Hi! I’m Melissa. And I want to make your pro organizing business better!
HI! I'm Melissa Klug. If we have met before--hi again! And if you want to get to know me more...nice to meet you!
“I get a lot of emails of saying, ‘I just recently lost my job and I am X, Y, Z age, and I need to restart my life.’
And one of the things that I want women to know is that you can remake your life. It doesn’t matter your age or your background or what you have been before, or whether you have been out of the workforce for a long time, or whether you’re just super unhappy.
One of the biggest parts of my story is you can remake your life at an age that most people aren’t remaking their life or at a period of time or with a lot of other roadblocks in your way. ”
I have had this Jay-Z line running through my head on repeat lately. It was really popular on reels and TIkTok, and it is a part of a Google ad also—but it's just a very simple line that says, allow me to reintroduce myself. And that is what I want to do today.
Here's how I got started thinking about this.
There are a lot of emails in my inbox from other people who have things that they teach about business. Think Marie Forleo or Amy Porterfield or people that are helpful to me as I build Pro Organizer Studio. I also spend a little bit of time on Instagram, and I scroll and I try to look for things that are inspirational or that will help me in my organizing business, or that will help you in your organizing business, or that will help me in my Pro Organizer Studio business.
And every once in a while, someone will come up and I'm like, who is this? Why are they trying to teach me something? What's their expertise for teaching?
And I had this moment thinking about how I got an email from someone very recently, who said, “Hey, I just stumbled on the podcast. Wanted to reach out.” While there are lots of people who have been listening to the podcast for a while and they might know who I am…also, some of you have never met me before, and you might be like, who is this person coming to me and talking to me about organizing!?
And I decided that if you were kind enough and wonderful enough to have me in your AirPods or to be in one of my programs or to have just stumbled across me and what I do—that I would like to just reintroduce myself. And even those of you who have known me and you've been listening to me, on the podcast or other things—I have been at Pro Organizer Studio now for almost four years—but you may not really know my organizing story or how I came to do this. And so I just wanted to take a little bit of time to talk about why I am passionate for the work that we do as organizers and why I'm passionate about working with pro organizers.
And so I just want to start with…
Hey! I'm Melissa. And it's nice to meet you.
I’ll start with a short recap of my life up until age 42—and that's a very specific year, but one of the biggest parts of my story that I want to impart to people is about age. I get a lot of emails of saying things like, I just recently lost my job and I am “x” age, and I need to restart my life.
And one of the things that I want women to know is that you can remake your life.
And it doesn't matter your age (by the way—this can go the other direction, younger—I get women in their early 20s who want to remake their life too!) or your background or what you have been before—or whether you have been out of the workforce for a long time, or whether you're just super unhappy. One of the biggest parts of my story is you can remake your life at an age that most people aren't remaking their life; or at a period of time or with a lot of other roadblocks in your way.
I had a lot of roadblocks in my way to prevent me from going into my own business, but what I wanted to do is blow those away. And that is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about helping women grow organizing businesses is because I have found so much happiness in this work and this career.
But here's a little bit of my background!
I grew up in Ohio in a small town, and I went to college in Ohio at place called Miami University. And I just want to say if you watch ESPN at any juncture during the college football season, you might see something on the screen that says Miami and in parentheses, (OH)—that is Miami of Ohio, or as we like to say—Miami was a university before Florida was a state, which is true! I was a psychology major, which is important to my organizing story because I love human behavior. I love studying human behavior. I love thinking about why people do the things they do. I like trying to figure out why I do the things I do! And so I was a psychology major, but when I graduated, I was like, “Hey, I just really want to go get a job.” I was ready to get out into the world. I didn't want to go to graduate school, which is pretty much what you do with the psychology degree, and thankfully at the time that I was graduated from college, they didn't really care what your major was.
So I started working for a paper company. Now, the first thing that people say when I say I worked at a paper company is they'll say, “Like Dunder Mifflin?” It was not like Dunder Mifflin! So I started working for this paper company, and I did lots of different things there—so many things happened to me during those years. I ended up working there for 18 years, which when you think about it, that is raising a kid from birth to go into adulthood. A lot of people don't spend that much time at one place in their career, but I was very grateful for all of that time.
That was a place where I learned so much about business, about working, about office politics, about working with people, about leading people, leading teams, all sorts of things. And I'm immensely grateful to that company because not only did I gain some of my best friends in the entire world and gain lots of business knowledge, but they also were very, very kind and they sent me to grad school, and I got an MBA from Ohio State University.
So here's a story about when I was in grad school. I was very happy working for a big company and I always wanted to keep working for a big company. As one of our last classes in grad school, we were required to take an entrepreneurship course.
I was so angry having to take that course. (which now is hilarious to me.)
I still remember it. I hated every second of that course, for several reasons. At that time, I was like, “Who wants to start their own business? That seems terrible. Just work for an established company. Just do that.”
And there was a very specific project we had to do—we had to stand up in front of our entire class (by the way, our entire class filled with very successful business people) and we had to pitch an idea.
It was many years ago and I still remember it. I stood up in front of class and I pitched my idea and I had hives, literal hives. I was bright red. I didn't want to do this. I just wanted it to be over.
And I am not someone that has a hard time standing up in front of groups—I have given presentations to literally thousands of people before, I don't get nervous about it. I stood up in front of that group and I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. The whole time I said to myself, I just have to check the box and get done with this dumb entrepreneurship class. I do not want any part of it. That was how I felt about entrepreneurship back in that day. Hilariously. I have very much changed my impressions of entrepreneurship, but that is how I started out thinking about the idea of running my own business.
While I was in grad school. I got married. My husband's name is Tim. He and I long distance stated for the entire time before we got married, the longest consecutive amount of time we had ever spent together was our honeymoon. Spoiler alert—it worked out fine. 20 some years later, he says that he enjoys spending time with me. I think that's actually true. He is awesome. If you are a member of our Organizing Essentials course, during the dark days of the pandemic, I actually organized his closet with him as a lesson in our Organizing Essentials course. And I have so many people that say, oh, your husband is so nice, and he seems so fun. And he is all those things.
So I was in grad school. I got married then. I had two kids. My daughter Reilly is a sophomore in college at the time of this recording and my daughter Emma is a senior in high school. And along the way in my job at the paper company, I moved multiple different times, and then eventually we moved to Minnesota, which is where Tim is from.
I had a home office before home offices were cool—I had a home office for 11 years. And that was another thing that I realized, later than a lot of people do—is how your house has to work for you.
One of the things that is important to my organizing career is that when I grew up, I had parents who were very, very organized people. I mean, like super organized. Everything had a place. Everything had a home. Everything was labeled. Everything was very, very orderly.
Well, everything except for—my room. Which was always a disaster zone.
And it was a disaster zone because it is my strong belief—and this has been absolutely borne out by every organizing interaction that I have ever had, is that you either do exactly what your parents did, or you do the exact opposite. I have data point after data point after data point that says this.
But. I went the other direction, because everything was so orderly in our home, and because there were a lot of rules in terms of how things worked in our house. I totally went the other direction and I really rebelled against that. I was super messy. My room at home was messy. When I went to college, my dorm room was messy. When I shared spaces with people, I kept my stuff together as much as possible to make my roommates happy. But in general, when it was my own space and when I was in charge of it, it was a total disaster, and I was totally fine with that. It didn't bother me.
I always liked to tell myself that I loved the chaos, and I loved having stuff around me.
There's another part of this too that involves consumption. When I was growing up, my parents were were very wise with money and we really got the things that we needed and we didn't have 200 extra of everything. And I think when I became an adult, I really was like, oh, I want to buy all the things because we didn't really do that when I grew up, and so I went the opposite direction on consumption as well. I was always buying new things. I had one friend in particular from college, whenever I would go visit her, that was back when Bath and Body Works was really big, and she would have like every scent of every bath and Body Works product. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I love this so much! And then I tried to emulate that kind of consumption.
These were big things for me, which will come into play later in my organizing career. I was, as I like to say when I'm giving presentations to groups that are learning about organizing, I like to say I was a trash panda. Because I was pure chaos. And that chaos didn't get better when we had little kids because little kids brings boatloads of stuff. There's just stuff everywhere. And so our house was chaos all the time.
I have something that comes up once a year in Facebook memories, and it is a text between my husband and me. He was talking about, “Hey, there's this Martha Stewart book on organizing in the junk box on top of the kitchen table.” and he says, “oh, how, how ironic is this?” And I screenshot that text and I put it on Facebook because it was funny to me. And one of my friend's wives left a very snarky comment about it. I'll never forget it. She's like, why do you have a junk box on top of your kitchen table?
And I'm like, how dare she be so judgy, like who doesn't like, it's just a box that you just pile things in! And I would go through the box like every two months or something.
Well, guess what. It's probably not normal to have a junk box on your kitchen table.
And one of the things now that I just kind of laugh about is now that I am an organized person and now that I help other people could organize, I think about all the things I used to do in my house. I'm extremely compassionate for how people get into a space of being disorganized because I was that person. And so when I work with clients now, and they're embarrassed about the state of their house, or whatever I'm like, “Nope, I get it.” It's totally fine. And I understand because I was that person. So I lost things all the time. I had to replace things all the time. Everything was just chaos. And that was just how things worked in our house.
I totally also did the thing that clients do, which is when someone's coming over, you just shove everything in a closet. And I had doom piles—all the things that we see at clients. I did it. It was me.
And this is a total side note, but speaking of the “you either do exactly what your parents do, or you do exactly the opposite”—I have a friend who grew up in a true hoarder home. And they have gone the opposite direction, and their house is extremely orderly—and they have a teenager at home, and that teenager has a mildly messy room. And this friend of mine is always like, “she has the worst room of any teenager ever.” And I have frequently said, I'm going to stop you right there, because I know that professionally and personally, that is not true. This room is actually not messy. It's just what your expectations are!
So I'm at the paper company for 18 years, and I decided it was time for a change. And I end up going through a very long process, but end up finding a new company and getting a pretty high flying job. It’s a paint company, and I went from paper to paint. The two different places I worked were big Fortune 500 companies, multiple billions of dollars, thousands of employees, very big businesses. And I moved from the very comfortable—but almost too comfortable— paper company, and I start a brand new job at this paint company.
The story is going to take a downward turn here in a second, but the one thing that's important to say is, I like to think that sometimes the worst things that happen to you are the things that you learned the most from. The things that you can really gain the most from, the happy ending story isn't necessarily it. Having to have some trials is good. And although the story both has, and doesn't have, a happy ending. I will say this place brought me a ton of learning about what I want for my life and what I want career-wise and everything else, but it also brought me some really lovely people. That's also a through line of my story—I'm very fortunate to have been able to work with some wonderful people. But nowhere, have I ever worked with more wonderful people than the organizing industry, but I'll get to that in a minute.
So I started the paint company. I'm very, very excited because I do love starting new things. But it became clear pretty immediately that it wasn't kind of the job that I thought that it was going to be, and this isn't the place I thought it was going to be. I started to learn really quickly that maybe I had made a mistake. I don't think I made a mistake leaving my prior job, but I made a mistake picking my new thing. Yet for two years, I went to work every day, and on paper, everything was really great. I worked in a very cool building. I worked with some really lovely people that I did genuinely love. By the way, some of my closest friends today are people that I met at this job. But it was a mismatch with culture, a mismatch with the people that I worked for, and the things I was doing, and what really lit my fire and excited me about work.
I had just started to think about, Hey, what do I want to be when I grow up? What do we want to do? What are my long term work plans? I will tell you that one of the things that I have never been very good at is drawing out what I want my next 20 years to look like. I'm much more of a, “Hey, I'm going to see what is laid out in front of me. I'm going to take you the left turn or the right turn or go straight.” I'm not planning out the map 20 years in advance. But I had started to think about, Hey, I don't think I'm really happy here. It's maybe not my dream job. What do I want to do?
Then my company was bought. And then something happened to me that I had never imagined happening in my entire life. Which was, I was told that after this merger was completed, that my job didn't exist anymore. And this is the vulnerable thing that I will tell you is that it was one of the worst things and best things that has ever happened to me in my entire life. It can be both of those things. I did not envision that happening to me. I didn't envision being someone who lost their job. And I will tell you as someone who had worked really, really hard my whole career and spent a lot of time working—I traveled nonstop. I left my family for days on end on business trips, and so losing my job was a real gut punch because I was like, things like that don't happen to people “like me.” I work really hard. One of the things that was hard for me was I put so much time and energy into my work and sacrifice, and it was a huge part of my identity.
And so that was one of the biggest things that I had to work on is what part of work is my identity. And that has been one of the gifts of this entire process is now I have a much better life balance of where work fits in. And I do a really great job with my organizing business of setting those boundaries of where work ends and where my life begins. And I'm very grateful because otherwise that wouldn't have happened I see a lot of people in my life who work 24/7, and I realized through this process that, that also wasn't something I wanted for my life.
And the funny thing though, is I get this news. And that night I was very upset. I had, I'm going to be totally honest with you, many cocktails, and the funny thing was the next day I woke up and I thought that maybe I would be in like a cold sweat and panic. And in fact, I was really happy that I didn't have to go to that office that day. I was really happy that I didn't have to work for someone that I really, really did not align with ethically personally professionally anything. I was very happy not to have to go to a job and pretend like I cared when I really didn't care anymore.
But at the same time, it was also a very scary time for me personally. I have always had jobs that provided the majority of the income for our family, and it was very scary to think, “Wait a minute. What do I do next?” But the one good thing about losing your job in a merger is there was a little bit of a safety net. I was very grateful and I was very lucky that there was a safety net for me. And I had a little bit of time to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. And what I realized very quickly was, I didn't know the answer to that. But what I did know is I looked around my house and I said, I cannot handle the chaos that is my life anymore. And it was cold. It was December, it was snowy outside. I was sitting in my front room in my chair, and I said to myself, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but there's chaos in every room of my house. And what I do know for a fact is I'm tired of that. And I want to do something about that.
So I said, while I have this time where I'm trying to figure out what I want to do in the future and what my next job is going to be, I'm going to take some time to get my house organized. My kids are at school, my husband's at work. I have all day, I might as well do something useful. This is actually one of my favorite parts of my organizing journey— because when Marie Kondo's book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up first came out in the United States, which I believe was 2015, I had someone who said, “Hey, I think you would like this book.”
Was it a hint? Probably, but I read it.
I folded my shirts correctly for like, two days maybe? You know how you get excited about something? And then you're like, Ooh, cool, cool, I'm going to do this. And then you lose steam very quickly. That was me with the that book in 2015. But in 2017, I was ready to try it again. I said to myself, well, I got that Marie Kondo book around here. Let me go find it.
I couldn't find it anywhere in my house. Which is hilarious because now as an organizer, I have found Marie's book in so many places, including my favorite was the bottom of like a six foot high pile of junk.
I had to repurchase Marie's Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up book. Which is a story that I have actually told Marie and her husband in person, which is very entertaining and a different story!
I repurchased the book and I read it, and I can't explain it other than—it just really clicked with my brain. And I just said, you know what, I'm going to give this a try. I'm going to do this method faithfully. And I am going to see what I can do with my house. The other thing I said is this is my personal thing, I'm not going to force my family to do it. It's my deal.
I started spending every single workday that I was at home organizing my house, and I did the KonMari Method very faithfully. I started with clothing. I purged probably 70% of my clothing. I had piles all around my room, and I was making trips to donation places constantly. They probably hated to see my car coming.
And the only way that I can explain it, and I do try to explain this to clients sometimes—the word addictive. And I don't mean to use that word in an improper way, but I became really just so excited by waking up everyday and going, what am I going to get done today? What am I going to organize today? And it was just a really enjoyable process for me.
Along the way my family actually decided to get into it themselves, and we ended up doing it as a family project in several of the parts of our house. We figure that we said goodbye to probably 50 to 60% of the things that we owned. I mean, we massively downsized. The one story that I will always tell clients or other people is we had 47 coffee mugs as I say, “for two people who drink hot beverages.” We just had too much of everything and an excess of everything.
The only thing that we ever say goodbye to mistakenly—there was one pair of shoes that we were like, oops, we accidentally sent those away and shouldn't have. Other than that, we never had a single thing that we were sad about. And I share that story with clients a lot. When they go, oh, I'm going to miss all these things when they're gone, I say—girl, you're not even going to remember what you dropped off at the donation place.
I figured out a lot about myself during this process. I see this with clients too—there is a lot of self-recrimination. There's a lot of beating yourself up for bad financial decisions. So one of the things that I realized in my journey was, when I talked earlier about how I love to consume things, I had consumed so much. I had spent so much money on emotional shopping. If I had a bad day at work, I would go online and just get a little something for myself. If I had a good day at work, I was going to reward myself—I'll just get another shirt. I'll just get another pair of pants. Oh, I need this pair of shoes. My consumption patterns were very out of control, and I used shopping as fun. What I realized is I was letting thousands of dollars of things go out the door, just like our clients do. And I just said to myself, I don't want to be this person anymore.
And the other thing that I realized through the process is. I didn't know what I wanted to do for my career. But as I kept going through my house and organizing every single space in my house. I just got more and more excited about the process. And I enjoyed waking up every day and going, what am I going to organize today? I was almost done with my house and I was starting to feel a little bit of pressure of—I have to start thinking about what comes next for me in my career, and people were starting to ask me, what are you going to do? What do you want to do? And I just kept thinking and saying: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
The only thing that kept sticking into my head is, I love what I'm doing right now. I love that I am getting my house in order and that it's not chaos anymore. I was happier. My husband was happier. My kids were happier. I was buying almost nothing. We were changing our relationship with not only the stuff in our house, but how we consumed—our patterns of consumption and everything else. And all I could think of was like this is the only thing that I'm excited about, but there's, nothing I can do with that—right??
Years ago, when I was in college, there was this event that I went to for parents and students, and I remember at the time I was interviewing for jobs. And this parent said to me, “A lot of things in life come down to serendipity.” And I remember thinking, “this dude doesn't know what he's talking about. It's not serendipity, it's it's preparation and it's work and it's hard work and it's all these things.” But I have realized along the way that he was right. Serendipity has been a huge part of my career journey.
And so I happened to be one night I was on Instagram. And I happen to see that Marie Kondo was having a seminar where you could get certified in her method of organizing. And I'm like, “Huh. You don't say.” I hop online and I check it out and it was pretty expensive. But it felt like something I wanted to take a chance on. I went to my husband who is a wonderful, wonderful human being probably better than I deserve, and I said, “I just saw a thing online and I have a crazy idea.”
This was the third time I've met Marie--when I was in Japan in May!
I told him that I really want to go and do this seminar because I think I might want to look into starting this as a business, and I think that may be crazy. And he just looked at me and he said, “I don't think it's crazy at all. I really think you should do it.”
That's how I found myself on a plane to New York City in April of 2018. In that seminar, I met people from all over the world, and I realized this was something that I really, really wanted to make into a career.
I get home and I immediately start going to work to actually get certified. I will not bore you with all the details, but it actually is a ton of work to get certified in the KonMari Method®. As a part of that process, I had to have practice organizing clients. And that was my first foray outside of my own house and into “how do I do this for other people?” One of the questions you have when you first start is—wow. I really love doing this for myself, but, do I love doing it for other people? Do I love doing it in other people's houses? Great news for me during this certification process is that I realized, okay, cool. It's not just that I like this for myself, I like doing it for other people.
The other thing that I realized, which I know is not for everybody, and it’s one of the things that I will tell everyone that there is not one size fits all in organizing or entrepreneurship, and certainly not in organizing entrepreneurship, but I realized that one of the things that I loved was getting into the psychology of consumption patterns. Like I had done it in the past myself, there are different reasons as to why my clients did it. I loved uncovering that.
What are ways that I could help them live a better life? And that was definitely something that I have continued. I totally understand that that's not everyone's cup of tea, and I totally understand that there are people who are like—I am not interested in like getting into the psychology, I just want to give people a beautiful closet. I just want to have people be able to get rid of as much stuff as they want to and I just want to make it look beautiful for them. I love that too. Do what kind of organizing works for you! But what I love and what I can really, really sink my teeth into is working with someone on, who hates their current situation and says “I don't want it to be like this anymore. How can I make changes?”
It feels so good to me when I am able to help a client really change, just like I really changed. The funny thing about organizing in general is that I find that I live so much better and I'm able to tell people, “Hey. I can tell you that after we get through this process, I know it feels like a slog right now, but I swear on the other end of this is something absolutely amazing, and I am so excited for you.” So fast forward, I did get my certification. And it was a ton of work by the way, a ton of work! But I got certified—I was the 179th person outside of Japan who had been certified by Marie.
In KonMari, there are levels of achievement based on how many hours you’ve worked with clients. And when you start out, you are just called green. You are green level.
One of the things about me that is important to know—I am exceedingly competitive. One of the things that I say in my own house a lot is everything is a competition. And I really, really immediately was like, oh, there are different levels and I can move up the levels with the number of hours that I organize. And from that point onward, I was like, game on. How can I get to Master level? I wanted to get the most clients, I wanted to get the most hours. I wanted to make my way to become a master level certified organizer which was 1500 hours of organizing with clients.
Knowing that the competition was on. I said, I want to start my business and I want to get to that level. Part of my story is that I did everything myself. I'm very much a DIY kind of a girl, which is ironic because now I love helping people build their businesses, but for my own business, I was like, I want to do it myself, and I want to figure out how to do this. In my prior corporate life, I had people that did things for me. And this was really exciting for me to be able to say I'm building this business fully on my own.
Now, the flip side of that is, as I tell people a lot, I made all the mistakes so you don't have to, I'm going to give you all of the bad things and the silly things and the dumb things I did so that you don't do all those same things!!
But I started my business on my birthday in May of 2018. My business and I share a birthday. I called my business Home By Eleven. And when I tell you that I spent, tops, four minutes coming up with my business brand name that may be an exaggeration. It may have been even less than that. 11 is my lucky number, and I'm happy to tell you the reason 11 is my lucky number if you ever want to ask. But I wanted to use the word eleven in my business. I knew that. And then I just had this epiphany that I was like, oh, Home By Eleven, like kind of your curfew when you're a kid. And I go, okay, cool. Home By Eleven. That's it. The end. So my business brand was easily established. I got all the legal things together, the LLC, all those things. And then I said, okay, what comes next?
I knew I had to build a website. So I got in Squarespace. I learned how to build a website. Now I teach people HOW to build websites, which 6 years ago me would have laughed at you if you told me that!!!!! Then it was—-I've got to go find some clients.
When I started my businesses, I gave myself a year. I said, I have one year from today to decide whether this is successful or not. On my birthday next year. I can decide whether this is a successful business for me or not. And the definition of success is varied. One of the things that I had that had to be a measure of success was finances. I had to make my business successful from a financial standpoint, because of my prior corporate life, I was very fortunate that I had very good jobs and I had very good paying jobs and my family had come to depend on that income. I gave myself one year to figure out, can I make a business that gives us enough as our family to be able to live and to be able to have a good life and to also make sure that I'm happy doing this and all those things?
What I realized really quickly was I thought that because I was certified by Marie Kondo's organization, that clients would just start coming out of the woodwork immediately. I found out that wasn't true.
So remember how I said, I made all the mistakes so don't have to? I really legitimately was like, oh my gosh, these clients are just gonna like be flocking to me!! I'm going to be able to beat them off with a stick!! And what I realized really quickly was no, there's actually a lot of stuff that goes into building a business. Any of you who are listening to this who have built a business know there is no such thing, I don't care whether it's inside organizing or outside organizing—there is not one single story that is an overnight success story. When you hear of an overnight success story, I can tell you there is 900 miles of work that went. Into it. But I realized very quickly that I had to pivot because I needed to make this business a success. I wanted to make this business a success. I had to figure out how to go get those clients.
I figured it out. And that is one of the things now that I teach to other people. And that is part of the value of my business education and my background and coming from a really hard background of some very, very tough cutthroat corporate jobs. I figured out how to go get those clients. I was very fortunate that I was able to start getting those clients in.
One of the things that we always work with people on inside a Pro Organizer Studio—we talk a lot about planting seeds. When you plant the seeds of your business, and you keep planting those seeds—it takes a while. They have to take root in the soil and then you have to water them and you have to give them a sunlight and you have to do some work to plant those seeds, but eventually those seeds start to grow. And those seeds start to grow into a successful business.
I planted those seeds. I laid all of my foundations. I learned how to get those clients. At that one year mark, I had checked all the boxes I needed to. By my second year, I, as a solo organizer had managed to make my business a six figure business. Imagine if I had ever committed to having a team! Which is another part of my story where I chose a direction and said, nope, I'm solo organizer by choice. I admire people who build teams, I just don't happen to be one of them that loves that. But I loved changing people's home lives. I was grateful that I was able to make a very good living doing it as well. So I kept going.
And I have kept it going since 2018.
I was so excited to wake up every day and go to work, whether I was working on my business or whether I was working in my business. Now it wasn't all sunshine and roses, by the way. There were ups and downs. There still are.
There are peaks and valleys this entire time. But the main thing that I come back to, anytime I'm in one of the valleys, anytime I'm having apoint where I'm like, what am I doing? And what's going on? I just go, I am infinitely happier now than when I was in my old life. My husband said to me one time when I was having doubts, because it happens, it still happens, occasionally we all have moments—I said to Tim, “What if I made a huge mistake. What if I am messing everything up and what if I am really just like, I just need to go back to like a real job.” And he just looked at me in this moment of just self doubt and crisis, and he looked at me and he said, you cannot put a price on happiness. You are such a happier person. You are more fun to live with. You are clearly so much happier than you were at your old job.
I was miserable at my old job. Miserable. And he said that in that sentence, “you cannot put a price on happiness” is what I always come back to when I'm having one of those valleys of entrepreneurship. And I say, oh my gosh, I remember what that old life was like. And I want to keep trucking because this is where I need to be. And this is where I want to be.
In 2019, I decided to go to an organizing retreat. My organizing bestie was a part of this group called Inspired Organizer, and she told me that person that's in charge of Inspired Organizer is doing this retreat, and she’s thinking about going to it—do I want to go with her? You don't have to be a member to go. That's how I found myself flying to Arizona and driving to Las Vegas with my organizing BFF. And I meet Jen Kilbourne, the founder of Pro Organizer Studio, and lots of other people who have come to be very good friends of mine were also on this retreat. I just immediately was like, oh, these are my people! All we did was hang out with other organizers and it was so lovely. Then in the early days of the pandemic we had a zoom reunion for the people that were at that Vegas retreat. And we were talking about how scary the pandemic was for people who do in-home services—if you were in business during the early days of COVID, it was really scary because depending on where you lived, you really couldn't go do your job.It was a very scary time.
On that zoom, Jen and I were talking and then we ended up talking offline and really started having some. Great conversations about organizing about entrepreneurship, about life, about partnerships, about spouses, about all sorts of things. And that is where my work at Pro Organizer Studio ended up starting. Jen was looking for someone to come on and start working at Pro Organizer Studio. And it was just the perfect entree to me. To be able to start something new for myself.
In October of 2020, that is when I officially came on board with Pro Organizer Studio. If you go in the way back machine, my first time on the podcast was when the, the episodes were in the sixties and now we are over 200 episodes. It's been a while since I've been coming to you in your headphones, but I can tell you that when I joined Pro Organizer Studio, I think that's when I felt like I found my true purpose.
And I love organizing with people. I truly do. I still organize. I'm going to an organizing client tomorrow morning as I write this! I still organize with people, but my true passion is with helping women grow better businesses.
Because I hate seeing people struggle. I hate seeing people work so, so hard and not get the results they want. And what I want is for women to be able to start these businesses without having to try to figure everything out on their own.
So remember earlier when I said I had that entrepreneurship class in grad school and I hated every second of it. The funny thing about me, and this is something I know about myself, and this is just something that I have come to accept about myself—I don't necessarily want to create something brand new. Creating Home By Eleven was the pinnacle of something I built that from scratch and I'm so proud of that business, but the main thing about me is I don't want to build the thing. I just want to take something that's existing and try to make it better.
And so that was a really beautiful thing about starting at Pro Organizer Studio was Jen had built this wonderful business that had a lovely community of people—women across the world who were learning about their organizing businesses.
And she wanted me to come. And make a few things better. She wanted me to start a course that was actually about how to organize beause lots of people had asked her for that, and she wasn’t as interested in building that. Well, I was! And there were other things that I brought to the table from my Home By Eleven business and from my other business background that she thought was valuable to Pro Organizer Studio.
She was the visionary behind it. I just took that vision and I ran with it.
Along the way. It became so much more than just adding a few things to Pro Organizer Studio. I bought Pro Organizer Studio and it became my very own business. I have been able to take this beautiful, wonderful foundation and then say, “Hey, it's time for a bunch of new things.” And that's where we really are now. We are at a new frontier for Pro Organizer Studio. And we are looking at what is going to help organizers as we go into the end of 2024 into 2025.
In general, I’m not super intopersonality tests and that type of thing. I have taken a bunch of personality tests, like Myers-Briggs and all the things. But the one I do buy into, and we've talked about on the podcast a couple of times, but the one personality test that just like nails it, in my opinion, is the Enneagram. I'm an Enneagram 2. There was an Instagram Reel once of someone who titled it “Enneagram 2 gets kidnapped” and it was like, “Hey, Mr. Kidnapper, you seem like you're really tired. Would you like to take a break? I have some snacks in my purse. Are you hungry?” That's kind of a good description of an Enneagram 2. I genuinely love helping people.
I love when people say, oh my gosh, I did this thing that you suggested, and it worked for me, whether that's an organizing client or an organizer who is trying to get to get clients. One of the things I've realized is through my business history, I was never a great fit with some of those great big companies because I cared too much, or I cared at a level that didn't align with what I was doing. Now I have a job that I am able to help people all the time, and I absolutely love it.
If you combine that with how competitive I am—I also want you to win. I want you to build a great, great business.
And that's why I love the work that I do at Pro Organizer Studio. And that's why I'm going to keep doing it. I am so grateful that I have so many people along for the ride. At the time that I'm recording this, I actually was just checking on my flights to the How To Summit, which is coming up in a couple of weeks in Austin.
And I am just so excited that I get to go and meet a bunch of new people and see a bunch of people that I met last year and be able to be together with about 65 of the people that are in our Inspired Organizer® course. And it's just so energizing to me to be in a room of people who want the same things that I want.
And I am honored that I'm able to help people.
Here are just a few things to help you get to know me better:
Me grabbing my 50th state with my daughter!
I will do anything to get out of a phone call. I do not like the phone when someone said, Hey, can you call me? I have clients. I have a few clients who will be like, Hey, can we have a, just a quick, quick chat? First of all, they're never quick chats. I just, I really don't like the phone. Just please text me.
I'm an introvert. People don't believe this. But it is true. I am an extroverted introvert. And the definition of an introvert is someone that recharges by being alone versus recharging by being with other people, it doesn't make me shy, but it just means that I actually love alone time. So I will occasionally go on trips by myself. Sometimes I go on work trips where I just am like, Hey, I just need a week to like, Bust out a bunch of work without being, without having any distractions.
I have been to all 50 states and to eight countries, I would like to up the number of countries that I've been to, but I am really proud. I just finished my 50th state in August, as a matter of fact. I said I needed to get all 50 states before my 50th birthday.
I am obsessed with tiny houses. I don't want to live in one full time that I don't think is realistic, but I really would like a cabin in the woods that's a tiny house. Send me any Instagram about tiny houses—I will watch it.
I am also obsessed with reading. I’m a huge reader. I think I have about 54 books done so far this year. I love reading. I read all over the map. I read fiction, I read nonfiction, I read all sorts of things. But if I could only pick one genre, I would pick like thriller/mystery.
I love documentaries. I will watch any kind of documentary. And they can be about pretty much any subject. I also unapologetically love some more low brow TV. I do not believe in the concept of guilty pleasures, but if I were going to call it a guilty pleasure, I love Big Brother in the summer, my family and I love it. I love Below Deck on Bravo. My husband and I also love Top Chef. I'll watch a lot of different things on TV, but I do really love a combination of intellectual documentaries and very nonintellectual other stuff.
I am really bad at asking for help. I don't want to inconvenience anyone. So I often don't ask for help, which is ironic because I love giving help.
I hate bookkeeping. It's my least favorite part about having a business. Bookkeeping and all of the stuff that goes with it.
I hate confrontation. You could be probably punching me in the face and I would just be like, hey, could, could you maybe not do that? I do not love confrontation.
There are lots of other things about me, but I just want you to feel like—I hear you. I know where you're coming from. I know what some of your ups and downs are. I know what you're struggling with as an organizer—and I would love to help you make it better. If you are struggling with something, I want to be someone that can help you. And I welcome a conversation with you. By the way. I will even pick up the phone and talk to you even despite #1 above! I will do that because I want you to be able to feel like you have an outlet.
Because I love helping people build better businesses. I don't care if you've been in your business for five minutes or you haven't started your business at all, or you've been in five years and you're not getting the results you want. We have people in our group that have been in business for almost two decades that still need a place to ask questions and go for help.
I want to be that safe haven for you.
I have worked for $4 billion companies and I have worked for myself for now six years. I love doing what I do and I would love to help you love it as well.
So, this is a little bit about my story. I hope that this helps you a little bit—hopefully you have found some parts of it that you can relate to.
This is my reintroduction to you. And I can't wait to show you what comes next.
I have a brand new free workshop called How Professional Organizers Can Get Clients Without Using Social Media. It is available on demand 24/7 at www.poroadmap.com.