Alisa Sparks '08 receives 4 Under 40 Alumni Achievement Award

On her very first home staging job, Alisa Sparks ’08 was thinking about textures and light—how a rug might calm the room, how a coffee table vignette could pull a space together. She loved the decorating part. Then the seller called: the house had sold for $50,000 over the asking price. “This completely changed my life,” the client told her. 

In that moment, Sparks’ focus shifted. It wasn’t just about making something beautiful—it was about what beauty could do for people. She wasn’t chasing décor for décor’s sake. She was serving people—building spaces that helped them breathe, move forward, and invest in what came next.

This focus hasn’t changed for Sparks or her team but only strengthened since establishing Linden Creek, a premier luxury design and staging company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017. 

Roots—Numbers, craft, and the first spark

Sparks didn’t start her career in real estate or interior design, let alone managing a seven figure company. After graduating from Bethel with a double major in finance and human resource management, Sparks worked for Wells Fargo building out pricing models. “I love numbers and I love finance, and that has never gone away,” she says. 

When her then-husband at the time entered the Marine Corps, their move to North Carolina opened an unexpected door: a role with the Department of Defense, where she budgeted for multi-million dollar Navy aircrafts.

By all accounts, Sparks’ career was a normal, financially-focused corporate one, but she was desperate for a creative outlet. She turned to home design. “We would buy the ugliest house we could find, live in it for two years, renovate it the whole time, sell it, and do it all over again,” she says. 

“The feedback we got on a house that we were trying to sell was that the staging was really good, but it wasn't staging. It was just my collected furniture,” Sparks says. It was an “aha moment” for her. She could stage houses. “So I saved up all my PTO, and every Friday I would knock on doors and network with people to try and find someone that was interested in my services. And then the phone started ringing.”

Sparks' attention to detail was rooted in a childhood spent with a hobbyist carpenter for a dad. “Growing up, my dad and I used to go to the Parade of Homes every year. We would walk the houses and talk about everything from the furniture and quality of the craftsmanship to a botched grout line in the bathroom shower,” she says. She also tinkered in her dad’s woodworking shop. “It was really just an opportunity to bond with him, but it was an experience that built my innovation, creativity, and problem-solving skills.”

All of that—the Parade of Homes eye, the woodshop fixes—met her in the moment the phone began to ring off the hook. To keep up, she turned the craft into a system and invited a team to carry it.

Strength—Built on people, powered by systems, guided by faith

For six months, Sparks attempted to maintain her full-time Navy job while staging homes, but the demand became enough to make a career. Soon it was time to hire her first employee. 

The shift to staging and designing luxury homes was never in Sparks’ vision. “Growing up, I was a frugal girl. I’d make my own furniture just to save $10,” she says. “So when I started Linden Creek, I had planned to be a middle-market service.” But the first contract Sparks and her small team landed was for a million dollar property—and so was the second.

The pivot clicked when a top agent in her market—someone Sparks had long respected—named what she was seeing: the necessary luxury service her market had been missing.

“I realized there was a niche in our community that was completely underserved,” Sparks says. “And so I decided to just serve it. That’s how we landed in the luxury market.”

However, a year into founding Linden Creek, Sparks and her husband separated, and she found herself a single mom living in Raleigh without close family nearby. “I suddenly had to make sure I was in the carpool lane at 2:30 p.m. every day to pick up my kids. Because of this, every time I started to get really busy at work, I realized I needed to take a step back and hire somebody to free up my time as a single mom,” she says. 

Between the carpool line and starting her business, Sparks witnessed God provide time and time again. “There were times where payroll for my growing team was going to be really tight, but then a client would pay an invoice two days early, and it just worked,” she says.

Looking back, Sparks recognizes the simplicity of her hiring strategy—one of necessity—was a blessing that allowed Linden Creek to scale quickly. Before she knew it, she had hired an entire design team, staging team, and sales team to support the growing demand for her business.

Sparks continued to problem-solve, scaling systems and processes along with her headcount. Linden Creek quickly outgrew the industry’s standard inventory software, used to track their staging inventory. Sparks hired developers to build and perfect a proprietary all-in-one inventory platform to reduce warehouse waste. She intends to eventually take it to market.

Other systems-related problems plagued her team—like storing artwork. After scouring Pinterest and the internet, Sparks turned to her dad for a solution, and together they designed a flexible, upright storage system that has saved Linden Creek thousands of dollars in damaged artwork. “It’s just one of those things where you see a need, so you figure out how to fix it,” Sparks says.

As the strength of Linden Creek grew and her team continued to manage all facets of the company, Sparks’ day-to-day workload decreased. “I realized I had worked myself out of a job,” she says with a smile. “And I love working. That was not the goal. So the question became, ‘What do I do now?’” 

Longevity—Designing a business that lasts

“What if you franchise?” It was a question, posed by a friend in another industry, that surprised Sparks. How do you franchise a business in the creative industry? “I had built all these systems and created solutions that other people in the same industry were really looking for,” she says. As she thought about it, franchising didn’t seem so far-fetched. 

After working with a franchise attorney, one of Sparks’ core team members shared her own dream—she had always wanted to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, so she asked Sparks if she could be Linden Creek’s first franchisee. The new franchise tripled Linden Creek’s annual revenue within twelve months. 

Now a few years later, Linden Creek has established its eighteenth location on the East Coast. The brand pillars of Linden Creek are the blueprint for each franchise: the Linden tree is recognized for its strength and longevity, living up to a few hundred years, and the creek represents tranquility and natural flow, highlighted one home at a time. 

The services offered by each Linden Creek franchise are the same: luxury home staging and interior design. Sparks’ systems are passed on to her franchisees, down to the inventory platform and art storage system.

During the first franchise rollout, Sparks had to address two new challenges. She had to figure out how to extend wholesale purchasing discounts and maintain design quality without a seasoned designer. Sparks solved both by appointing a creative director to pre-build accessory and pillow sets and codify styling guidelines, then selling those kits through a bespoke e-commerce storefront—giving franchisees brand-consistent results and competitive pricing.

Today, these curated styling sets are available to purchase through The Shoppe. “Everybody can buy a vase, but people can’t buy a full coffee table that’s completely furnished with elements that are both vintage and fresh,” Sparks says. “As a result of just trying to support our franchisees, we brought a totally new storefront to market to support our team with discounted pricing for their own luxury staging.”

As CEO of Linden Creek, Sparks spends much of her time with her franchise partners. “They’re people with stories just like mine—they came from corporate or marketing or nursing and want to make a massive career pivot,” she says. It’s work that Sparks loves.

“There is so much joy in developing people: taking their natural, God-given talents, pushing them to be even greater, and then watching them grow,” Sparks says. “It’s so much fun to be a part of the coaching conversations and strategy sessions with my franchise partners who are going through the exact journey I went through eight years ago.” Sparkse gets to coach and cheerlead, an incredibly rewarding component of her career.

Tranquility—“Home is your haven”

The conviction that home should bring peace didn’t begin in a showroom; it was shaped at Bethel. Sparks grew up expecting to attend—following her sisters—and chose Bethel for its reputation and for a learning environment where faith was at the center. “I loved that at Bethel, your faith is an important part of your college experience. I will never take that for granted,” Sparks says. “And I think that was a fundamental, pivotal moment for me that helped build a foundation that was necessary for my future.”

Bethel helped shape her passion for people and for striving. “At Bethel, I had professors who forced us to think outside the box. They’d ask, ‘What if you think further, what if you think more?’ That season instilled a constant ‘what’s next?’ in me, that’s been fundamental to Linden Creek, all within a community with a servant-leadership heart centered on people and bringing people to God,” Sparks says.

That template—faith-centered work, people, and excellence—guides the way she builds Linden Creek. 

Today, Sparks is remarried and the mother of a beautiful, blended family. She works alongside her husband, Allen Sparks, the chief operating officer of her company. They hope to grow Linden Creek to a national scale so more people can experience the calm she sees beauty create and so franchise partners can build meaningful work and lives.

For Sparks, it’s more than work—it’s sharing home with others. 

Nominate the next 4 Under 40 recipients!

Bethel University’s National Alumni Board annually seeks and accepts nominations for the 4 Under 40 Alumni Achievement Award. The selection is made from Bethel University graduates 40 years of age or younger who have had outstanding achievements in their career, public service, or volunteer activities.

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