Growing without outside funding

Meridith Baer grew up on the grounds of San Quentin prison, acted in TV and movies, wrote scripts in Hollywood … and then, at 50, started over – and built one of the best known home-staging companies in real estate.

Meridith’s life unfolds like a movie: As a teenager, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. In her twenties, she was a writer for Penthouse. In her thirties and forties, she was a screenwriter in Hollywood, hobnobbing with Sally Field and dating Patrick Stewart.

But in her late forties, Meridith hit a wall. Her writing career stalled, so she poured her energy into fixing up the house she was renting. When the owner sold that house almost immediately, she stumbled onto a strange new idea: why not stage homes for a living?

From there, Meridith turned a few pieces of thrift-store furniture and potted plants into a full-blown business: trucks, warehouses, hundreds of employees, and high-end homes across Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and beyond. Along the way, she weathered the pressures of scaling a creative service into an operational machine—without ever raising outside capital.

What you’ll learn:

How to reshape a career at 50 (or any age) without a master plan

How Meridith priced her work based on value created, not hours worked

Why you don’t always need investors to grow a multi-million-dollar service business

The psychology of home staging: designing spaces that make buyers fall in love in the first 10 seconds

How Meridith thinks about legacy, stepping back, and seizing new opportunities

Timestamps: 

06:08 – Growing up as a warden’s daughter inside San Quentin

11:01 – Teen pregnancy, forced adoption, and reunion decades later

12:43 – From Pepsi commercials to Penthouse magazine

19:58 – Selling a major movie script, recoiling at the finished product

22:47 – How a breakup with Patrick Stewart totally reshaped Meridith’s life

27:41 – The accidental first staging job at age 50

35:17 – Early days of the business: vans, day laborers from Home Depot, and naming her price

47:18 – Unexpected struggles: tax trouble, a cancer diagnosis

51:07 – The business expands to New York and beyond

1:00:22 – Running a 320-person company at 78—and what comes next

1:05:56 – Small Business Spotlight

This episode was produced by Alex Cheng, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Noor Gill. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Kwesi Lee.

Follow How I Built This:

Instagram → @howibuiltthis

X → @HowIBuiltThis

Facebook → How I Built This

Follow Guy Raz:

Instagram → @guy.raz

Youtube → guy_raz

X → @guyraz

Substack → guyraz.substack.com

Website → guyraz.com

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.