214 | From Middle School Friends to Business Partners! | Tina and Nancy of Uncluttered Spaces

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Dec 30

Written By Melissa Klug

Most people (me!!) have not super fond memories of middle school--but for Nancy and Tina, a junior high friendship blossomed into a business partnership in a wildly successful organizing business.

I am talking to them about their partnership, organizing, life, and so much more--it's the PERFECT way to end 2024 on the Pro Organizer Studio Podcast!

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You can listen right here by pressing play, or you can read the full transcript below!

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
How are you? Welcome to the podcast.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yes, we're happy to be here. Yeah. Yeah. We enjoyed you so much at the organizing summit.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, at the How To: Summit. Thank you.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yes, the house. You were great. Your information was great. So we appreciate you.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
You can tell I'm super passionate about those subjects. And one of the biggest things is I know that there are a lot of people that listen to the podcast that weren't at the summit. But I just—by the way, come next year because it's great. But other—just, I'm so passionate about people having the foundation of their business set. And a lot of times we like try to go to college before we've gone to kindergarten. And so I was hoping that it connected with people. So I'm glad it did.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It did. It did with us and our team.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Good. Cool. How many people did you have at the summit?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It was five of us. So we had three team members come.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, I love that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I wish we could have brought them all, but we couldn't.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Tell me a little bit about you, your business, where you are, all of the things.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
So it's a long story.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That's okay. I got that. That was—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Okay. So we started our business 13 years ago. So it's been a long time. 2011 is when we started. So going on 14 years.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Like really before it was a thing.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It was way before it was a thing. And Nancy and I have been friends since we were 12 years old. And we sat next to each other in Mr. O’Neill’s English class in seventh grade. True story. First day of school, looked at each other—“I like your hair.” “And that braid.” “I like what you're doing.” “Let's be friends.” So cute.

And we formed this friendship that has been ever since. We’ll tell our age—we’re 55 years old today—but our friendship spans childhood, adolescence, motherhood, marriage, and the highs and the lows in those things. Life is not all roses, and Nancy and I have, through our lifespan, been through deaths, divorce, breast cancer. You name it, we've seen it all. Our kids being born, one of my kids being diagnosed with a chronic illness—we have been there for each other through everything.

And with that comes this special trust and bond that I wish every woman has, not only in business. We know we're really lucky, but also in friendships. We meet so many people—our female clients especially—who say, “I wish I had a Tina,” or “I wish I had a Nancy,” and I don't have that. So those are aha moments for us because we're in the day-to-day grind where we look at each other and we just give each other like a little smile, like, we are so blessed to have this really special bond.

We do a lot of private high-fiving. Yeah, we do. We have a power pose. And this is our power pose. Everybody knows it in our company. That works for us. Like all of our team members—when something good happens, whether it's small or big, we always just connect and give a power pose.

So our friendship goes really far back. And how our business started was we were both in this odd timeline of our lives where our kids were no longer super little. They were just starting school. And Nancy and I have both been in the service industry, the hospitality industry, and the sales industry.

We have this huge background and we're like, what do we love to do? And we spend every day together. And you can only be a gym rat for so long. That was a very short time for us. But there's so much you can do in your own house—just so you're circling that. And this is stupid, meaning there's so much more out there for us to get.

We're smart women. We're go-getters. We love money in our pocket. And what are we really good at? And we combined all of those things. And we were doing a little bit of house cleaning at the time. And I hated it. Nancy was like, this is great. We get to be together. And we're just like—we talk all day and we whip through these houses.

And I was looking at the houses where I'm like, this has to be so much better. Like, this could be styled better. And we started doing that for people. And Nancy and I were really good at it together because one of our superpowers is that we can talk without speaking. We can look each other in the eye or give a subtle glance and we know what the other one is thinking and what the next step is.

So we're always on the same page. It works great with clients because you know when the client is sick of you and you're like, “Alright, it's your turn.” Like we could just look at each other and be like, switch, switch.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I love that. It's like the twin telepathy kind of thing or whatever.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. Yeah. And then, so it was 2011, and I was like—our New Year’s resolution—and we both have entrepreneurial spirit. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family as well. And I'm like, let's start our own company. Let's be professional organizers. We had to Google, “What is a professional organizer?” And we each put in $500. That was our capital.

And we went on LegalZoom and made up an LLC, Uncluttered Spaces. Used every family member we could that owns a sign company, a printing company, website photographer. So we took advantage of all that and it did us good. It started us, got us on the map.

And then our first big job was—it’s the craziest story. It was a warehouse, but it was like four warehouses just filled with pallets to the ceiling. It was insane. And this company brought us in and we had to sit in front of the CFO, the CEO, and they were talking about all their problems.

And we're just—we have business suits on, we were like, “We know what we're doing,” our clipboard. And we're like, fake it till you make it. And he walks us through these warehouses. And Nancy and I are looking at each other like—but—and we're going, “Oh yes, we can do it. No problem. No problem.”

So we left. We didn't give a quote because we didn't need—we said, “Oh, we need time to think about how much this whole project will cost.” So we get in the car and we're like doing our high five in the car.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Love it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
How are we going to quote this? And we figured out our—like labor and stuff like that. And we spoke to Nancy's father, who had a business for many years, and we said, “How do we price this?” And he said, “I'm going to tell you, you're dealing with a business. It's business to business. This is business to business. It's different mentalities.”

He said, “Figure out the price you want and then bump it up 20 percent.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Love that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And offer the 20 percent because what they're going to do is negotiate down to the price you want. And they think they won, but you won inside. And we did that exact thing.

And they hired us on the spot. When we signed the contract, it was such an unbelievable moment for us. We're like, wow. And then we did the job. And the job grew bigger. And we still work for that company today.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, that's amazing.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
He's brought us so much business over the years. But that's what really, I think, gave us the confidence that we didn't have.

You can't go to college to become a professional organizer. There were no workshops back then. There was no how-to. There was very little on the web, on the internet, about our industry. But once Nancy and I realized we could do that project, we knew we could do anything.

Yeah. And from that day forward, trust me, when we first started, we did the little signs with the pull-off tabs. Every dry cleaner. We hit every realtor’s office. We did it. Everything you can hand out—we did it. And then we got that one client. And then from there, they just trickled in slow by slow.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Really specific, because this is something that I preach on all the time. I'm a big fan of saying yes and figuring it out. And I know that for some organizers, you have that feeling of “I have to know how to do everything. I have to know all the 22 steps that I need to get from point A to point B.”

And if I don't know those, I can't take this job because I don't know it. How did you get that “Yeah, I got it, I'll just do it”? I think that there's an X factor to that. Either you have it or you don't. But how did you fake yourself into “yeah, we can totally handle this”?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
That Tina is that person. She's a “yesser.” She says yes to everything. That's just who she is. She's like, “We'll figure it out. No problem.”

I'm more of the pessimist. I'm more of, I don't need every step to figure it out, but I'm always like, “Are you sure? Maybe we should think of this. We should think of that. We should think of that.”

And then I think we just usually take the leap of faith. We take the yes. We do. But we have each other's back. And I think that's what's so important. So even when I'm like, “Oh yeah, we can do this,” and I can see out of the corner of my eye that she's giving me the look like, “Okay, are you sure?”—she then implies all the things that I haven't even thought about yet.

But she makes me think about it. And then we put it into a plan of action. And we have each other to back us.

Not everything always works. We have failed at many things. We could write a book about all of our failures, the mistakes we've learned. But I'm a big believer that without making mistakes, I'm never going to learn.

So we just push through it. And yes, we make mistakes. But do we learn from them? Yes. Have we made some big mistakes? Yes. Have we learned from them? Yes.

And I think, like Tina said, having another person to voice your opinions to about whatever's upcoming—when you're an individual organizer, it's got to be a hard thing because a lot of it must be running through your head if you're not Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Strong enough to say yes, it would be hard. It would be, I would see where you would definitely be like, I don't know.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And that's one of the reasons that with the stuff that we do, we try to—we develop a community of people because then you can go, you need someone. When I was early in my organizing business and I was truly alone, I found an organizing bestie and we would just—we would text and be like, oh my gosh, you won't believe what happened to me today. You won't believe what I found today. You won't—whatever.

And it's just nice to know, even though she wasn't solving my problems, I just was able to talk about it. And like you have that built in with each other, but find it somewhere, whether it's a community, whether it's someone you find—like just find that person. Because it's really important. Because otherwise you can burn out really fast.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. I think that's even the way—even when you're in the process of doing an organizing job—some days you're not creative. Some days you have a day where you're like, I don't know, I can't figure out how that's gonna fit in there. And she'll walk over and go, vice versa. Do. Boom. Or vice versa.

There's just days. Like the other day, Tina—I was doing arts and crafts and puzzles and games—and she walked over and she was like, I was in a garage, and she was like, I got to take a break. Hi, I'm having a moment. And I'm like, good, let it out. Let it up. Be in here for a while. And then she went back and she finished it. Like that's—it’s nice to be able to. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Love that. I'm jealous too, because do you guys have spaces that like one of you hates and one of you loves? Like I hate it. And I would love to have a kitchen. I would love to have someone to be like, here's the kitchen. I hate it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah, we do. And we have a team now. And one of—I think the best things about our team, Nancy and I hope—and one of our team members is sitting here helping us videotape this right now. So she could even chime in—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yes, I would love that. That'd be—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We always think, okay, when they start working for us and they shadow a job—because if we bring somebody on, we also want to make sure that they like what they're doing too, right? Because it's going to affect their job and their quality of work that's representing our brand.

So these are things that are like, come shadow a job. We'll pay you for shadowing, but just learn and really see what organizing is. Because I think a lot of people have this misconception about what we do.

But once we find out, we put them at all tasks, and then we find out what they're really good at. And now we know that's what they love. Like Lena is such an awesome organizer and bathrooms are her thing. Girl can do a bathroom like that. And I can't stand a bathroom.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I don't love bathrooms.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh, put me in a master closet. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Bathroom? No thank you. Bathroom—she gets those drawers all done quickly. Yeah. I love it.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I'll take Elena next week in Minnesota. No. Great.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
You want to go to Minnesota, Lena?

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
What are some of the difficult parts of a partnership? You're such good friends. Did you ever have a moment where you're like, wow, I hope our friendship survives? Like my daughter last year—freshman in college—she decided to room with someone that she didn't really know, but I knew her mom.

So I've known this girl's mom forever. They didn't go to high school together. And I said to my daughter, I'm always going to be friends with Julie. Don't ruin this for me. Don't have a terrible roommate situation. Have you ever had times where you're like, man, Nancy is really ticking me off today, or vice versa?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I think we do. I think we do. I don't know if we verbalize it all the time. I think we just do—we have moments of being on each other's nerves. I think we do. I think we do.

I just don't think we let it linger. I think we're good communicators. So we'll say to each other, is something really bothering you? Or let's talk about it. Or when we've had a moment, we talk about what the situation was and how we both felt about it and how we could resolve and move forward and forgive.

I'm not a grudge holder. It's not really my MO anyway. But do we get on each other's nerves? Yeah. This is a 45-, 50-year friendship relationship, and we're with each other more than she's with her husband or her kid, or I'm with my kids. So yeah, the day-to-day, yes.

But I think the pros far outweigh the cons. And I think the answer to that question is yes, we have disagreements, but yes, we communicate about it and we talk about it. Yeah. And we know when someone's having a bad day.

So I know if she's having a bad day, or she knows I'm having a bad day, I'm not going to go there at work because there's not a place for it at work, right? Work is separate than our personal friendship because we socialize outside of work too.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah. You spend a lot of time together, like—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Personal and professional.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
You guys divide things? So obviously there's the organizing side of business, and then there's the business side of business. So is one of you the, “I want the businessy tasks,” or how do you divide that kind of the back stuff?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I think we used to divide it a little bit in the beginning. I think now we sit down and talk about a lot of it together. I do scheduling usually, but we do scheduling together, so we decide who's on schedule. I post schedule—there's those simple things.

Tina's much better with writing emails and the wording of things to clients. I think we're lucky. We brought on a new girl this year that is a project manager for us. And Lena, who does our social media—those two can whip through a computer like nothing.

So I think the longer we've been in business, the older we are, we know to task things now to a lot of people. But we job share as far as the fundamentals of running our business. Like the financial part—we're both on board with it. We're both aware. We both have access to all of that.

We sit down together. We try and cut out more and more what we call office time because our office time is in our van. One of us is driving, the other is the passenger. We go through all of our tasks, our to-do list. We talk about everything from banking to accounting to marketing to everything when it's just one-on-one.

So our team doesn't see that part of our business because we keep it separate. They don't need to know all that stuff. Plus they don't understand it. Like Nancy and I know what's going on.

I feel like we job share a lot. We communicate daily what's going on within our business. We're both fully aware. So if anything happened to one of us, honestly, the other could just step in and run the business.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I was just thinking about how efficient it is to use your traffic time for that. That's so smart.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. That is usually—whoever's driving, the other one is emailing, sending text messages, paying the credit card off, those kinds of things, writing an invoice, whatever we have to do.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
One of the things that I wonder about in a partnership, especially when you're with a friend—like I had this discussion yesterday with someone—is I think there are some things that need a separation of church and state.

Like I don't want a personal friend to work with my finances. I wanted to hire a stranger as a realtor instead of someone we knew. When you started your partnership, did you have any sort of legal agreement in place or anything like that? Or did you just trust, like, hey, it's all going to work out? How did that look for you guys?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I think we always viewed it as a 50/50 equal partnership—legally, financially, everything. So whatever debt we have, we know we're 50 percent in on it. Whatever assets we have, we're 50 percent in on it.

To me, that's such simple math, right?

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, it is.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Not complicated. We're believers in not trying to complicate things. It doesn't have to be complicated. And I don't think that part of our business has been complicated at all. So it's just literally a 50/50 partnership.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But it's important to have some things in place. Even if it's 50/50, to make sure everybody is in agreement. Because things happen.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah, they do. I don't know if you and I have ever—I don't think we've ever really discussed that. I think we always just think it's going to work.

I don't even know what—she knows, like, she's my power of attorney for my health. It's—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, yeah, that's good.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And I said, okay, if I die, like, you just get Uncluttered Spaces. It's written in my thing. Like, it's her and I started this baby. Nobody else can touch it. My kids can't touch it. Her kids can't touch it. Her husband can't touch it. It's our baby.

And with that is, you get that baby. Because I trust you. We built this together and we came in equal. We came in completely equal.

I'm sure anything can happen. I've heard nightmare stories. I have friends that have partnerships and it's so nitty gritty. One partner's really nitty gritty to the other. Nancy and I aren't nitty gritty. We're not counting every single thing. It's like, hey, this is what I found today that we got.

It's just—it's interesting. I don't know.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I think it's also—you have to pick the right person. Someone listening might have a best friend from middle school, but they might not be the best person to start a business with.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Here's the key thing, right? Nancy and I did write down our personal values, which we already knew because we grew up together. So I already knew her personal values, she knows mine, and they align.

Our values align with how we conduct ourselves as human beings, as women, as friends, as mothers, as wives, as daughters, as sisters. These things align. And I think that's part of the connection.

But when we planned our business, we also wrote down our business values. And we wanted to make sure we were using the same terminology for what we wanted to put out there as our brand. And our brand is us. People know us because we're consistent.

That's one of our mission statements: using creativity to provide solutions with kindness and compassion. That's our mission statement. And that's who Nancy and I are.

We're natural problem solvers with kindness and compassion. And that's always our end goal with our business. It wasn't like we're in this to make a million dollars. We never had that mindset.

It was, what can we do that we're really good at, change people's lives, and be present for our families in the meantime? Flexibility in our life. Our kids were really little when we started this, and now they're all grownups. They're all gone.

So it's been a huge journey of how that started.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, like you said.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Side hustle to now big business. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
You have seen each other personally through marriage, kids, sicknesses. You had the in sickness and in health, better or worse. Businesses have ups and downs too. Businesses get sick, tired, whatever. Thirteen years is a long time. You've probably had a lot of ups and downs.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh yeah. We've had months where we're like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? We have so much business this month. Or one of us got sick—how do we handle that? How do we continue?

One of us went through a major life-changing event. How do we handle that? We went through the pandemic as a business from beginning to end.

But we took those opportunities. It gave us a minute to pause and reflect personally and professionally. And when one of us couldn't work, it was like, I got your back. Stop worrying. Stop calling me wondering what's going on. We got it.

I think one of the best things we ever did was get a mentor through SCORE.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, I know lots of people who love SCORE.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh yeah. When we were going through the change of this not being a side hustle anymore and getting really busy, it was accountability.

We didn't have accountability in the beginning for the business stuff. Our mentor would say, here's your list, I'll see you in a month, this is your homework. And she was awesome.

We owe a lot to her because she made us accountable. And I think to this day we're accountable because of that.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That's a big deal. I see that too. Especially when you're solo. You need someone to say, hey, what have you done today? Did you send the email?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That's something that I do and the work that I do because it is really important to have someone saying, Hey, did you remember to do this? Hey, where are you? Hey, I want to push you a little bit on this because I want you to go. I want you to go achieve this thing, right?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
That's awesome.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Job is a little bit of tough love, right?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
You. Bye.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That because otherwise it's really easy to be like, I could just sit on the couch today. Cause you can—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. Yeah. And even in our business—clients—we treat our clients very different than we did in the beginning. Yeah. And that's like a whole crazy story. And that talks about the ups and downs—business and the lessons, hard lessons we learned. But one thing we learned is don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Correct. Absolutely correct.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Don't ever do that. And we did that for a while. And it was—it was great. And we were like, this is great. And then the shit hit the fan with this client and then it wasn't so great. It wasn't so great, but it was, looking back—this is where we talk about lessons—like it was the best thing that ever, it released us and changed our mindset to a business mindset.

Yeah. It's really hard to explain, but it was like—and that's the same time we got our business mentor. So I know people talk about you have to think like a CEO when you own your business and you do. And we didn't for a long time. And I think that was a big lesson we learned. And once—once we shifted that mindset, oh my goodness. Like we can manifest anything.

Yeah. And I think you have to learn to set boundaries with clients.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
100%.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
There are certain clients that just want to be your best friend and they want to call you and they want to text you and they want you in. And there is a point to where you have to say, yeah, this is a work—this is a client relationship.

Not that you can't act like their friend and have compassion for them. I'm not saying any of that, but there is definitely—you definitely have to learn boundaries.

And one of the boundaries we—one of the rules we have is we do not accept people's donations personally. And we tell our team that: do not—whatever they try and push on you, please say no. Because with that becomes an attachment. And with that attachment becomes a favor. And with that favor is now we've crossed the line between professionalism and friendship.

And we don't want strings attached. But we jokingly say what happens once it gets in the van? Who knows, right? But don't accept it. Don't say, yes, I would love this beautiful dress. Because they're gonna expect something in return. Yes.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Right. Or it's going to—or the narrative is going to change to—I know that I talked to an organizer about a similar situation where someone on her team, like the client had been very generous and very nice. And then someone on her team did accept something. And then it became a—the client started to think maybe she's trying to encourage me to donate something. Like a whole thing.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It's messy. It could—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
It's messy. And I will tell you even with—this is a personal thing, but I'm totally with you. I had a client who had very fancy things, lovely things. And I went there. It was the first day I worked with her. And four seconds after we started, she's, Oh, I'm getting rid of this jacket. This would look really cute on you. Put it on.

She was really pushy. So I put it on to make her happy. And she's, Oh, you need to take that. And I was like, actually, no, thank you so much. That's so nice. But no. And she was really offended. And I was like, Ooh, I actually ticked her off by not taking it.

But I tried to explain—it was awkward—but I was like, it's just against the boundary. But she was really annoyed. And I'm like, I still know I did the right thing though, because otherwise then it just becomes a thing.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. It does. We just tell—because Lena, who's this young—I'm looking over here in the corner—like she's young, cute figure. Clients are always trying to push their fashion on her. And even though we're like, this is not her fashion, but I can tell when she'll say no gracefully.

And—but then I might interrupt and be like, our policy—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
She's not allowed.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Allowed—to save her of that. But we try. But that's one of those things that as organizers we have to talk about because we're always in those really awkward situations.

And trust me, Nancy and I don't want other people's stuff. I got enough. I got my own stuff. We always tell people that too. We're like, we got our stuff. We got my own stuff. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I am always amazed too, since we're talking about this, it's amazing to me when people are like, would you like this dusty, terrible thing that I don't want? And I—and again, I'm always really nice about it. Oh, thank you so much, but I can't say—I just couldn't possibly. I'm like, why would I want that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. I know. I want that. Exactly. But Nancy and I—we definitely have looks on my face. And then once our clients get to know us and they laugh, they appreciate it, they're like, I know that you're giving me a look. Like why would I want that? Yeah. Trust you.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh yeah. It's funny. And also re-reselling things. This is—don't do that either. Yeah. Don't start reselling things. Don't even involve yourself. It is ugh. It's—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Let's talk about that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And money. It's a waste of time and money.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
All right, preach to me, ladies, because—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. I know. I know. Are you doing it? Do you do it?

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
No, but here's why I want to—here's why I want you to preach because we have newer organizers who listen to this and frankly, experienced organizers who I think get in a trap.

It actually happened the other day. Someone in our Inspired Organizer® group—she was looking for some help and she goes, I just told her—she's newer—and she goes, I told a client that I would sell all their Legos. And then I told them I would do this. And I told them I would do that. And someone in the comments is stop right now. Go back to her and be like JK, I can't do this. Like just, I—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Not in our wheelhouse, that's what we say. Not in our wheelhouse.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I did it at first. I was a—because like I said earlier, I was a say yes person and I will always be a say yes person. And I'm glad I said yes, because then I learned how terrible it was and that I didn't want to do it anymore.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We did the same thing. We did. Yes.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And on eBay and it was such a waste of time and money. We actually returned his items and said, this is not—it's not going to work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But I do what you're saying though, of you do have the ability to say yes when it is really hard. Or when you don't know, because then it gives you that practice. If it's a mistake, you learn from it. And then you can also just be like, this is terrible. I hate it. I hate every second of it. It's not worth my time. It's not worth my money.

And by the way, you're going to come up with your own lecture. You can give clients your lovely set commentary. You can give to the client and be like, no, this is why I don't do it. And this is why you shouldn't do it either.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And we do that. And then if it's somebody who's really wanting their stuff sold—like they think their antiques are worth something—we just are very prepared with some estate traders that we know. And we say, here's their number. Good luck. You might get two cents on the dollar, but good luck. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I—this is a total tangent, but I did a presentation the other day at a bougie retirement community, and it was for people who were thinking about moving in there and all the older people thinking about downsizing. And I did questions and answers and a bulk of the questions are how do I sell my stuff? How do I—tell me about estate sales, tell me about the blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like—I just was—I was saying it so diplomatically, but I was like, so many people in this room have things that they think are worth something and that they're going to find out that they're not. And that is a bummer. It's—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It is a bummer. It is a bummer because they think it's their treasures and that they've been holding on to this for a long time. Since my grandmother to my grandmother, and it's not worth anything and—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Actually, just on that subject today, this morning, I was slothing in bed a little bit, reading the news and there's a really good—Business Insider has some not great articles, but they had a really great one that interviewed a bunch of professional organizers about the Gen Z versus boomer, like the stuff conundrum and like boomers wanting their kids to take their things. And, but it was actually a really good article, a lot of good stuff in it. So it's just a little—go look that up and read it. It's good.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh, okay.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But back to partnership.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I will say Nancy and I always laugh like we look at each other when we completed a big project and we're just so grateful. We think I couldn't do this without you. Yeah. And having that partnership because it's a hard job, what we do, professional organizers.

And it also—our partnership has set us to be different than other organizers. And I mean that in a positive way, even how we sell our company, because we are large project, large scale base. So we are not—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Absolutely. Get—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We're not session-based. So we don't sell sessions. So somebody that wants a session organizer, we'll refer them to somebody else locally that does that. And we explain to them, that's a one-on-one relationship with somebody you work three hours at a time, perhaps once a week. It depends on how the organizer wants to set you up. You have a lot of homework. So you have to be accountable most of the time to work on a one-on-one session.

Where we're like, there's two of us—we're team. We never send—no more than—no less than two people. We have a two person team minimum for any job we do because you need that person to run.

We call it like working the front end and the back end of a job. And it just makes us more efficient. We're twice as fast.

And also we do same-day removals because we talk about the psychological part of organizing with their client. How once we get them to make a decision, the other team member is taking it out and putting it in the van and getting dropped off at end of day. It's now.

And we just talk about how we've learned over time that really team-based, paired-up organizers—it's just so much more efficient as a service to provide.

And it also helps when Nancy and I talk about when we're working one-on-one, one of us will start one-on-one with somebody and it's mentally exhausting for our clients. It's not physically exhausting, but it is mentally exhausting for them. So we know we only have like bite-sized parts of their attention.

And most of our clients have ADD. And I know you've talked about that before in podcasts and it's a top—you know—top topic, hot topic in our industry.

But Nancy and I, with the benefit of having two people is we can tell when that person's tired of one of us and we'll give each other a glance and we'll just change directions and one steps in.

And only one of our clients figured it out. She was one of our favorite clients and she was like, wait a minute. I know what you just did. I know what you're doing. You just switched on me on purpose, didn't you? Because I was stuck. And we're like, yep, we got to keep it rolling along. Yeah. Keep it moving.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But I love that you fool most people. I like that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah, we do. And then I give a lot of credit to somebody that owns their own professional organizing and does it. Even if you're doing it three, four hours a day, it's a lot for one person to do.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
There are a lot of parts of it. What you just said really—I think about these things a lot. I basically spend my entire life thinking about professional organizing, which maybe I should get a hobby.

But like I do think if you really think about—because when you said clients get mentally exhausted—and sometimes the clients are like, why am I tired? And I just say to them, because you just made thousands of decisions. Like paperwork in particular. They're like, why am I so—

Decisions, and your brain is tired.

Guess what we have to do as organizers. We not only have to anticipate what we're going to have them sort through next. We're going to get the piles together. We're going to categorize them, figure out the best way to work with their psychological state. We're having to do all of that in our head.

So we're doing ten times as much work as they are. And we're hauling their stuff out to their car. We're tired. It's hard work.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It's hard work. It's hard work. Elena was over here on the side here and she just wrote two really good words. She wrote Decision fatigue. Yeah. For the real thing for your client. Decision fatigue. That's a good one.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Listen, we gotta get Elena on the podcast.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
She's—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Over here's—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Not. Come over here, Elena. Hi Elena. How are you? So if everybody's watching on YouTube—if you're watching on YouTube, you can see Elena too.

No, fatigue is—that's really important. And like you, Elena, can't you see it? Like you can see a client start to get tired?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And that's the good thing about you guys is sometimes I feel like you can make a decision for people and they really, they actually appreciate it. You're like, you don't need that. And they're like, you're right. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Earlier this week with someone, I said, sometimes my job is to give you permission just to take that thing away. I will just say to them, would you like me to disappear this? And they'll be like, yeah. They don't want to know what happens to it. They just don't want to do it themselves.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Exactly. Yeah. There is that. There is a period where they say, you know what? I'm done for the day. You know where I'm going with everything.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I'm going to let you make the decisions. And I'm okay. Decision fatigue is really important. Important in our partnership because one of us will get fatigued and the other one can jump in. So yeah. Awesome too. Yeah. And that's, I think, how we're able to do these bigger projects too.

And we always say to the client, like we do a project from beginning to end. To end like we never leave part of it hanging. And we don't start another job until we're done with your job.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Okay, I love—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Focus, yeah, solely on your project. And we have X amount of time to do it because we've already forecasted the time in our contract—what we're going to do. And we—that's our focus, is that huge project from beginning to end, from—at the last detail. I mean, we hang artwork, stage houses, we redesign the spaces. We're doing it all. Besides doing the organizing, the remove, the decision making.

And we have great team members. Like, when Tina and I are doing all this purging and we're pushing and we're separating, they're implementing. Like they're working their butts off to—one is taking the donating out, one is doing the trash, breaking down boxes, whatever. One is resetting the room as we're speaking and moving on to the next.

So, you know, to have good team members is really important to Tina and I. Yeah. So—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Average length—since you're doing bigger jobs—do you have an average length of one client? I know it wildly varies, but—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
You mean per job, or—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah. Are your jobs usually like a week, two weeks? Are you with someone a—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Two weeks. We've done two weeks. We've done three years, believe it or not—a three-year project. Yeah. We've done—most of our projects, we try and get the whole house, right?

Like for us to take a job, we try and sell—because as we know, one thing we've learned after all these years: one space leads to another. One space is not going to solve the client's issues because we also dive really deep into the issue.

We look at how the family functions. We look at how their brain works. You know, when we interview, we do a free consultation, and sometimes they take up to an hour. Nancy and I spend time, but we ask really hard questions.

Yeah, I will come out and ask—just by looking around and seeing what's going on—do you have ADD issues? Have you ever been diagnosed? Is there something else that's happening within your family dynamic?

Because one thing we found out too: a lot of our clients have like life things that alter their lives, whether it was a death or divorce or an accident or an illness or something so life-changing that has thrown—that has derailed them and organizing.

But inside them, they have that ability. We know that they once had it and we help them get it back. And that's, I think, what separates hoarding to people looking chaos and hoarding. I'm going to call it those two different things. I don't even know if that's a real thing in our industry, but hoarding is very different than chaos in my—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Totally different.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And—and we get vetted for hoarding clients, and we're not licensed certified psychiatrists. So we don't take—we don't take them on. Because that is a trauma, a severe trauma. So severe that you have to dig really deep.

We do deal with other traumas, like we talked about death, divorce, illness that we know that we can get them back out of the chaos back into implementing systems that they can continue to use because we fail at our job if we leave a job and we have to make them once a month.

Nancy, do not really want to do maintenance. We don't. We don't—if we're good at our job, we're going to put systems in place and they're going to work for how that family works.

And there are times—there have been times, it's recently happened to us—where we had a client, she didn't want to be super involved. She was trying to explain to us what her system—what she wanted for her family. We thought we implemented it. And then the next day we came back and she had little tags everywhere and was like, this is not going to work for my family. This is not going to work.

And we were like, all right, then we need your attention. Like, you have to be present.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
You can't have it both ways.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Present. So else you're wasting your money. You're wasting your time and you're wasting your money because you're going to be unhappy with our service. That's not fair to you or I or us. So let's figure out what actually works. And then we got it right. And that was—that happens—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
There are the clients who expect you to do the miracle. And it's—we are miracle workers, but we cannot do everything.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Readers—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Like—once in a while we'll have someone, there was one yesterday actually in our group where she was—she sent a picture and she's, my client, it was a pantry. She had a list of things that clients wants, but she was like, Oh, also she doesn't want organizing supplies. She doesn't want this. She doesn't. And I go, so she wants a fairy to like—like there are only so many things that we can do and say, I'm not willing to be involved, but I also don't like what you did.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It's hard. That's a hard thing.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
It is hard.

I'm going back to something that you said too when you were talking about a lot of the people we work with had some sort of an event, and it might be—it's divorce or it's just being a parent of small kids or it's who knows what.

I would also add to that the pandemic, I think, really messed people up. Myself included. And I—we were very—I was very fortunate during the pandemic, I didn't have any huge life changes, but I just think there's been something about since 2020, I think a lot has changed. So I think even just that has really changed people's brains and made things a lot harder to accomplish.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I agree. I think—I also think the pandemic, it was a terrible thing and people died from it, but it truly helped our industry. I agree.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, for sure. Yeah, because people are—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
People are like in their houses going, wait, but husband has to work here every day. Where is he going to be out of my bubble? Where are my kids going to be out of my bubble?

Those kinds of things that I think really boosted our business a lot and people made a lot of changes. And I think a lot of people realize how much stuff they add and why am I bogged down with all this stuff? I don't need it. I—I think it made them feel a little sense of like just being with their families more. Being okay.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, and I think all of those things are true. I think that we—we have fundamentally changed, but also we realize how important our houses are, how it's worth it to have some of these services. This is a really important part of our life, and we need to just concentrate more on it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Right? Yeah. That's where I keep getting back to normalizing what we do. I think 2020's helped us head in that direction. Let's hope so—that it's normalized what we do.

And I think what I—and I think like Tina and I have always talked about this with some of our older clients, is that the generations coming up behind us, they're not living for great linens, antique furniture, china patterns. They're not ironing their pillowcases like our mothers did. They're in life for experiences.

They want to be with their kids every moment. They want to be with their kids out doing things all weekend long. They're not doing household chores. It's a lot different for younger people nowadays.

And I think it's starting to make older people realize like it's—there's a shift and young people and moms—they're willing to hire people to come in and want the pantry that they want, or want their master closet like they want, because they don't want to do it on the weekends.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
They're tired. I—yeah, I have a client I did a consultation with this week and she just—she has four kids and she's a stay-at-home mom, but she's, I can't do it. She goes, my husband keeps asking me like why can't you do it? And she goes, I can't because I'll get one little thing done and then all the other things stop. And I'm like, yeah—you don't—first of all, you don't have to explain it to me. I'm with you.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
It is. It's just really hard. And you just want someone to be like, can you please fix it for me? And then I will go do it. But I need someone to come in and fix it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It's like a reset. I think a lot of families need like seasonal resets. And Lane and I were talking about that recently.

Like what—when—in one of our van drives, Nancy was in another car, we were like, okay, in our industry what are we really selling—the type of service that professional organizing is and how do we get people to understand what we do?

And it's—there's—because we have a client who—she needs a reset. Like she needs right before the holidays, she needs right after the holidays, she needs right when school ends and she needs right when school starts.

And really that's the common reset of how Nancy and I lived our lives and raised our family. That was my own personal reset. And I think a lot of people don't understand that.

And it's like string—I always described it as having your stringing beads as a mother that you don't have organized when you don't have organization skills. And that not somebody unties constantly. So the beads going off and you're just putting them—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Beads are falling—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And I think when you do a solid, like hardcore reset and put systems in place and do a whole house in totality, it is amazing and life changing. And that woman or man, whoever, can now proceed and follow those procedures. Does that make sense?

And I just think that's huge of what we sell people. And that's why we call it the project base. We're like, we're going to sell you a huge project, but it's worth it.

And also women, the money you spend is the best self care you will ever spend on yourself. Yep. Ever. Ever.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And it is—if my calendar is correct—it is Mental Health Awareness Month as we are recording this.

And I always tell people—because we're—I think one of the things that the pandemic did bring us also, and this is just—it's been happening over the years—but we are a lot more open about talking about mental health and how important mental health is and talking about depression and anxiety.

And I'm very much like you, I will ask a client, do you have ADHD? The other day I said—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Or depression.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, I go, have you been diagnosed with ADHD? And she goes, How could you tell? I'm like—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But I do think we're so much better in saying this is a mental health service we are offering.

One of my favorite client quotes I ever got was, I did a cost benefit analysis of you versus my therapist. You were more effective and you cost less money. That was like a great testimonial.

But this is especially for—I'm not just saying we only service moms. We don't. We service lots of people. But especially for moms, especially for people that have a lot of chaos in their life, this is a service that helps anxiety, depression, all of the things.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. It does. It's huge. Yeah.

And we're expensive. Yeah. And we tell people that, listen, we're expensive.

And recently—and a lot of organizers talk about know your worth. Know your worth. Nancy and I have figured out our worth over the years and we know our worth. Yeah. We're not afraid to quote our worth.

And we sold a big job to a client and she was having a moment in the beginning and she was—anxiety, everything was just like crashing in, you have this moment—and she made a comment. She's, and you're really expensive.

And I turned, I stopped and I said, you're right. We are really expensive, but I guarantee you—we are worth every single penny. Yeah. And you're going to come out on the other end spending a lot of money, but we're going to change your lives. That's why you hired us.

And she said that was the best thing. We worked for her for now a year and a half and we will always be on her payroll and always on her team and supporting her and her family because we changed her life and she knew it. Yeah. After it was said.

But I'm not—Nancy and I are not afraid anymore to just let people know. And not everyone's going to be able to afford us, unfortunately, and I wish we could help everybody that comes our way. But we do try and break it down. Like maybe we'll start—work within your budget and start starting the phases. Sometimes we'll do phases, break it into phases, let's do phase one. We'll start—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I love to help people who truly can't afford our services. And I've talked to a lot of people who feel that same way.

And what I remind people sometimes is that I was talking to someone the other day who really just wanted to make her services extremely inexpensive so that anybody could afford her. And I just said what I want you to do is charge the people who can truly afford it. And then do some clients pro bono or do some clients—

I told a story about I had a client that I said, could you afford 20 an hour? And then I forgot to invoice her. Like you can do those things, but you need to get paid what you are worth by people who very much can afford our services and who—you know, I have a client coming up who made sure that I knew what her personal training—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Schedule was and her yoga schedule and everything else, because she couldn't be around during those times. And I'm like, yep, we—you’re paying for all those other things. I am a service just like those services. And it's very much worth it to the people.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah. And there's other ways to give back. One of our core values in our business was we give back and Nancy and I brainstormed, how do we want to give back? Who do we want to give back to? And in the beginning we were knocking on doors, believe it or not—Opportunity councils in our local community.

We were looking to help like homeless women living in shelters, getting them into their new apartment. And there was so much bureaucracy and red tape that we couldn't get in. So we finally did find an organization that we do volunteer at and we help and it's—it’s a shelter for women and we—they give them skills, life skills.

It's an 18-month program that gives them life skills to live independently as with their children. And we volunteer and we teach them organization skills and we help out with the group home itself. So we do know like we—we—it is important for us to give back, but you can give back in so many different ways and just giving your service for free.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yes, 100%. I absolutely love that—that there are lots and lots of ways that you can help and give and probably spread the word much farther than working with one person one on one. I love that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah. Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
What are some of the things that you do like when you talk about like you want to normalize what organizing is—do you guys have anything specifically that you do or have you thought about anything? Like I—because I'm very much on board with this.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
We—so one of the things we—we've been working through is like the umbrella of our services. It's such a big umbrella and Nancy and I've tried to narrow it down over the years because we also have learned what we like and what we don't like to do.

One of the services I—we would love to normalize, which we learned about at the HT Summit, like we were really interested in this subject, is the concierge relocation. Oh, yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Presentation I—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah. Yeah. And we've been growing. That's what we do. And that's probably our favorite thing to—everything. Like we love doing that huge complicated project.

Like we have a client right now—they sold three homes across the United States and relocated them all into one central home. So we had an intake—three totally different, unique—purge one thing and get rid of one thing.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Of course.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Trucks. I think we're on our like 20th truck coming in today. We have a team there today that they're receiving and it's literally like trying to make sense of all this stuff and organize it.

But those are the jobs we love and we love to be known for because they're complicated. They're messy. I love problem solving. So it's, yeah, let me put this puzzle together type thing.

I think I'm getting off topic with your—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
No, you're not. Not at all.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
But just those—that is a big part of the concierge relocation part.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
One of the things that Brandon said in that presentation is—and I know he did—he, they gave three different ones. So just anybody who wasn't at the summit, Brandon and Mallory of Hello, Happy Home are talking about these concierge move services. They do really big scale moves.

And one of the things that he literally had the room chant. It was very funny. Take back the unpack—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Like we want organizers to be involved with moving because like I have a friend that I helped—a personal friend that I helped pack up—and she said, Oh, my—her mom was going to help her on the other end. And she goes, Oh, my mom is so happy that you're doing this because the last time I moved, she screams at me from the other room, “Ashley, why is there a shoe in a pan?” And my heart is—yeah. Because there was space in the pan. I don't know.

I was like, we're not putting shoes in pans, right? You can make so much money from—even if you just very simply did packing and unpacking—so much money to be made in moves.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Oh, I agree. I think that—I think it's so gratifying. I think it's very gratifying for us and for even our team members, I think it's very gratifying to pack somebody up, organized, purged. And then when you move them in, how easily it flows into just putting it away.

And I think there's times where we kind of estimate jobs a little bit longer and we finish it so quickly because our team members are so efficient. We're so efficient with the packing that it, the client is, “What, you're done already?” It's so gratifying to see them be like, I—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And they're thrilled.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah. Thrilled.

Normalizing that professional organizers should be a part of moving, because when you set up systems from the day you move in your house, your flow should be consistent throughout the lifetime of owning that house.

And that's a big problem when we walk into homes that are total chaos. And they'll say, “I moved in and I—this is how I moved in.” Yeah. 20 years ago. 20 years ago. And we're like, okay, that's a problem. There's still boxes in the basement. I haven't moved. I'm like, why you—why bother?

So I think the answer to that question is normalizing the relocation service as a normal, much needed service under the professional organizing umbrella.

And we're trying to rebrand our vans with—’cause it just says professional organizers on it.

And I think I was the crazy one that lifted my hand in the lecture with Happy Home saying, “Can we all agree to call it the same thing?”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh yeah. I was in your session.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yes. Because I think that's a big problem that Nancy and I and our team—we go back and forth. Is it move management? Is it—I like movement. We always call it move management because we really manage it. We pack it. We expedite it, move with the mover. We receive the move with the mover.

Nobody's going to Google move—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That's the problem. People don't—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
You’re going to come up as a mover. It's all factual.

Nancy, I've been really like down this wormhole in that part—that umbrella, that part of under umbrella. What do we all agree collectively as professional organizers to call this?

I think it's concierge relocation is what everybody—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I like that, too, because—I was in your exact same session and that you are absolutely right. We need a name for it, but it has to be a thing that people are going to Google. Otherwise, it doesn't work.

But it is a little bit of education of, hey, I think most people don't know that we can even do this. First of all, a lot of professional organizers don't offer it. I'd love for you to offer it—do, in the bounds of your abilities, interests, whatever.

But even if you just unpacked people, even if you—I don't want to pack. I don't want to deal with movers. I don't want to deal with all that. Have a really robust unpacking service, because exactly what you said, people move into houses and they're so stressed out. And they're like, “I don't care where the cups go. I don't care where my shoes go. I don't care.” Eventually you do care. You just don't care the weekend you move in and then you're in chaos for infinity.

And so the selling point is: let us do it for you right the first time and you don't have to redo it 40—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Times.

And every moving company and every professional organizer should have relationships. You should at least try to find somebody you can do business with that you're going to give each other business because—and they do not know how to pack. No. They offer it. Movers do not know how to pack. They'll just take a drawer and dump it.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
We had—I, I actually, my comment on this post in our group the other day was this is the worst posts that we've ever had in this group. And I was only barely kidding because it was people were talking about like gross things that they have found.

And most of the comments were things people found when movers packed it, like 90 percent of them. It was like movers packed a bowl of oatmeal that then went in storage for six months. Movers packed a piece of pizza that they just—they do not—they will pack literally trash.

So an organizer isn't going to do that. So how much—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
No. And it's going to cost them more money on that.

If you're not organized from the pack to the whole process, it ends up costing you a lot more money. And I think that's another thing we're trying to normalize with people—that the cost of these type of jobs seem so expensive because they are very labor intensive. The amount of labor you need for these jobs is a lot.

They're gonna save money down the road and it's trying to sell that point to them too is, you know, yeah—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Cost and price are different and people don't always see that.

It is—there is a price of our services and then there is a cost of choosing not to do it. And there is all sorts of things—opportunity costs, all sorts of boring financial things that you can talk about. But the difference between yes, our service might feel like it is pricey, but the cost of not doing it is going to build up over time in the following ways. And sometimes you just have to come up with that story.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
But any other services that you guys just love to offer?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
I love when we do our—we have a luxury concierge service that we do.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, tell me about—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
A lot. We have a couple clients who live out of the States that live in the UK—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Okay.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces :
They live in beautiful homes that we treat like a boutique hotel.

So whenever they—we—we—and particularly one of them, we have set up the whole house from the time that it was built and that was really fun.

They were like, “This is everything.” They had interior designers and the interior designers bought them plates and some silverware, but they had like furniture—they had no coffee maker. We were like, so when they come into town, they're going to have to run out and go buy all this.

We offer the service to provide all of that in your kitchen, your bedrooms. So we—they hired us and we love that. I love that part of our business too. Just when you walk in their house and everything is prepared for them. It's a wonderful feeling. They can come in with ease. They don't have to worry about anything.

All their rooms are reset, their provisions are bought for them. So it's—we set up for their parties and—it's just a fun—it's fun. It's like light. It's not super hard work like you're doing all the time when you're unpacking. Yeah. And it's our baby.

I think we all treat it like it's our baby because we actually started it from the very beginning to make this house, this beautiful home into a boutique hotel.

And we tell this client, we're like, this is—we treat it like a boutique hotel, from the finest fragrance—home fragrance—and then we decorate when they come in town, like we add those little touches, like fresh flowers.

And that's the fate—our favorite place for all of our team members to work. Yeah. They love going to this residence because it just—it's just a wonderful feeling.

But we have background in hospitality and hotel and restaurant background. So that was one of the assets we brought to one of the services when we started Uncluttered Spaces. What are we really good at? It's that we're very good at the little details too.

And where we live, a lot of people have multiple homes all over the world. So we're really blessed of our location of our company. So we have people who we know don't live here permanently. So it's just—it’s their vacation homes for them.

So it's like a second home for a lot of New Yorkers. Tina and I have lived here our whole lives. We both have left and have come back, but back in the day in the nineties, a lot of New Yorkers lived here a lot and it was their second home.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And then it went away. They went away, and now they’re coming back. The trend is coming back — to go live in your country home. So, yeah.

But we’re fortunate enough that it’s not just celebrities. We have that kind of percentage of people who live in our area. So that’s a plus — and that’s why we’re able to offer that kind of luxury, high-end concierge service.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
A really good point: some services are very dependent on where you live, right? We have people in all geographies — people across the United States. Every once in a while, someone in Europe will say, “This is very American-centric.”

And I’m like, here’s what you need to understand: America isn’t the same from one city to the next. The difference between Philadelphia and York, Pennsylvania is wide, right? You have to look at your own geography and look at what your market can handle.

But if your market can handle it — and I would argue that a lot of markets can handle a lot of things —

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
If your market has a vacation area, that’s your luxe concierge area that you should be marketing to — whether it’s a lake, a beach, whatever, a mountain.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
A lot of places have second homes. I live in Minnesota — almost everyone, except for the family I married into, has a cabin. I’m not upset about that at all. It’s totally fine.

No, but you have to think about it: “Hey, I live in an area where a lot of people do have these cabins.” And a cabin really is often just a cabin, but it still is a second place. Sometimes people need help in their main home, or they go away to the cabin for the whole summer, whatever.

You just have to be really creative about the services you’re offering based on the area that you live in.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And Melissa, you’re seeing a generational wealth transition right now. These cabins are being passed down to this younger generation who has a different mindset — and they’re going to love having a professional organizer come in and set it up how they want it, like a boutique hotel.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Sure are.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
They drop their bag and enjoy the cabin that they inherit. You know what I mean?

So that’s another thing, too — transfer of wealth is happening to the younger generation all over our country. And that’s the generation who we want to normalize our service to, honestly. They get it. They get it.

And they’re also the generation where both of them are going to have to work. Both partners are going to have jobs, and they’re the ones who are going to say, “You know what, honey? I’m working. I want this done. I’m willing to pay for it.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That was actually part of that article I was talking about earlier. It’s an $84 trillion generational wealth transfer that is—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Happening.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
It’s not happening in my house, but it’s happening in other—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
It’s not happening in my house either. Me either.

We’re also— I’m so going to go off topic, because we haven’t even talked about senior move. Senior relocation — which is another branch of our tree that we service — is senior move management.

And we partnered with a community, and I recommend this for any professional organizer who likes doing this. Assisted living communities in our area — and most across the United States — are owned by one big company, and they manage them all. If you can get in with that company, that’s huge.

Nancy and I are affiliated with the ACTS Community, and they have a subdivision that they have a contract with called Live Now Relocation, based out of Chicago. Two women started this company a couple of years ago. They vet people in the service industry — movers, professional organizers, real estate agents.

They sell that service to these big communities, and then we’re a vendor on that list. And listen — reach out to them, anybody listening, because they’re trying to go national, and they’re amazing.

So we partnered with them, and that led us to a partnership with the ACTS community. Now we have this special division within our brand that does senior move management into assisted living, which is very different than over-55. Nancy and I learned this through trial and error of being in business.

We were marketing to over-55 communities for years and getting zero. Like — why are we not getting any over-55 clients?

Now the over-55 community is unfortunately edging into assisted living because they’re aging out. The “boobies” — baby boomers, call them the boobies — aging out into the final… It’s so sad to talk about it like this, but it literally is the final transition of their lives.

And these communities know it. So where we live, they’re gutting them and turning them into cruise ships. I’ve met Nancy and I’ve never seen anything like it. The amenities of these facilities are absolutely insane — so over the top. And it’s because they are controlling the wealth right now.

And I think these companies know, “Okay, we’ve got to make it better because they’re going to pay for it.” And that is like a trillion-dollar industry in itself — the assisted living industry.

And those are the clients that can afford our services and probably need us the most, because they have no help.

Yeah. So Nancy and I have made a little niche in that industry in the last 18 months. And we’ve had a lot of their children—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
—who are like, “We’re hiring them because I don’t have the time or the patience to work with you. It causes fights. It causes tension.” And older people want to keep all their stuff.

So we’ve gotten a lot of people who say, “My mom needs your help. I will be at the estimate. We’ll make it possible.” But they physically can’t do it, so they need us.

Whereas the over-55s are still physically active. And that was the lesson I learned: that’s why they weren’t hiring us — because they still have the “I can do it” attitude. And they are doing it. But when you get to 80, you’re not doing it.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And this retirement community I was talking about the other day — when I said “bougie retirement community,” I was not joking. When you say it’s like a cruise ship… cruise ships don’t have anything on this place. I was like, “I’ll move in.”

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
They’re on, aren’t they? Unbelievable shift in that industry. Unbelievable.

But you need so much money to move in. And they’re the ones controlling the wealth still. That was my “aha moment,” connecting the dots: “Wait a minute. Why are these places so bougie?” Because they’re the ones with the money right now.

It’s amazing — they’re taking rooms down to the foundation and rebuilding them.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Crazy. Sad.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
This is a totally different direction, but when you look at trends — and one of the things you have to do as a good business person is look at trends in life in general — one thing I’ve noticed, probably because I have kids that are college age, is dorm rooms.

When you look at what people are doing, they’re hiring professional organizers and interior designers for dorm rooms.

So when you think about that… that’s the aesthetic, or the expectation. Whether I like it or not is inconsequential. I do think it’s ludicrous, but—

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Me too. Me too.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
For my own children, they’re not going to do that.

But my point is the aesthetic or the expectation of people now is getting younger and younger. The Instagram aesthetic — Instagram does everything. And then you think that’s going to transfer throughout someone’s lifespan.

Dorm rooms are nicer now at college. First apartments are nicer. All of these things are nicer. And so the expectation of the upkeep that comes with that — someone like us can really help with that throughout someone’s entire life cycle.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Exactly right. And they want instant gratification. So we can bring in a team of eight people. They’ll say, “Here’s what I want it to look like. I made a Pinterest board. I want all these things in it. I want bins. I want the plastic, acrylic — everything.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
So what are some things that you think about — whether it’s your partnership — do you envision keeping this going for a while? Or are you just going to ride the train until it’s gone? Or do you have thoughts about what comes next for you?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We have thought about it. I think we’re here until we’re ready to retire. But we’re also growing our business with the hope — and we do tell some of our team members — like, this could be yours one day.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
For sure.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Nancy and I — one thing is, we never got into this to be millionaires. That was never our value.

We talk about core values. It wasn’t like, “How can we get rich quick?” It was like, “When we started this, how can I be home by three o’clock when my kid gets off the bus?” And, “How can I be home in the morning?” And, “How can I say no — I don’t want to work that day?”

That’s why we started Uncluttered Spaces: it gave us flexibility. In our schedule, we could say to a client, “Oh, we’re not available that day.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I can’t do that day.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And that was priceless. Nancy and I couldn’t put a value on it because that was what was important to us.

But as we’ve said, it has grown. The stakes are higher. Our kids are grown up and gone. And now it’s like… I work more now than I did when I got out of college.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, for sure.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
This is my first real job, honestly. I had my prior job for 12 years, by the way.

And we’re building this to offer jobs for other women. We want them to get paid. We want them to be economically sound and able to provide for themselves and their families.

We’re big about spreading the wealth within our business. And if that means one day one or two of them want to partner up and do it — great. There we go.

But we’re still… 55 is still young.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh heck yeah. I’m only five years behind you, so I’m still trucking for a while.

But you do have to have a plan, right? Because sometimes things happen. And also, just knowing that… My husband said something to me right at the beginning, when there were days I questioned, “What am I doing? Wait a minute — did I make a huge mistake?”

At that time, I was making less money than I did in my prior life. And he looked at me and said, “You can’t put a price on your happiness. You’re a happier person. You enjoy what you’re doing. You’re not coming home cranky.”

We had this long talk about it.

And what you said is so true: you didn’t do this to be millionaires. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. But there is a different value to a business — flexibility, life, being able to say, “Sorry, I can’t be there today,” or being there for your kid, whatever that looks like for you.

That, to me, is worth an incalculable amount of money.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And we genuinely love what we do. We love helping people.

And honestly, a lot of our team members — guess what all their degrees are in? Take a guess.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Psychology?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. Psychology. Psychology. Everyone would hire a psychology degree — Laina too.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Hands up, girl.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We’re all in it for the same reasons, whether we know it or not. We’re empaths. We like to help people. We get to do something different every day. You’re not doing the same thing week by week, day by day — it’s a new challenge every day.

And I’ll say it: I have ADD too, because we like—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
One hundred percent. I recorded a podcast yesterday and said, “Whether you have a TikTok diagnosis or an actual diagnosis, I think we’ve all pretty much got it.”

But someone I was talking to yesterday — a dear friend — she had one of those days a few days ago. She texted me and said, “I just realized… today is not great. I hate this job. I don’t like what I’m doing, but I get to go home at the end of the day, and then I’m done. I don’t have to be here every single day.”

And she said, “When I went to an office, every day was the terrible.”

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Terrible. Nancy and I never would work for our personalities.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And she said, “Today’s not great, but I’m done at the end of the day. I don’t have to go back tomorrow. It’s a finite period of time. I’m making good money doing it. And then I can move on to something more enjoyable.”

It really is that simple.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Exactly. And that’s part of why Nancy and I love it — the constant change.

And that’s also one of the reasons we don’t like maintenance. We feel like we didn’t do our job if we can’t let go of the client’s hand.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That’s funny.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
So we’re always like, “Oh, maintenance…”

If I have to maintain somebody, it means I may have failed at what I’m trying to do. Did I put systems in place for the family to follow properly?

But we do have some maintenance clients.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
That’s probably the only place where we differ — I do a lot of maintenance.

But I understand what you’re saying. And I also understand being able to say, “That’s not my jam — I’m going to send that out.”

We talked about referral partners: have people to refer to if someone loves maintenance and it’s not you.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yep. We have done that.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I love how you’ve phrased it. You might not love maintenance, but I love the concept you have about resets — resets once a year or whatever.

Those are seasons of life where you need a refresh.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yep. That’s what we do for a couple of clients.

That’s the kind of maintenance I love — but coming in once every two weeks? To me, now I’m a housekeeper. And there’s a fine line.

We could do a whole podcast about how we say, “No — we are not cleaners.” We all say that: we do not clean. Let me make that very clear right from day one: you’re not cleaners.

But there are gray areas in our industry, and you have to know what you like, what you don’t like, and define that for yourself uniquely.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Say yes at least once.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Oh, for sure. We did it all. We said yes to everything. That’s why we can confidently say now what we like and what we don’t like.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
And you might surprise yourself either way. You might think you’ll love something and hate it, or think you’ll hate it and love it.

Say yes one or two times, then set the boundary.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Absolutely.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Is there anything I haven’t covered that you would like to? Laina, did we miss anything?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah—

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
My new best friend.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We know it’s not for everybody. Some people like to work alone. But if you’re lucky enough to find someone you trust, the sky’s the limit.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I think it’s really sweet. When I think back to middle school — and a lot of people don’t enjoy middle school, I’m one of them — I love that you have this relationship that has lasted all this time, and you can share so much of your life.

I just think it’s awesome.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Thank you. We are very blessed. We realize it a lot.

People tell us we’re blessed to be friends for how long we’ve been friends, and to run a business together — a successful business together.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, I love it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
A lot of people admire it, and it’s nice to hear.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I’m so happy to have met you, and I’m so happy you spent time with us today. You’re going to be inspirational to so many people.

Go out and find someone — even if you don’t enter into a partnership like this — find your person.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yes.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Whether that is someone in organizing or not — find someone who gets it.

I always say I could tell my husband a hundred stories a day and he would kindly listen, but you need someone who just gets it without you explaining it.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Exactly. Even if you don’t have a friend or partner who wants to hear about organizing, you have the community you’ve created, Melissa — it’s there for that reason too.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Yeah, we want people to feel less alone.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
One of my biggest goals in the work I do is that I want people to have sustainable businesses.

We have people in our group who have been organizing for 20 years, and I always say “15 minutes or 15 years” — everything in between. I want people to have sustainable businesses.

And I think that only happens when you have community. Even if you work by yourself — like I do —

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
You do. And you’ve built a big one. And I think that’s what has helped you. I don’t think you work alone at all. I would not describe you as working alone, honestly.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I work alone physically.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah. But you might need that to recharge.

Are you the type of person that has to go home after a chaotic day at work?

We make our team take a break for lunch every job, every day, for 30 minutes. We all pack a lunch — it’s one of our policies. We’re like, “You have to pack lunch if you want to work.”

We sit and we talk — usually not about work. It’s like a recharge.

The other day at lunch we were talking: are you the type of person that has to go home and be in a quiet space and recharge your social battery? And all of us are like that.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
You all are.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Every single one of us. Our job is so much problem-solving and multitasking.

Like you said, we have to be ten steps ahead of our client: what’s going to happen next, how they’re going to behave, how we can change behavior and still run the job and meet our finish line.

Our goal is to wrap up the project. And we’re exhausted — not just physically, but mentally.

And maybe it’s because our brains are wired the same way. That’s why we work well together as a collective, but we also need to be alone and have that space.

There are times where we’re done with clients, but we’re not really done. We’re writing invoices, scheduling, all of that.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Done.

Being honest about that — I’ve found for a long time in my life, I don’t think I realized that about myself.

You feel pressured to be different. But being honest about needing space and time is important.

People were like, “Does anybody want a roommate for the summit?” No. Absolutely not. I love all of these people dearly, but no — I have to have a room by myself.

Or my husband has something going on tonight and I’m like, “Cool, I’m just going to stay home.” And that is great.

Be honest about how you recharge. And if you’re the opposite of me, go forth — enjoy.

Just be true to yourself. Because especially with entrepreneurship, if you don’t have those recharge moments, you need that.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yes.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Aw, it’s so nice to know you guys. It’s so nice to chat with you. You guys are great.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We could chat all day.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I bet it’s really fun to work with you guys.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Thanks. Yeah, it’s fun. We do have a good time. We have some good laughs. We work hard, play hard. Exactly.

That’s why Nancy and I went to the summit two years ago — just the two of us — and we set goals every year. We start in January and talk about them throughout the year. Most times we meet them.

One of our goals in 2020 was: one year, we’re going to come back to the summit and we’re going to have a team — because we didn’t have teams yet — and we’re going to pay for all of them to come and be part of it.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh!

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And here we are two years later — we brought our team, paid for it all, had them be part of it.

But it was also great because Nancy and I want to be transparent in our business. We want them to know everything that we know. They hear things differently than us. We have nothing to hide from our team — that’s why we’re a team.

They learned so much — unbelievable what they learned. And the takeaway is transparency.

That’s why we say, “One day this could be yours.” We tell them: “You guys can have this — you better know what’s going on. It’s not just coming in and doing a ‘soft’ job. It’s so much more.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I have more and more people contacting me — some in my group and some not — saying, “I really want to sell my business. Tell me how.”

And at some point, with generational wealth transfer, there’s also going to be generational business transfer. You might not want to do this anymore.

You’d like to have something from what you’ve built, but you have to cultivate that. I have one person right now who has no clue who she’s going to sell it to — because she hasn’t cultivated anyone.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We’ve had someone offer to buy our business.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Oh, interesting.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
He only purchases service industry businesses. He owns window-washing companies — residential, home-focused.

And he said, “I think home organizing should be a service under the umbrella of my business portfolio.” It was really interesting.

We were like, “Yeah… but we’re not ready to sell.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Right.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Come back in ten.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I’m fine with that.

I really do think there’s something bigger that could happen in our industry. We’re all so individual — and that’s fine — but I think it’s starting to shift.

More people know about organizing. More people are becoming organizers. But it’s still going to take a shift for people to see it as a service — like housecleaning — that they’re willing to pay for.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I think it’s the best self-care. Don’t get your nails done, eyelashes and eyebrows — get a professional organizer to come in.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I need all those other things too.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
I know, but they don’t realize how valuable this is. Taste it and test it — you’ll be hooked.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
A hundred percent.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Or just pause those things. Save your money.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
My favorite thing — and again, this is just us chatting, not for the podcast — is when someone says, “Wow, this service is really expensive.”

And I’m like… all the things in your house that you have purchased are actually the expensive things. You’ve spent twenty times what you’d spend with me — just in your kitchen.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yes. Think about compulsive shoppers — “I have three pairs of these because I couldn’t find the other pair.” Then you find them and it’s like, “Oh my God, think about how much money I spent.”

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
So much money.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
And that’s a whole other conversation — invoicing.

When our invoices started getting bigger because projects got bigger, we’d be like, “Oh God, let’s prepare ourselves if they say something.”

And then we got to the point where we were like, “Yeah. No. This is what it is.” I have no problem giving it to the client. We’re worth every penny.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
As you are.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Yeah.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
Can you tell everyone — if they want to learn more about you, get in touch, or learn more about what you do — where can we find you on the great wide interwebs?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
You can find us at unclutteredspaces.com, and on Instagram and Facebook. For our socials, there’s an underscore, but for our website it’s www.unclutteredspaces.com.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
All right. I will link everything in the show notes. If you’ve never seen show notes, they’re right underneath the podcast — you can click through all of these things.

And are you coming — no pressure — are you coming to the summit next year? Will I see you next year?

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We’re talking about it. We haven’t decided yet, but we’re talking about it.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I hope to see you at another point.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
We will. Yes.

Melissa Klug | Pro Organizer Studio:
I’ll see you on the internet.

Tina and Nancy | Uncluttered Spaces:
Okay. Exactly.