Organizing Closets Leads to Organizer Education

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What do I want and what will make me more fulfilled? That is the question that led today's featured story to make a big life change. Transitioning out of a successful corporate career and also making a big change to the side hustle she'd started a few years earlier. What began as a professional organizing project long before Marie Kondo was a household name, turned into an educational effort to teach other people how to enter the business. This is Sodasville School.

I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. And how about you? What do you want and what will make you more fulfilled? Always a good question to ask no matter where you are in life. I often ask myself basically the same kind of thing.

I talked recently about doing the five goals about how I was writing down, these are the five goals that I want to work on. And I want to work on these five goals to the exclusion of everything else. But it's difficult because there are more than five things I want to do. So that's why I gotta think, okay, what do I want? What will make me more fulfilled?

Is it trying to do some of those smaller things while working toward the bigger ones? Or is it saying, you know what? I really need to go all in with these bigger goals. So that's one of the approaches I've been taking, but there are lots of different ways to consider these questions. And through all these different stories that I share with you, I hope to shine a spotlight on lots of different examples.

All right, this one is called Organizing Closets leads to organizer education. The story is coming up in just 30 seconds. Stay tuned. [Music]

Long before the Konmari method of organizing was popular, Melissa Chilikol was using her own method for organizing homes on the side for family and friends. After reading the $100 startup, Melissa saw that she could turn it into a side hustle and make money from it.

So she made a website through Wix and set up an LLC with LegalZoom. From there, she started Let's Get You Organized. At the time, Melissa was working long hours for a Forbes 100 company and only had time for one or two clients on the weekends. Charging as little as $20 an hour, she enjoyed the process of helping others declutter and purge of things that no longer serve them. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was rewarding to support people in this way.

She knew what it was like to grow up in a home of clutter and wanted to create space and freedom for others. As the years went by, Melissa found her clientele expand. She was serving busy moms, divorcees, and shopaholics. While she loved serving those clients and supporting them directly, she was also becoming emotionally and physically drained. She would spend an average of four hours at each home talking through which items to let go of and also use a lot of energy lifting and moving heavy items.

Meanwhile, she was feeling the burnout from working long hours at that day job. While she was making a good salary, Melissa felt the need to reorganize her own life. She began to evaluate what she liked about both her job and her side hustle, taking note of how she could combine skills from both to create something that was truly her own. From there, she began to declutter her own business and organize it into a full-time endeavor. She got creative and developed a four-week professional organizer mentorship program for women wanting to get into the decluttering world.

After all, she herself had learned the value in creating something that earns extra income while also making a difference for others. So she knew that there was value in teaching her skills to other women. Melissa utilized her seven years of experience to teach what being a professional organizer is really like so students can determine if the business is for them or not. Some of the highlights of the program include creating an impactful company name, how to find clients, price your services, and more. When Melissa created that program, there weren't a lot of courses out there like hers, and the one she did find came at a high price tag.

She made hers accessible and charged only $197. She thought this was a good price point for adding value to the course while also making it available to more people. She then made an even lower priced virtual clutter coaching course for people who want to take a DIY approach to organizing their own homes. The course offers instructional videos and worksheets on what to keep, toss, or donate when decluttering your home. Finally, she contracted with a team of women to support high-end clients who were looking for in-home professional organizing.

That service cost $300 for a four-hour in-home session, and Melissa takes a 17% cut from each of her team's clients. Making this change from being the organizer herself to being the mentor created new sources of income for Melissa. It also raised her profit margin. In 2018, she profited $15,000 from the change and is on track to doubling that number in 2019. Her advice to anyone in a place of change is to ask yourself, what do I want and what will make me more fulfilled?

From there, write down what comes up for you and see where you can make changes to align with your answers. Melissa enjoyed organizing homes, and after doing it for several years, discovered that she likes empowering others more than doing the physical work herself. And through that transition, she was able to quit her day job and launch her own business using her strengths in consulting and organizing. In the future, she hopes to expand her let's get organized mentorship program to empower even more women to become professional organizers and to learn the value of being compensated from running their own side hustle or business. [Music]

All right, so business-wise, it's always interesting how people decide on their pricing.

And often in situations, you have really high-end courses and you have really low-price things. And there can be some success in essentially targeting the middle. Or in effect, saying, okay, it's not gonna be super high-priced, but I'm also not going to give it away either, so the 197 price point is interesting here. I kind of think it might need to be a little bit higher, like 297 or 397, something like that. But those are the kind of things that you can play with and experiment as you go along.

Now, Melissa is doing a lot of other consulting in addition to what we talked about here in the episode. So this isn't her sole source of income, but she has made a transition to being a full-time employee, doing this on the side, to now doing this side hustle and a couple of other things as well. And then, of course, asking yourself that question, what do you want, how will it make you more fulfilled? It's always a good thing to ask and to answer of yourself. So maybe that should be your role and that should be your little assignment for today.

And it's not a difficult task, it's more just something that requires you to step back and think. So you can do that on your lunch break, you can do that while you're commuting, maybe right after you listen to this. You can do it while you're at the gym. Just think about something that you want that you don't have right now or some change you want to make, and then ask yourself, how can I make even a small choice, even a small change, a small decision to get me closer to that reality that I have just envisioned? Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Today's show notes, including links to Melissa, anything else I mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/958. Episode 958, we'll be back tomorrow. Much more is coming up, be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.