a warehouse lease in front of me, and no staged house behind me

Before the lease math, sort out the referral side. Both agents will want to send you work and some will expect something back, and whether a stager can pay or receive a referral fee tied to a listing depends on the licensing rules in your state. In some states any compensation connected to a real estate transaction pulls you into license territory, in others staging is treated as a plain service contract. Ask a licensed attorney in your state before you write anything into an agreement, because getting that wrong is worse than paying an extra year of rent.

Your fixed cost is the number to build around. Rent, utilities, insurance and truck payment at the figures you gave lands somewhere near 2,700 to 3,000 a month before you touch a single job.

On the revenue side, treat each stage as two streams. The first month fee covers design, delivery, install and de-install labor, and most of that is consumed by labor and fuel, so contribution is thin. The monthly extension after month one is where the inventory actually earns, because the furniture is already in place and your marginal cost is close to zero.

So the model turns on average tie-up length, which is the assumption doing most of the work in your post. If a set averages 45 days you get roughly eight turns a year per set and you collect maybe half a month of extension revenue on average. At 90 days you get four turns and more extension months, which is not automatically worse for cash, since extension months carry higher margin than install months. It is worse for growth, because your capacity is measured in sets, not in jobs.

Count the sets, not the revenue. If a three bed stage needs one living, one dining, one primary bedroom, a secondary and accessories, your warehouse holds some finite number of simultaneous jobs. Work out that number honestly, multiply by realistic tie-up, and see whether the resulting job count at your quoted prices covers 3,000 a month plus inventory replacement.

Staging demand also tracks transaction volume, so run the same math with the two agents listing 25 units instead of 40 and see whether the lease still survives.

What are you assuming for install labor? Everyone I've asked about this says two people, six to nine hours on a vacant three bed, then three or four hours to pull it out. At 25 an hour loaded that's 500 to 650 of labor per job round trip before you've paid yourself for the design walk or the shopping. If your first month fee is 2,800 that's real but it isn't nothing, and it comes out of exactly the month you were counting on.

Look at the building before you look at the spreadsheet. 2,400 square feet with a 10 foot ceiling and no dock is a different business than the same square footage with 16 foot clear and a leveler. You can double usable space with pallet racking if the ceiling allows it, and you can't if it doesn't. Ask about floor loading, sprinkler heads (you cannot rack above them), and whether the overhead door is drive-in or you're carrying sofas up three steps every time. I've seen guys sign for cheap square footage and then eat two extra man-hours per load forever.

The 14th deadline is the landlord's problem, not yours. Ask for month to month at a higher rate and see what he says.

Nobody has priced replacement yet. Sofas come back with pet stains, a light gray upholstered dining chair is a one-season item in a house with kids touring it every weekend, and art gets dinged on every install. On the renovation side I budget consumables as a percent of revenue because that's the only way it stays honest. Pick a number, even 6 or 8 percent of gross, and put it in the model as a line. Otherwise year two arrives and you discover the inventory that made the math work is half worn out and you have no cash set aside to refresh it.

Let me put numbers on what pike said. Take 2,800 first month, subtract 600 labor, 150 fuel and truck, 200 for your design time at a real rate, call it 1,850 contribution per install. Extension months at 575 with almost no cost, say 500 contribution each. If tie-up averages 60 days you're collecting roughly one extension month per job, so about 2,350 per job.

Fixed cost of 3,000 a month means 1.3 jobs a month just to keep the lights on, call it 16 a year, before you pay yourself anything or replace a single sofa. Your two agents supposedly generate 30 to 40 vacant listings and you will not win all of them. So the lease works if you convert half of that pipeline and it does not work if you convert a quarter. That's the whole decision, and you're being asked to commit 36 months to a conversion rate you have never measured.

Five years into a service business, the thing that surprised me most was seasonality of fixed cost, not seasonality of revenue. Listings cluster. My slowest 10 weeks generate maybe 12 percent of annual revenue and the rent bill is identical in all 52. Whatever number you land on for jobs per month, divide the year into your four best months and your three worst and check that the worst three don't wipe out your cash. And when you do hire install help, hire two people who can work together rather than one and yourself, because the day you're on a truck is the day nobody is selling the next job.