we had just put a home on the market that we had renovated and flipped. And the feedback we got was the staging was good, but it wasn't staged. It was just my furniture that I had collected over the years and kind of made look right for the home. But it was this aha moment for me of maybe I could stage houses. I don't have an interior design degree, but there might be something to the staging.

Alisa Sparks [00:04:33]:

And so that was really what started the entire concept of Linden Creek.

James Kademan [00:04:37]:

How cool is that? All right, so what was the answer that you gave your friend? So when you're at the coffee shop and she's like, what are you doing?

Alisa Sparks [00:04:45]:

I Smiled politely. And I said, this one's for the long game and it's going to be worth it at some point in time. And it has been. I'm thankful for the transition I made. I can look back and say with confidence, this was a good call, but it's scary in that interim, right. Like when you don't know, when the math doesn't math, when you're still building your business and reinvesting every penny. It's a scary transition.

James Kademan [00:05:05]:

Oh, I totally understand that. I. You know, you remind me of a time I had a buddy of mine offer me a job at a place that he was working out. And I'm like, I'm actually starting my own thing. And he was like, why? It's just one of those things where it was interesting. Where? To a point. When someone asks you a question like that, you really don't know how to answer it, because in order for them to ask that question, they don't really have the foundation that's needed to understand the answer that you would give.

Alisa Sparks [00:05:36]:

Yeah, that's exactly right.

James Kademan [00:05:38]:

Just say, like, because. Whatever. So tell me, when you first started your business, I imagine you get the website is this. Well, I have to back up a step because I don't know a whole lot about home staging other than I have seen homes that are staged. Inserting couches, furniture, rugs, stuff like that, that once the house is sold, those go to a different house or how does that work?

Alisa Sparks [00:06:02]:

That's exactly right. Yeah. So we own our own furniture and inventory. It started small in my garage. I became best friends with my FedEx delivery guy who would drop off new furniture every day, and I would spend my evenings, you know, assembling furniture in my garage until everything was built out. We do a much larger scale of that today. So the operations are different. But yes, I was slowly building and collecting my own set of inventory and furniture, putting it in a home and.

Alisa Sparks [00:06:27]:

And the moment the home sold, taking it out and moving it to the next property. Wow.

James Kademan [00:06:32]:

So I imagine that takes a lot of space. You have all. I mean, coaches aren't small, right....