Setting a vision for your organizing business

29 September 2021

When I started Peace of Mind Organizing in 2005, I sat down and tried to picture what my business might look like down the road. I took out pen and paper and had brainstorming sessions with myself. I tried to envision myself in various client situations and what that might feel like. I thought about how it would feel to help someone get organized and build a bank account doing so.

Did my vision come true? To be honest, I don’t know, because I didn’t hang on to those early sheets. But I do know this: Having a vision for what success looked like was a compass that helped me navigate the decisions I made about marketing my business, setting policies and boundaries and so much more.

If you’re considering starting an organizing business (or perhaps you’ve started one in the past couple of years), I urge you to sit down during a quiet moment and think about what you would like your business to look like.

You might ask yourself questions like these:

What kind of people would I like to work with?
What kind of organizing projects seem especially appealing?
Am I ready, willing and able to put in the effort to build my business, which may mean working a lot of hours for no pay, especially at the beginning? (If this one seems very unappealing, you might consider becoming an employee, rather than a business owner.)
What do I love most about organizing?

Once you’ve written those thoughts down, the next step would be to think about how you will find the people you’d like to work with (and how they’ll find you) and how you might market those appealing projects. You might brainstorm the systems you could establish to make your business run smoothly or think about where you can learn about that stuff. (My advice is to join the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and your local chapter so you can learn from fellow organizers.)

You might take another step back and think about how things will look one year from now and then five years from now. This might help you steer your business. I encourage you to file away those sheets (or take a picture of them) so that you can look back ten years from now and see how your vision panned out!

I know that I didn’t expect to do team organizing when I started out. I never dreamed I’d have employees. I also expected to get more clients from word of mouth than from my website (the opposite has proven to be true). Having a vision for my business while keeping an open mind to other possibilities has been successful for me. I urge you to try it too.

I’m just about to start a new mailing list for new and prospective organizers. Keep your eye out on the blog and website for a sign up. Or, if you’d like, feel free to email me at janine@peaceofmindorganizing.com and I’ll personally add you to the list once the sign up is live.

Photo by Virgil Cayasa on Unsplash

Tagged with: becoming a po, napo