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Grow Your Business - Writing

Never in my wildest dreams did I dream of being a published author, because I didn’t think I had the skills to write a book. This is why I did write a book . From 2009 to 2011 professional organizers in the United States were in make-or-break years. In 2008 and 2009, the United States labor market lost 8.4 million jobs. People were cutting out all discretionary expenses, and that included professional organizing services. My phone was not ringing, and people were not signing up for my webinars, online training, or live seminars. Many professional organizers left the industry because they were experiencing the same and needed to find employment to pay their bills. Or, if they did not provide the primary source of income for their family and that person lost his or her job, they now needed to find a way to have a steady income. Interestingly though, many people who lost their jobs and couldn’t find employment wanted to start their own business. They had time on their hands and ...
Recent posts

5 Critical Mistakes to Avoid Working with Clients

Mistake #1 – ORGANIZING FOR YOURSELF AND NOT YOUR CLIENT You love to organize and you even have fun organizing your friends or family members. What about organizing a complete stranger’s kitchen or garage? Will you be able to really listen and seek to understand what ‘organized’ looks and feels like for each client. There are a variety of personality types, barriers to organizing, and mental health issues to navigate and understand to successfully organize others. Working with clients who are chronically disorganized, who have ADHD, or who hoard requires specialized training and experience. Layer 1 training will introduce you to challenging clients and resources for obtaining training and skills to work with them. You will also learn how to organize every space in a home including the typical habits that cause disorganization, how to create organized zones, product solutions to aid organization, new habits to maintain organization, and the estimated time to organize. PLUS thr...

Mastering the Business of Organizing

We are very excited to share with you that Anne Blumer  updated  and  expanded  her book  Get Rich Organizin g under a new title,  Mastering the Business of Organizing A Guide to Plan, Launch, Manage, Grow, and Leverage a Profitable, Professional Organizing Business .  In this book version, Anne shares with the reader not only how to start and manage a professional organizing business, her complete process for working with clients, skills, and techniques for working with a variety of client types, but now her best held secret--how Anne grew her business with fourteen distinct streams of revenue! “I wrote Mastering the Business of Organizing A Guide to Plan, Launch, Manage, Grow, and Leverage a Profitable, Professional Organizing Business along with the Institute for Professional Organizers™ curriculum and program because I believe in the immense value of this profession. I want others who aspire to it to represent the industry as experienced ...

Professional Organizers are Starting Their Career Younger!

Blessing McKenzie I had the fantastic opportunity to have Blessing McKenzie, a high school Junior, job shadow me yesterday.     Blessing is considering a career as a professional organizer!     I think that speaks volumes to where our industry is headed.     She also interviewed me for her school project and agreed to let me blog about her questions and my answers. What are some of the biggest challenges that you face for this job? If you are a business owner, I would say the biggest challenge you face is finding clients, or rather clients finding you.  That’s the simple answer.  The fact is, the biggest problem is having the education and experience to work with chronically disorganized (CD) clients. What is one thing that surprised you about this career? What surprised me about this career was discovering people are chronically disorganized rather than situationally disorganized.  When I first started my career, I thought I woul...

Reflections

Happy fall!  As I reflect on the past 14 years of training new professional organizing business owners, I thought it might be interesting to share with you some facts about the Institute for Professional Organizers: We have taught new professional organizing business owners since 2004 400+ participants have completed our  training program All but 2 participants are female From 17 countries Whose average exam score is 88.8% From our training evaluation survey, 100% of our participants said they would recommend our training program to new professional organizing business owners We've held 50 live seminars and  client practicums In 2009 I wrote the book  Get Rich Organizing  for the sole purpose to provide information and education during the economic downturn when it was not financially comfortable for some people to complete the full training program. I don't have exact book sales because it sells through many channels.  I do know the book ...

August 2018 Client Practicum

Meet Laurie Wolpert and Shauna Ellis, both from Oregon, who Certified by the Institute for Professional Organizers August 8, 2018.

Accountability Activity: Multitasking

What's the secret to effective multitasking? Not doing it. Any time you do more than one thing at a time, you delay the completion of both tasks. The key is to focus on ONE thing and ONE thing only, until completion.  If you're in the habit of multi-tasking throughout your day, I challenge you to go for one day focusing on one thing at a time--and observe how much more productive you actually are, and, how much more you get done. Try it and see how much more you check off your list today. Leave a post and let me know if you were more productive by not multitasking.