At first glance, The Posh Porch Company looks like a business about pumpkins.
The Aldie-based company designs, delivers, installs, and removes seasonal porch displays for customers across Northern Virginia and beyond. Customers choose packages, add services such as styling and end-of-season pickup, and wait for their porches to be transformed.
When I spoke with founder Devon Szklennik, though, I kept coming back to something underneath the seasonal displays. The company has found ways to take a job some customers want done, but do not necessarily want to do themselves, and turn it into a service that feels relatively simple to buy.
That makes the story worth examining even for people building businesses that look nothing like The Posh Porch.
A consultant, accountant, designer, attorney, technology specialist, coach, or other independent professional is selling very different work. But the customer can still be asking a similar question: Will hiring you make this part of my life or business easier?
She recognized the problem because she had lived it
Szklennik’s idea grew from two parts of her own experience.
She remembers her mother making holidays feel special when she was growing up, even without unlimited space or money. Years later, Szklennik was a working mother in Northern Virginia navigating the kind of schedule that can make convenience especially valuable.
She had also noticed something about her own buying behavior. When a service reliably took a task off her plate, she was willing to use that service again.
Then people began noticing the porch displays she created for herself and asking whether she could do the same for them.
What stood out to me was that familiarity with the customer came before the formal business model. Szklennik understood the emotional appeal of the service because she was close to the problem herself.
Of course, recognizing a problem is different from building a business around it. The next challenge was turning that insight into something customers could understand, purchase, and receive consistently.
The pumpkins are only part of what the customer is buying
A customer could buy pumpkins and hay bales without hiring The Posh Porch.
What the company takes responsibility for is everything surrounding them.
The team sources the materials, transports them, creates the display, provides care instructions and, when purchased as part of the service, returns after the season to remove everything.
During our conversation, Szklennik said roughly 92 percent of customers purchased styling. She also said that the company’s popular middle-tier package commonly reached around $850 after typical additions at the time we spoke.
Those numbers made me think differently about what the customer is actually purchasing.
There are pumpkins in the transaction, certainly. But there is also time, aesthetic judgment, transportation, coordination and the relief of having one seasonal project handled by someone else.
That distinction becomes interesting when translated carefully into professional services.
Someone hiring a bookkeeper may value accurate bookkeeping, but they may also value not wondering whether something important has been missed. Someone hiring an IT professional needs technical work completed, but may care just as much about getting back to work without repeatedly troubleshooting the problem.
A marketing client may be paying for a strategy document. The underlying desire could be clarity about what to say and what to do next.
The service and the problem it removes are related, but they are not always the same thing.
Making the purchase easier became part of the service
The Posh Porch also had to make creative work repeatable enough to sell efficiently.
Customers can choose among defined packages, add services, select installation periods and provide photographs of their property. The company has also experimented with helping customers visualize how a particular package might look on their own porch.
That structure reduces some of the uncertainty around buying something that is both creative and relatively expensive.
I kept thinking about how different this is from the way expertise is sometimes sold.
Inside a company, colleagues may already understand what an accountant, designer, marketer, engineer or technology specialist does. Once that person becomes independent, prospective clients have to figure out much more for themselves.
What exactly am I buying? What will happen after I say yes? How involved will I need to be? What does the price include? What will the finished result look like?
Packaging does not have to mean forcing every client into an identical service. But The Posh Porch illustrates how much of the buying experience can be shaped before the customer ever speaks with someone.
For a smaller professional practice, the equivalent may be far simpler: a clearly described service, a defined starting point, a short onboarding process or an explanation of what happens after a prospect says yes.
The customer experience continues after the sale
One of the figures Szklennik shared that caught my attention was the company’s repeat business.
She said approximately 86 percent of its 2024 customers returned in 2025.
That number made the details around delivery more interesting.
Communication happens before installation. The team coordinates the work, customers receive care instructions, and Szklennik described instances in which someone from the company noticed that a customer’s pumpkin was deteriorating and replaced it.
These are small details compared with the visual impact of the finished porch, but they shape what the customer remembers about the company.
For a solo professional, the equivalent does not necessarily require sophisticated software or an elaborate customer-success operation. It might simply raise a few questions.
What does a client wonder about immediately after saying yes?
Where are they most likely to feel uncertain while the work is underway?
What happens after the main deliverable is finished?
And six months later, what will they remember about working with you?
The answers will vary considerably by business. What interested me about The Posh Porch was how much of the experience surrounding the core product appears to contribute to the value of the product itself.
Trust can change the economics of attention
The company experienced another important moment after appearing on Good Morning Washington.
Szklennik told me the television segment generated roughly 220 bookings on the day it aired.
The obvious explanation is exposure. Many more people suddenly saw the business.
But there was another possibility I found interesting: the appearance also provided third-party credibility.
That matters when someone encounters an unfamiliar company and is being asked to spend hundreds of dollars before the service has been delivered. The decision is not only, Do I want this? It is also, Do I believe this company will deliver what I am seeing?
Professional-service businesses face their own version of that problem, particularly when they are new.
A prospective client may look for a referral, testimonial, case study, professional credential, article, recognizable customer or some other evidence that reduces the amount of faith required to make the first purchase.
Not every business is going to appear on television, nor does it need to. The broader question is whether a prospective customer has evidence beyond the business owner’s own claims.
An unexpected customer segment emerged from testing
Real estate agents also became an important customer group for The Posh Porch after the company tried marketing seasonal displays to them.
The service could help prepare properties for listing photography, showings and open houses. Szklennik’s story suggests this was not simply a customer segment identified perfectly in advance. The company tried the idea and paid attention to the response.
That is another part of the conversation that seemed especially relevant to very small businesses.
An independent professional may begin with one idea of who will value the service and later discover that the strongest response is coming from an adjacent group.
A designer might notice demand around launches rather than general design work. An accountant might find a particular need among newly independent professionals. A consultant may discover that one industry responds more strongly to an offer than several others.
The Posh Porch does not provide a formula for finding those markets. It does show what can happen when a business leaves enough room for customer behavior to challenge the original assumptions.
Five questions I took away from the conversation
The Posh Porch is visually memorable, but the parts of Szklennik’s story that stayed with me were less about pumpkins than about the experience surrounding them.
For someone building a much smaller service business, I think these questions are worth considering:
- What does the customer actually want taken off their plate?
Is the value mainly the technical work, or is part of the value the time, uncertainty, coordination or frustration that disappears with it?
- How much work does a prospect have to do to understand what you sell?
Are they able to see what they are buying, what it costs and what happens next?
- Where does the customer still experience uncertainty after saying yes?
Could clearer communication, onboarding or follow-up make the service feel more dependable?
- What evidence helps a new customer trust you?
What can they see besides your own description of your capabilities?
- Who else might have the same underlying problem?
Is there an adjacent customer group worth testing before making a larger change to the business?
These are not lessons that transfer perfectly from seasonal porch styling to professional services. The businesses, economics and customers can be very different.
But the underlying buying question may travel surprisingly well.
Looking past the pumpkins
What I found interesting about Szklennik’s story is that the visible product makes the business easy to understand while also making it easy to misunderstand.
Yes, The Posh Porch sells seasonal displays.
But much of what Szklennik described to me involved everything around the display: recognizing a problem she understood personally, making the service easier to purchase, reducing uncertainty, building trust, paying attention to the experience after the sale and noticing unexpected customers.
The pumpkins are what people see.
The business underneath them appears to be built around something less seasonal: understanding what customers would gladly stop doing themselves if someone else could make the experience dependable, polished and easy.
About The Posh Porch Company
The Posh Porch Company is a family-run seasonal porch styling business based in Loudoun County, Virginia. The company provides seasonal decorating services for homes, businesses and real estate clients across Northern Virginia and the broader DMV region.
Learn more at theposhporch.co.