229 | The 7 Things I've Learned (How To Summit MainStage Presentation Part 1)

BusinessPodcastMarketing

Sep 30

Written By Melissa Klug

I’m sharing the first three of seven lessons I’ve learned while coaching organizers, including choosing the right business structure, overcoming perfectionism, and the importance of setting a solid digital foundation.

This one is better on video…here you go!

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

LINKS FOR LISTENERS

Connect with Melissa and Pro Organizer Studio: CLICK HERE
If you are interested in our Inspired Organizer® program, you can find us at www.inspiredorganizer.com
We have a whole library of podcasts here, our YouTube channel, and you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pro Organizer Studio.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Melissa:
Hey, pro organizers. It’s Melissa, and I feel like you should probably be a little bit scared because I have returned from hiatus and this is my second podcast of the week… which is shocking.

But I did promise that I was going to be more regular because I had a lot of people last week— they were like, “Hey, we missed the podcast.”

And I know it’s been a while. I’ve had a lot going on, but I’m back. I’m here. Second podcast of the week. The first podcast of the week was my bestie, Cabri, and I talking about what we got out of the How To Summit. We gave a little bit of an overview, and now I’m gonna dive deep.

So I know that there were lots and lots of people that were in the audience, but I know there are lots and lots of people who couldn’t be there. And even if you were in the audience, maybe you missed a few things.

And so I am going to go through the mainstage presentation that I gave. Presentation or presentation? What do you say? Is that like caramel and caramel? It’s definitely not like tomato, tomato, because everybody knows it’s tomato.

But anyway—part of this presentation is about how I have undiagnosed ADHD, which anyone who’s listened to this podcast for any length of time is like, “We… we know.”

But I would like to walk you through my presentation—and look, I just said it differently from before. Anyway, getting back on track.

I’m going to walk you through, and I am also going to tell you where you can get the slides if you would like to follow along, because I did have slides. They were projected on a giant screen on the wall.

But I want you to be able to have these slides because I want you to be able to think about some of the things in this presentation, and I want it to be something that is a resource for you.

I am going to give you two options—both access the same way. So if you go to proorganizerstudio.com/links—L-I-N-K-S—I will put that in the show notes too, so you can just click and go. And if you haven’t checked out show notes, there’s always a lot of good stuff there. So lots of things in there, but today it’s going to be the link for the slides.

You can either look at the slides on Canva as I talk here on audio, or I will also load the video version of this podcast right there on the website and you can watch it while I flip through the slides—whichever works better for your brain—or you could just continue listening to this audio and just imagine what I have up on the slides.

Whatever floats your boat, ladies. I’m here for you.

But here are a couple of things. I am going to go through this whole presentation, and I might divide it into two parts—TBD—but I would also love if you have any questions. Please feel free to hit me up on email hello@proorganizerstudio.com or DM on Instagram @proorganizerstudio, and happy to talk some of this through with you if you are thinking about some of the things that I’m talking about or just have some questions or whatever.

I am here.

So I’m going to get started, and the title of my presentation is: The Seven Things That 233 Podcast Episodes Taught Me About Organizing.

Here’s what I didn’t say on the mainstage: if you are an avid podcast listener, you may, in fact, be hitting play on this podcast and you’re like, “Hey, this says 229 or whatever.”

Yeah, I had some podcasts that were not, like, numbered. We had some bonus episodes. So at the time of publishing this presentation, I had 233 podcast episodes. Now we’re up to 235 after I published this one, which is exciting.

But I am really gonna do this now how I did it in the room so that you can feel like you were there. And if you would like to play along and watch the slides, roll by proorganizerstudio.com/links.

Slide Moment: “Even the Airline Wants This to Be a Good Presentation”

Even the airline wants this to be a good presentation. You can see on the screen, I show my confirmation for my flight to Dallas on the Sunday before the Summit started, and my confirmation number was BRINGIT.

And I was like… boy, I know those confirmation numbers are absolutely, just completely random, but man, I feel like that one was made for me.

“Bring it” was my—was that confirmation, and it made me really happy. Even Southwest Airlines wanted this to be a good presentation.

What Everyone at the Summit Has in Common

So the next thing is: I did start with talking about one thing that everyone in the room has in common, because there are probably going to be parts of this presentation that I give you that you’re like, “Ooh, Melissa, I’m not sure that I agree with that,” and that is totally fine.

I actually think that we should have more positive, constructive disagreement and talk through some of the things that I believe in and that you believe in. But I did start out this presentation by saying that we have one thing that everyone in this room has in common, and it was a post from our Inspired Organizer group where someone said, “Can we share outfit ideas? Struggling here.”

Same, girl.

So my response was: there is nothing that stresses me out more than what to wear to the Summit. I said, “I didn’t spend this much time on my wedding dress.” I’m barely joking. That is true.

Everyone at the Summit just looks so nice. I saw so many super cute outfits. I saw so many people that were absolutely just slaying it with their fashion. And to those people, I say: kudos. Absolutely amazing.

Personally, the day I gave this presentation, I wore a pink suit jacket and white pants. And if you know me at all—if you’ve seen me in person—I basically wear black all the time.

So I do laugh with Brandi and Ryan about that—that the only time of the year that I ever wear color is to the How To Summit.

But anyway, it was fun to get dressed up in something new.

Organizing Changed My Personal and Professional Life Forever

If you’re following along, the next slide: Organizing changed my personal and professional life forever.

I have a picture up of my trip to Japan with Marie Kondo and a lot of other organizers, which was absolutely just one of the most amazing experiences that I’ve ever had.

I did a podcast about it. You can go back and listen to it. It was about a year ago. But organizing changed my whole life, truly.

And if you haven’t heard my story, the very quick version of it is: I was an extremely messy person my entire life. And I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I followed it faithfully.

We said goodbye to about 60% of the things that we owned. And I loved the process so much, and it was so great, and I felt so good about my house and myself and my life and my family that I was like, “Oh, I want other people to feel this way.”

And so since then, I started my organizing business, Home by Eleven. I grew it to six figures in my first year, which I’m incredibly proud of as a solo organizer.

And then I realized that my real passion was teaching women how to start their own businesses because I saw so many people that were struggling, and I had not only been able to build something that I was really proud of, but I had a business background.

I had worked at Fortune 500 companies my whole career, and I was like, “I really think I can help people.”

And that has been just the biggest honor of my life. I have had a lot of years in the workforce, and there’s nothing that has made me happier than the last few years—being able to help women (and a couple of men) really change their life and make their organizing business dreams come true.

So organizing is incredibly important to me, and it’s an important part of what I do—just to make sure that you understand that I have a passion for teaching people how to build businesses.

What’s Behind the “233 Podcast Episodes”

So I say these are the seven things that 233 podcast episodes taught me about organizing, but that’s not really true.

What’s really true is that in those 233 podcast episodes, here is what else is behind it.

424,000 podcast downloads
Between Inspired Organizer and Organizing Essentials, I have coached 1,794 organizers on five continents
647 organizing client invoices as a solo organizer
66,177 miles driven to and from clients (including one speeding ticket in Iowa—thank you to the Iowa State Highway Patrol for that)

But the seven things that I’m going to talk about really come from all of those experiences and so many more things that I couldn’t even articulate.

The reason that I’m telling you this—and the reason I told the How To Summit audience this—is because I really think it’s important for you to know: if you’re asking someone for advice, if you’re looking for coaching, if you are trying to find someone to give you advice on your business, I want you to know what their credentials are, and I want you to know that they’re someone who has the ability and the skills to help you.

Because it’s really easy to be a coach now, and I want you to make sure that you have all the information about someone before you pay them to give you advice in your business.

You Are an Entrepreneur

I want women entrepreneurs to succeed. That is all that I want in my Pro Organizer Studio business.

And I want you to succeed at whatever your definition of success is, okay? You get to set the success parameters. And it can be anything from: “I just would really love to get out of the house a couple days a week,” or “I would like a weekend side hustle,” or “I want to grow my business enough,” or maybe it’s just fun money for a vacation.

Or maybe you, like me, are your family’s breadwinner and you have a very specific financial goal you have to reach.

You get to make the parameters of what you define as success. But I really want you to make money in your business. I want you to be able to reach financial goals that maybe you couldn’t have imagined before. But I want women to make money in their businesses.

On this slide, I say: “You’re an entrepreneur,” and there’s an asterisk, and it said: if one person pays you for organizing, congratulations, you’re an entrepreneur.

I think that there’s this idea that you’re not an entrepreneur unless you reach a certain amount of money, or you have to have a team, or you have to make it your full-time job.

I don’t care about any of that. You are an entrepreneur if you’re just even thinking about starting a business, okay?

I want you to refer to yourself that way. I want you to think of yourself that way because that is going to help you get past some of those confidence blocks. You are an entrepreneur.

1) You Get to Have the Business That You Choose

Okay, so let’s start getting into the seven things that I have learned.

First—the first one is: you get to have the business that you choose.

So maybe you say, “I really want a team. I want a big team and I don’t want to be in client houses.”

I, on the flip side, have chosen to be solo by choice for all the years of my business. That works for me. I totally recognize it doesn’t work for everyone.

You get to decide whether you want hourly pricing or packages. There are people who can go on both sides of that argument all day long. It doesn’t matter to me.

What I do want you to do is get paid for what you do. So whether it’s hourly or whether it’s packages, I just want to make sure that you’re getting paid.

You might want to work side-by-side with a client and really get into the decluttering, or you might say, “I’d rather not see the client ever.”

One of my favorite things that happened at the Summit is: I was at the hotel, I was talking to someone that I had just met. Her name is Tracy McCubbin and she was a wonderful presenter at the Summit.

Tracy said, “My favorite client is a dead client.”
So she just would prefer that she does some house cleanouts and that the client is not there to give an opinion.

So you can do that too. She also told me that I could use that phrase as long as I gave her credit. So here I am, Tracy. It’s all you. Made me laugh for days.

You might say, “Hey, I’m doing six-hour sessions max.” Personally, I’ve stayed in clients’ houses until after midnight because that’s what the job required. It really doesn’t matter.

There are some organizers I know that really want you to lock up your animals while you are organizing. That’s the thing.

On the flip side, I regularly have clients who drop their dogs at my house and we take care of them while they’re on vacation because we love dogs.

The picture—if you are not following along to the slides—it’s a picture of my client’s dog who decided that his most comfortable place was my head on my bed.

But you can decide that’s a boundary that you don’t want to cross, but for me it works. My client was thrilled.

And by the way, the client whose dog I watched—happily, because they had an emergency and they couldn’t find anyone to watch their dog—she paid me $13,189 last year.

I’m gonna do her a favor and keep her very cute dog at my house for a week. No problem.

It does not matter what other organizers do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just listened to me talk about a couple of things that I do and go, “She is insane. Why does she do that?” That’s totally fine.

I only care about you meeting the goals that you have set for your business. So the choices you make in your business about how you run things, how you structure things, how you do things—those are all your choices to make.

And the only measure of success for those choices is: are you meeting the goals that you’ve set for your business?

Now what I will tell you is: if you’re not meeting those goals, then you might have to adjust some of the things that you’re doing.

I will tell you that I regularly have people come to me and they say, “I really want to be an organizer.”

And I’ll go, “Okay, cool. Why?”

And they’ll say, “I really want a flexible schedule.”

Okay, great. It does offer you a flexible schedule—depending on what your definition of the word “flexible” is.

And so then these same people will say—and this is legitimately verbatim. I have heard this on many occasions: “I only want to work two days a week, but I need to make six figures.”

And I just say: we’re going to have to make some adjustments to those goals because that might not work. That might not align with reality versus your goals, okay?

You’re allowed to make every single decision in your business, but you also, as an entrepreneur, sometimes have to pivot and make some different decisions and adjust and maybe let go of some of your absolute non-negotiables.

Or maybe the non-negotiable is actually negotiable. Maybe you say, “Oh, I really thought this was the way to go. I really thought I would die on that hill.”

But in fact, I’ve determined I don’t even want to climb the hill.

So just remember: you get to make the choices in your business. And you getting to make the choices in your business also means that you do not have to look at other people’s businesses and say, “What are they doing? What are they doing?” and then change everything that’s happening in your business.

We’ll talk about that in a little bit too.

2) Perfectionism Is Ruining Your Business

Item number two that I have learned: Perfectionism is ruining your business.

So the graphic that I’m showing right now is a woman saying, “Hold on, let me overthink this.”

Organizers, in general, are really good at overthinking things. We like to analyze every single possible angle that something could possibly come from.

And what I see more than anything in the work that I do is that people who are seeking perfectionism sometimes never launch their business.

There was a woman that I coached very early in my time as a business coach, and she had a completed website for one year and she said, “I can’t press publish because it’s not perfect yet.”

This was a professionally done website. It had been done by a really good web designer. It was beautiful, but she had determined it wasn’t perfect. And therefore she had not clicked publish for one year.

And I just said to her: do you know how many families you could have helped in that one year?

The paralysis around not publishing your website because it is “not perfect” means there is revenue that you have missed out on as a business person. It means that there are lots of families that you would have been amazing to help in their houses that never got a chance to know you.

So overthinking and perfectionism is ruining organizing businesses.

Perfection is actually procrastination in disguise.

Perfectionism allows us to say, “Oh no, it’s not right yet. I can’t put it out there. Nope. It’s not right yet.”

If it’s not perfect and it can’t be out in the world, then you can’t fail. You can’t fail at something that hasn’t started.

I have a lot of people who say, “Oh, I’d really like to offer moving services.” By the way, if you’re not offering moving services—packing and unpacking—you’re missing out on thousands of dollars of revenue.

I hear people say to me, “Oh no, I can’t do that because I don’t know how to do it.”

How would you actually do it? You just do it. It’s really—it’s just like organizing something else. You’re just organizing things into a box with padding in between them.

What I see a lot is someone who’s like, “I need to learn the 75 steps in order to be able to feel good about that happening.”

And then they’re never able to really quite get that entire list down, and so they never do the thing. They never launch the thing. They never put their business out.

“I don’t have the perfect business name.”

Perfectionism is procrastination.

Questions to Ask When Perfectionism Strikes

How will you know that you have achieved the perfect fill-in-the-blank? What does the “perfect website” look like? What does the perfect business process look like?

Guess what? You don’t need a business process if you don’t have any clients. I just want you to go out and get some clients, and then you can figure out a lot about your business processes when you actually have clients to serve.

So who is going to tell you, “Yep, it’s finally perfect.”

There’s no line out there that says, “Okay, cool, you’re done.”

The line for perfection keeps moving. And if the line is always moving, you’re never going to reach it.

Who defines what perfect is? Is it you? Is it me? Is it someone arbitrary?

There is no one that defines what perfect is. This is a construction of your own brain. So stop saying it’s not perfect, because that word doesn’t even make sense. There’s no definition of that word for the businesses that we run that makes sense.

What is actually important to your clients or your potential clients?

It isn’t the perfect logo. I’m sure there are a lot of branding people that will not like what I’m about to say. But I am 99% sure if you asked most of my clients, almost none of them could tell you what the name of my organizing business is.

They could not tell you that my business name is Home by Eleven. They just know me. They know what I do.

So spending time cycling on the perfect business name, the perfect logo—all of that—what is actually important to your clients? It’s not that. I promise you, it isn’t.

One of the questions I want you to ask yourself when you’re struggling with some of those perfectionism moments is: is this a revenue-producing activity?

There was an organizer that I know that was very frustrated by the outcome of a piece of branded merchandise. It was something that she had put her company’s logo on and she didn’t like it.

And she was spending so much time worrying about how this merchandise looked with her logo on it.

And I just said: does anybody care about—do your clients care that the shirt isn’t the right color? They don’t. They just don’t.

So is this a revenue-producing activity that you are struggling with perfectionism on? I guarantee in most cases, it is not.

I do want you to concentrate on revenue-producing activities, and I do want your properties to be great, but don’t let them being perfect get in the way of getting them out there entirely.

MVP: Minimum Viable Product

This is a little bonus that I didn’t talk about in my presentation, but I had a discussion with someone today about it.

There’s a concept called MVP: minimum viable product. And in an organizing business, minimum viable product is pretty—it’s pretty low ceiling. There’s not a lot that we need in our business to actually get the business off the ground.

You can have an organizing business by just telling people, “Hey, I’m a professional organizer.” “Oh yeah, I would love to come to your closet.”

Think about minimum viable product the next time perfectionism strikes. And I guarantee that you can go, “Oh, this is fine.”

Is your website perfect? No. Can it be tweaked after you launch it? Absolutely. Do I want you to get that website out there so that you can start getting the tentacles of the internet finding you and crawling your website and introducing your website to people in your area that need organizing? Yes.

Hit publish on your website. You can tweak it after it’s published.

Stop letting perfectionism ruin your business.

3) Your Digital Foundation Is the Most Important Thing You Can Fix

The third thing: Setting or fixing your digital foundation is the most important thing you can do in your business.

Last year at the How To Summit, I talked about the key parts of your digital foundation. They included: a website with personality, a Google Business Profile, SEO, blogging, a lead magnet, and email marketing.

Now lots of people told me that they loved my presentation and that it had so many actionable items, and unfortunately my guess is that a lot of people left and maybe didn’t do that foundational work.

Which I understand. It’s overwhelming. There are so many things to do.

But these six things—website, SEO, blogging, lead magnet, and email marketing—notice nowhere on that list is social media.

And we’re going to talk about social media in a little bit.

But these are the keys that you need to be doing in your business. And if you are not, I need you to stop and evaluate what you have going on.

If you are following along on the screen, there is a series of hurdles on a running track. And I want you to think about all of those six things, and I want you to check it through the lens of a disorganized client.

Our clients are coming to us usually at a crisis moment, okay? I cannot count the number of times that I’ve gotten an email and the person sounds so desperate. And you know that they have hit my website in a crisis moment.

They’re frustrated with their spouse, they’re frustrated with their kids, they’re frustrated with all the clutter, they’re frustrated with the paper—all the things—and they’re like, “Forget it. I need help with this.”

Now, what you do not want them to do is land on your website and then there are 75 hoops for them to jump through.

I look at hundreds, if not thousands, of websites a year. And I can tell you, there are so many times that I see people who have a contact form that has 20 required questions, and that it makes it very hard to get in touch with them.

I want you to think about how you can make it as easy as humanly possible for a potential client to get in touch with you.

Please don’t think about your processes. Please don’t think about, “Oh my gosh, I need to get them into my CRM and blah blah blah.” Figure that out on the back end.

Make it easy for that client to contact you.

Get your phone number and your email hyperlinked on your contact page. Let them bypass a contact form altogether.

Give people options. You might want them to go ahead and hit your Calendly for scheduling a consult. Guess what? Some people don’t love that technology. Give them ways to get in touch with you that’s simple.

But please, do not make it difficult for that client to get in contact with you.

Ask yourself: if you think that your website may be a little too complex, I want you to find a friend who has a very chaotic life and be like, “Hey, go to my website and tell me how easy it is to figure out what you’re supposed to do.”

Let that person tell you, “Oh, that’s way too hard.”

Here’s another thing that I’m going to tell you on your contact page.

I see this all the time. People are like, “How’d you hear about us? Google, another client referral…”

But please don’t ask that question on your contact page. Ask them that when you get them to the consultation or at your first session.

“Hey, how’d you hear about me?”

It’s important information and I want you to know that, but please do not make it a barrier for potential clients to get in touch with you.

When someone is struggling to find clients and I ask them specifically whether they have done that foundation work—whether they have gone through and looked at their website and really made it shine with their personality and made it easy to navigate, if they are posting on Google Business every single day, if they’ve done their SEO, if they blog—all of those things—I ask them.

If you’re on my slides, you can see three different things, including Dr. Evil from Austin Powers saying, “How about no?” It’s Taylor Swift saying no.

A lot of people say, “No, I don’t know, I just… can you just tell me how to do my social media?” No, I can’t.

Because social media is not what’s going to get you those clients. Your website and all those other digital properties are.

So a lot of people will come to me and say, “I don’t have enough clients.” And when I say, “Have you done this, and this, and this?” they will say, “Nope. Haven’t done it.”

Those digital foundations are critical.

Nothing in our business is possible without clients. We cannot make our financial goals, our personal goals. We cannot keep the lights on without clients.

And the easiest way to get clients is a solid digital foundation.

There are lots of other things that I am going to also tell you how to do. If you are in my program, if I am coaching you, you are going to hear other things too.

I think networking is important. I think referrals are important. I think testimonials are important. But you need that digital foundation to start those clients coming through.

Wrap-Up and What’s Next

Okay, I’ve given you a lot.

I’m going to break this into two segments. You’re going to get them back to back, don’t worry. But I am going to stop here because I do want to talk about something that we have going on.

We talked about it briefly on the last podcast—Cabri and I are doing this together.

It’s called Boss October, and we are walking people through all of the education that we have.

And if you are interested, if your business needs a reset, if you need a reset, our goal is that we do this starting in October so that when 2026 comes around—January 1st—you are ready to go, hit the ground running.

We want you to have positive business impact starting October 1st.

If you are interested, please go to proorganizerstudio.com/links. If you hit the show notes, you will be able to find that as well, and I will be happy to send you more information about what we are doing.

So if you need that in your life, I would love to be your guide for Boss October.

And if you’d like to know what Boss October is, there is a podcast. I don’t know what number it is. I should know that, but I’ll put it in the show notes.

But a client of mine came up with this concept where she does all of the things that she’s been putting off in the month of October.

And so we’re going to take that concept and turn it on its head and make sure we fix our businesses going into 2026.

Recap: The First Three Things

You get to have the business that you choose.
Perfectionism is ruining your business.
Setting or fixing your digital foundation is the most important thing that you could do.

Those are the three things that I want you to think about, and then I’ll be back tomorrow with the rest.

Bye, organizers!