Thinking about home staging competition in your area may make you feel intimidated. When you’re afraid to move forward with your home staging business, it’s easy to come up with all kinds of “reasons” that it won’t work.

For example, perhaps you’ve heard that 90% of businesses fail in their first year. That’s pretty depressing! I know it held me back when I started my first business 22 years ago. (That’s at least how long that particular statistic has been circulating as “truth!”)

Perhaps you missed the study by Home Business Magazine which actually found that a whopping 70% of home-based businesses succeed for at least 3 years! That’s a much more optimistic view and one that you’re not likely to see on CNN (aka Constantly Negative News).

Aspiring home stagers sometimes say, “There are already home stagers in my area. I’m sure there will be too much competition for me to enter this market.” This becomes a comfortable excuse for not going forward.

You can talk yourself out of anything with the right arguments, but you may be jumping to a whole bunch of conclusions that are not justified.

If you really have a dream of becoming a home stager, you owe it to yourself to find out the caliber of the competition. I don’t mean how well they arrange furniture (though this is important); I mean how well they market themselves. For example:

– Do they come across as real professionals?
– Do they sound confident about what they do?
– Are they persuasive when they explain what they do?
– Are they easy to find?
– Are they easy to speak to?
– Do they listen well?
– Are they likeable?

Don’t just look at their websites and assume all these great qualities if it’s a great site.

The competitive picture might look a whole lot different if you actually pick up the phone and speak to them.

There are a lot of “home stagers” who aren’t actually serious about their businesses. It’s more of a creative hobby for them, and you’ll be able to spot them as soon as they open their mouths to explain what they do!

> Read the rest of this article about Tough Home Staging Competition and how to determine if there’s enough potential demand for your staging services in your area.