December To-Dos for Your Professional Organizing Business
How is it December already? Let me help you think about the new year AND get your business ready for what's next with a list of December to-dos for your professional organizing business. We have a full list of items that will help you get ready for the best month of the year.
This interview originally aired as an episode of the Pro Organizer Studio Podcast. If you would like to listen, You can CLICK HERE or find us on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you love to listen to podcasts!
I have got to be honest with you, I truly cannot believe that that it is December. This year has gone so fast, I think probably personally for me, because we have had a ton of changes in our house. My daughter graduated and went to college pretty far away, and so it might just be me and like some of the personal stuff, but I don't think so. I have talked to a lot of other friends. I know it's been a tough year for a lot of people, difficult in terms of just a lot going on and but it also has been a fast year for a lot of people.
But anyway, can't believe it's December. It is one of my absolute favorite months of the year, and not just for the standard reason that it's the holidays. Although that is a great reason—I love driving around looking at people's houses. House decor is one of my favorite things to look at in the holidays, and not just beautiful house decor. I love that, but I also love the stuff that's totally insane. There is a house in our old neighborhood that has the most completely bonkers, insane display of Christmas lights you've ever seen. Think Clark Griswold but maybe less tasteful. And I just love this time of year for the obvious reasons.
But, I actually weirdly love it for business also. It is a great month for business. I've always loved December, back in my corporate life, and I love it in my entrepreneurial life too. And so what I want to give you today is a few of the, things that I am doing this month, and what should you be doing this month?
The reason I love December as a business and as an entrepreneur is because this is the perfect time of year to do some specific things in your business because organizing businesses tend to be a little bit slower on the client front in December. That is not a general statement. You might be totally swamped right now. I actually have a lot of organizing clients right now, but that's just how timing worked out, but it does tend to be a slower time of the year because people are so busy, with a lot of entertaining going on, a lot of family stuff, a lot of school stuff, kids stuff, all sorts of things.
So this is not to say that it isn't a great time to continue to get clients as we're going into the new year. It is a great time to promote certain services. But a lot of times people don't tend to have a ton of sessions. So this enables you to do a lot of things in your business that you may not have had time for.
So what I want you to be thinking about is, what are some of those tactical things that you've put off? Are there tweaks that you need to make to anything in your business? What are some of those things that you've said, “I'll get to it. I'll get around to it.” Any of those kinds of things. Make a list of those things that you have been putting off. Maybe you've been procrastinating because you don't have time. Maybe you've been procrastinating because you don't know how to do it. This is a great time to get all that stuff shored up.
What I want to talk to you about is taking some time in December to set yourself up for success in January. So let's get into it.
One of the reasons that I love December as a business owner is because it generally allows me a little bit of breathing time and thinking time and doing time. And I love going into the new year feeling like, okay, I'm set up for success. I'm ready to go.
But here's what I want you to start doing in December. Hopefully you have the time to do this and you're not running from client to client. But the first thing I want you to think about is: let's just sit down and do an analysis of the last year. What are some things that worked great in my organizing business? What are some things that aren't going as well as I want? How do I want to do things differently in 2024? What things do I want to keep exactly the same that have been functioning great? What are some things that I have put off?
What are some things I've procrastinated on? Whether those are difficult decisions you need to make? Maybe you need to raise your pricing and you're scared about it. Maybe you have a team member that isn't a good fit for you anymore and you know you need to deal with it but you've been putting it off. Maybe you need to take more time to work on some of these things, and you know that you need to hire a subcontractor and you're scared about that, and that's something that you haven't been ready to do but you know you need to. Any of those really hard decisions that you might have been putting off, I want you to think about those.
One of the things that I'm going to be totally transparent with you about, there are things that I'm really good at in my business and there are things that I'm not quite as good at. And in my 20 year corporate career where these things were really important, we did a lot of quarterly planning, strategic planning, which was sometimes five years out. But quarterly planning in particular was a huge part of the businesses that I was in. And I'm going to be totally honest. I always hated that. I hated quarterly planning. I hated strategic planning. I hated trying to forecast what was going to happen five years from now. I'm just, I tend to be a little bit more of a person that takes things as they come.
And so in my own business, I had to really force myself into some of that. You know, structure that I didn't love as much, but one of the things that I do genuinely love is that in this December timeframe, I am willing to do a little bit more of like, what has been good? What has been bad? What do I need to change? By the way, me not liking quarterly planning or strategic planning. I know that there are organizers out there that are like, How can you be an organizer? All we do is plan. And that isn't true, but some of those, like, structured things are not my favorite. And maybe you guys are really great at it.
But what I want you to do is realize January 1st is going to be here really fast. New Year's resolutions start to come into place. You are starting the clock over on a brand new year. And I want you to be ready. I want you to go into it strong and ready to go. For myself, even though I don't love that planning process, I am very careful to look back at this year and say what needs to be different and what worked great and that I do not want to change a thing.
Sit down with yourself. Make that list. I want you to do this also based on what is important to you. So it might be that you want to look at your financials. I always urge you to know your numbers on everything, financials and everything else, but you might want to make decisions not based on financials. You might want to make it on quality of life.
Maybe you felt like you had too many organizing hours this year, maybe you felt like you had too many clients. Maybe you didn't have enough clients. Maybe you want to start figuring out what is your ideal schedule and work your way back into that. If you want to make the decisions based on just numbers, great. I want you to know what you made this year in your business versus last year. How many hours you worked, what is your margin, did you spend a lot more money on X, Y, Z thing this year on your expenses? I want you to know all those things.
By the way, if you don't know your numbers, and if you don't have those things in place, I want you to create those in December. Make sure you know, your numbers, not just your financials, but all of those other things about your business. And I want you to put that in place.
So all of this is a strategic look. Now I want to move you into a few granular, but really important things that I want you to think about in your business.
This is, something that I don't know that I've ever really talked about before, but I want to give you a tip on something that is exceedingly unfortunate. It kind of goes along with I had a couple of podcasts where I talked about— don't fall for these scams.
So this is sort of like scam adjacent, I guess, but it's something that I did not specifically talk about. And it's really important because I've had two very unfortunate instances lately that people have been deeply affected by this. I want to talk a little bit about protecting your digital assets. One of the things that I love about December is you can shore up not only some things in your business, but you can also just do some of these little things that have been, that you maybe have been putting off a little bit. And this is one that you might've been like, eh, I don't know. Is it really important?
I want you to take the time to do this. So sit down. Grab a winter cocktail or coffee or tea or whatever you like. And I want you to sit down and do this for your business. I am talking about protecting your digital assets. Specifically top of mind is social media assets, saving those, really trying to protect those from being hacked, but it's also so many more assets than that.
So, I know two people who have gotten their social media hacked to the point that it is unrecoverable. And, by the way, I am not someone that says, oh, just give up. This is one case where it is It is almost completely impossible to get any sort of support at Facebook, Instagram, Meta, anything. It is almost impossible to get an account recovered. And what I want to tell you very clearly, this is very much on the scam front. There are people that will try to take advantage of you and say, Oh, hey, I can get your account back. No, they can't. They're just going to take a bunch of money from you and maybe make things worse.
Let's talk about social media protection. If you have an Instagram and a Facebook and you spend any time whatsoever on it, and by the way, this goes for people that do the, the proof of life strategy that I talk about or your social media is a really integral part of your business, it's something that you really love and you really spend time on and that it's important to you, I want you to make sure that you have these accounts protected, because the two situations that I am talking about, in one case, it was a client of mine, a non organizing client, she fell for a scam, and her Instagram was hacked, and she is a bricks and mortar business—so her Instagram was something that was really important to her. And then what has happened subsequently, and this has happened in both of these cases, there are dominoes that fall. So there are things that are tied to those accounts that then you are also locked out of and for one of these clients we had to start her Instagram from scratch, which I can promise you was 0 percent enjoyable for this particular person and for me, by the way, also not enjoyable for me. And it locked us out of so many other things. So now we can't connect her Instagram to her Facebook and there are a lot of other things we can't do. She can't run ads, she can't do all sorts of things.
So the second person that it happened to is an organizer and she's still working through it but for some reason her personal Facebook account has been taken down by Meta. And she now is locked out of her business, Facebook, and other things.
So we'll start with social media, but we're also going to talk about other things, financial accounts, all sorts of things. For all of your properties. Two factor authentication. Maybe you have seen this pop up before and you haven't known what it means or whatever, but do you know how Sometimes when you try to reset a password, it will like say, we need to text you, we need to email you, we need to whatever—that is two factor authentication. You need to have two factor set up on everything. Anything that's important should have two factor authentication. And frankly, even things that aren't that important should also have two factor authentication. Set it up. There is almost nothing that comes with a password that you cannot put two factor authentication on.
Especially for your social media, set up two factor immediately. You can do this in Instagram and Facebook in the settings.
The second thing I want you to do, and this is really more specifically for Facebook, but for your Facebook business account, your personal Facebook is likely the owner of your business Facebook page. I want you to pick a trusted person, a spouse, a best friend, a business partner that you trust implicitly—someone else in your life. So if you have a parent, something, but you need to have other people other than you that have access to your business account as an administrator so that if something happens, so for instance, in the case of this organizer, she was the only person that had access to her business, Facebook. And now that her personal Facebook has been hacked. She no longer has administrator access to her business page. Having someone to act as a backup for your business Facebook page, please do it. That was the only saving grace of my other client whose Instagram got hacked is that I had access to her Facebook account as well. So her business Facebook account wasn't lost but only her Instagram was.
It was still a tremendous pain to get it back. Please set someone else up as an administrator on your business Facebook account so that that doesn't happen. You can do that on a couple of different things but Facebook is kind of the biggest one that we see that happen. You can also, if you wanted to, you can start a new Facebook account as just a, you know, put your first and middle name, whatever works. You can start a Facebook account that only has one connection and it is to your business Facebook page. So if your personal page somehow is unavailable to you, you can log in as that secondary person.
Two factor authentication should also be on anything related to your finances. As an example, we use PayPal for Pro Organizer Studio. I also have PayPal for my home organizing business. It actually scares me the number of times that I get my two factor authentication tripped, which means someone's trying to get my password on PayPal. There are unfortunately a lot of things out there where sometimes your password gets exposed in hacks and all sorts of other things. And we all, you know, often will use the same password for a lot of different things. Two factor authentication helps stop that process as well.
Turn it on PayPal, Venmo any of those kind of payment platforms is also great. The other thing I'm going to remind you if you have an iPhone, go online and search for resources on how you can protect your iPhone via passwords from theft. Because it's not just having a password on your phone, which is obviously you should do that. It's really important. But there are ways that people can steal your password as well, and then steal your phone, and then lock you almost immediately out of your Apple ID. There are some tricky things you can do with screen time passwords to lock them out in addition to the two factor authentication.
The other thing I'm going to tell you is this was one thing that came up. It comes up a lot in our Inspired Organizer group. Please know that if you get a Facebook DM from someone that says, Hi, this is Meta, and you have a copyright violation, your page is going to be taken down unless you fill out this form right here. That is a complete scam. Facebook is never going to contact you via DM. They're just not going to. Please never, never click the links. Report the people. Usually what happens is, because I get probably two or three of these a day, what they're doing now is they will send you the Facebook message and then they will immediately block you so you can't report them or block them. But never, ever, never, never, never, never, never, ever click on a link you get in a DM that says, Hey, we're taking your account down. You have a copyright violation. It's all fake. It's all crap. Please don't do it.
Okay, so two factor, and please make sure that your business accounts have a backup administrator. Also just stay protected just in general. Like use really good passwords. Have really, really strong passwords. Don't use the same passwords for everything, all that.
Moving on. Next subject!
The second thing I want you to do is I want you to look, and I'm always going to start with this, at the digital foundation of your business. You might be tired of hearing me talk about it and I'm sorry, but I'm going to keep talking about it—because I just want to give you a couple of examples from my own business.
I could give you a million examples from our Inspired Organizer membership, but I've had multiple people that have come to me in the last week, new potential clients who have specifically said in their intake form, “I love your website.” One of them said, “I love your vibe.” And that's really great. I guess I have a vibe.
But I just want to remind you that your digital presence is really important to getting new clients. So the first thing I want you to do, I always want you to make sure that your website is ready to go. The second thing if you didn't know this already, if you haven't seen this, I did a Google business profile mini course. It's $19. It includes a private Facebook group where you can ask any question and I'm going to throw in a bonus. I'm going to do a live zoom coaching session in a couple of weeks specifically on Google business profile for anyone that is in that course. And I want to be able to do that because this is also a critical part of business that so many organizers miss out on. And the cool thing is I had someone that took the course that said, I am so excited it worked—she had gotten a bunch of new inquiries in that week. This stuff really, really works.
Actually I had a friend of mine in the organizing business a few years ago that I was, I was giving her a list of things to do. This was before I started being a coach, and she didn't really like connect with all of them. And then eventually she's like, Melissa, I did the things you told me to do. And they actually worked. And I was like, yeah, I don't just make this stuff up. It actually works!
The second thing is you can check out two podcasts that are about SEO, a huge part of any organizer’s business. It’s with an SEO expert for professional organizers, Julia Renee Consulting. She is an SEO person that a lot of organizers I know use and they rave about her results. So I interviewed her for the podcast and you can get more information here!
And I really want you to do a deep dive on your SEO as you go into 2024. So those other digital foundation pieces in your business, make sure that your website looks good. I want you to make sure that your Google business profile is set up, and I want you to make sure that your SEO is good. Julia and I got into everything and I think you’ll learn a lot (epsodes 171 and 172 of the podcast.)
OKay, so we're done with, making sure you're protected making sure that you have got your digital foundations set.
Now what I want you to do for the rest of December is—I want you to remember it is still a great time to fill your funnel in January. We had someone in our Inspired Organizer group today that posted like, “hey, if you're waiting to send an email, don't, because I sent one out just saying like, Hey, hope everyone's having a great day,” basically. And she had three clients that booked with her for January just because she sent out an email newsletter. So I'm going to keep preaching that—send out your email newsletter, get prepped for January. Start getting your calendar filled for January.
Also, I want you to think about what kind of marketing you want to do trying to think about how you're going to capitalize on New Year's resolutions. January is going to be here right before we know it, so think about—you might not be super busy with inquiries right now, but you will need to be ready for inquiries coming in when those New Year's resolutions start.
I want you to think about your pricing. I did a podcast a few months ago that was raise your prices. Yeah, I mean you I know some of you listened to me, but some of you didn't. So I want you to look at your pricing—I want you to do a scan of your market and see what's kind of going on. Get an idea of what's happening in your market. Even if you raise them $5 or $10 an hour, please think about raising your prices. Going into January is a primo time to raise your rates. You can do it quietly, go back and listen to my podcast. I tell you how to do it, but think about raising those rates.
Are there any policies in my business that I want to change? Maybe that's a cancellation policy, maybe it's a policy on the minimum number of hours you want to be in someone's house, maybe you work on single sessions. Is there any automation that you need to add anything in the team process? And I know that we can make a whole other podcast just about having teams. But think about, is there anything on your team that's working and not working? The other thing I would urge you to do if you have a team, I'm sure you do this a lot anyway, but get your leads together or get your team together and make sure you have an end of the year debrief.
Maybe you do it over lunch to celebrate a great year. Maybe you do it at a happy hour or a dinner, but have a team meeting. Get some feedback from your team, make sure all of that is set as well. Any new policies for that new year, let's get them done. I know I've just given you a tremendous word soup. but I would just want to make sure that you're using December super wisely.
But, but, but, but, but, but, I also would really love you. to get a lot of rest and recharge in the month of December. No matter what holiday you celebrate, no matter where you are in your life, no matter what is going on, I want you to enjoy some downtime, even if you just take a couple of days off in the month—please make sure that you rest, reset, and recharge. I'm going to be doing that and I hope you do too.
I actually had a potential client yesterday who is the friend of a friend and she was really trying to talk me into working with her the week between Christmas and New Year and I was like, NOPE! I'm holding the line on that one. I am not working the week between Christmas and New Year, no matter what. I mean, I guess if she told me she was going to pay me $5,000 an hour, I'd probably do it then, but she's definitely not going to do that. So I'm definitely not going to work. And I want you to set those boundaries to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and being the best you going into next year.
I’m excited for the new year and I hope you have a great December!