Skip to main content

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 were watching HGTV and, you guessed it, Mission Organization, Clean Sweep with Peter Walsh, and Neat. These shows sparked a desire in many to start a professional organizing business, but they had little financial resources to do so and didn’t know how to start a business. The calls I received from people about my training program were to say they would love to take my training program, but they could not afford it.

I, too, suddenly had time on my hands, and I was fortunate that the recession did not impact my husband's employment. As he can attest to, when I have time on my hands, I find a way to fill it! I decided that if the participants couldn’t come to me and couldn’t afford the online version of my training program, there must be a way to get the information to them. Because what I’m passionate about is making sure those in this profession represent the industry as experienced and knowledgeable professionals.

I decided to write a book that covered my training program content, not the depth of the material but the surface—enough to give the information needed to get started. Writing a book was not an easy task. In fact, it was painful. I was accustomed to writing in bullet points and then speaking at some length to each bullet point. But I persevered, and with the help of an editor, Get Rich Organizing was self-published in August 2009.

I didn’t write a book to get rich. In fact, I knew I wouldn’t sell millions of copies because millions of people don’t want to become professional organizers—thank goodness! I wrote the book to fill a need for a niche population. I’m glad I did! I have met and heard from hundreds of people who have purchased Get Rich Organizing, about how it was an invaluable resource to them in the development of their business and how they would not have succeeded without that information. Those words are worth all the pain it took to write the book!

My advice is never to think you can’t do something because you don’t know how to, or you don’t believe you have the skills to. And, hire experts if you need help. Isn’t that what we teach our clients after all?

After ten years since writing Get Rich Organizing, I decided it was time to revise, update, and expand it.  It is now published under a new title Mastering the Business of Organizing: A Guide to Plan, Launch, Manage, Grow, and Leverage a Profitable, Professional Organizing Business.




I have grown my business with multiple streams of revenue, fourteen to date. My book revenues are one of those streams.  I'll be sharing with you in future blogs several more revenue streams you can grow your business with.

Have you written a book on organizing?  Please share the title of your book if you have.  Or, are you thinking about writing a book?  If you are, what is holding you back from doing it right now?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 would be organizing people’s things in a more or