Shauna Lynn Simon – Beyond The Stage Homes
Shauna Lynn Simon had some pretty strict requirements when she was shopping for her first house.
“I wanted an older home, 40 to 60 years. I wanted character. But the catch was, my dad has MS,” she says. “He was still able to travel to see me, so I needed a place where he could stay.”
For six months, she searched with her real estate agent. “I’d walk into a house like, ‘Ooh, this is a great house! If I was here, I’d pull up the carpet, and the dining room should be in this room, and I’d take this wall down…’” she says – even if she had no interest in submitting an offer.
In other words, she was thinking like a home stager, though she didn’t know what home staging was.
The founder of Beyond the Stage Homes was, at the time, working as a Custom Product Specialist for a company selling speciality promotional items, and her background was quite technical: Shauna Lynn holds a math and business degree, and worked as an Energy Analyst as well. But she’d always had a creative side to balance it out.
After she finally purchased her home in 2007, that creative voice took charge. “I painted the house, replaced some flooring, minor little touch-ups here and there, and I started decorating the place with things that were in my head,” she says.
So when she found herself out of a job after a layoff the following May, and she couldn’t find anything that sparked her interest, she remembered how much she loved buying and decorating her home.
She called her real estate agent to do a little fact finding. “I met her for lunch one day and said to her, ‘I’m kind of thinking about becoming a real estate agent. Can you talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on that?’ And she said, ‘you need to look at home staging.’”
Shauna Lynn liked the idea of using her interior design superpowers to help people prepare their houses for the market. It would be a great way to stretch those creative muscles and help people one-on-one – an important point, for the self-proclaimed “serial volunteer” – without losing out on her love of technical work and crunching numbers. The more she learned, the more excited she felt.
(And it really is like a superpower. “I found this really cool statistic that said 10% of homebuyers can actually visualize a space,” she says. “That means 90% of people have no idea what a place is going to look like if you don’t spell it out for them.”)
Over the next year, she took a course, earned a certification, built a website, and launched her business.
“I remember my first staging consultation, and I was walking out of there thinking, it just felt so right,” she says, “I’ll admit, I didn’t really know what I was doing! Yet when I finished, I knew walking out of there that I provided great tips. I was going to help this homeowner out.”
But Shauna Lynn wasn’t achieving all she wanted to with the business, and took a small break to figure out what she could do better. It was a valuable exercise, she says, and it set her up for success today.
“I had to step outside of things and ask: what would I do if I wasn’t a home stager? And I couldn’t come up with anything that was half as satisfying.” Now that’s love.
So she came back even stronger. She rebranded, figured out who her ideal clients really were, created a new business plan, identified the real estate agents she wanted to work with, started thinking about growth and expansion, and launched a new website. That’s also when Beyond the Stage Homes adopted its mission statement: “to provide high quality, cost-effective, and creative solutions to help homeowners maximize the potential of their homes.”
She also started work on her own training program for new home stagers, which covers the technical home staging theories and concepts, plus lessons she only learned first-hand from real clients, like buyer behaviours and psychology.
Really understanding her clients and how to resonate with them was a huge focus during her brief hiatus. “It’s such an honour to be invited into someone’s home,” Shauna Lynn says. “You’re about to walk into their house and tell them everything that’s wrong with it, and somehow convince them to make some changes without completely offending them.”
Very rarely would she replace an entire house’s worth of furniture and décor, anyway (unless the home’s vacant to begin with). The goal is to work with what homeowners have, when she can, even if that means simply bringing in one piece of artwork from her warehouse to jazz up a bare wall.
Staging isn’t all she does, though. At work, she also provides interior design, renovation, decluttering, and organization services. And after hours, she’s volunteering for the next MS walk, mentoring entrepreneurs through the Waterloo Region Small Business Centre, sitting as a representative for the Real Estate Staging Association, speaking to students about pursuing a creative career, or fostering a new litter of kittens for the Humane Society.
Helping is truly at the centre of why she loves her job, and everything else she participates in, Shauna Lynn says. “I think that it’s a community that’s given me a lot so I want to give back to it.”
Learn more at:
https://www.beyondthestagehomes.com/