Hey Tory; I'll have to go check out the thread. I AM an expert you know, LOL!
I actually got started when I was at Mary Leggewie's. The amount of disorder in that house... she had her finger in every pie in town + ran a couple of business + homeschooled. Organizing her house wasn't a top priority.
She'd let my family come up to the mountains and stay for free, so I began shoveling out, I mean, cleaning her house while we visited
It was win-win. Our styles were very different and I learned to work with her to accomplish my goals. Then I realized that I could do that for other people.
Martha, my customers generally come to me word-of-mouth. For my first professional job, I hijacked a friend's Facebook thread! Her friend was complaining about all their junk, etc., so I said I'd come down and help. I sent the gal a private message with my fee ($25/hour) and she accepted. Then I found out she lived nearly three hours from me!!! Oh my goodness.
I took the challenge and went down. We spent about 5 hours literally shoveling out her office, which she'd been using as a personal storage space. Of course I took lots of pictures. She ended up giving me twice my fee, four bottles of very nice wine we found in the debris, and an entire Hefty bag of brand-new purses. She also gave me a little lecture about running my business (she is a tax accountant), so I got a LOT out of that day.
I gave the purses to a girlfriend of mine who runs a Christian women's fellowship. She used them as raffle prizes and gave one of the purses to a dear friend of both of ours who had cancer (she later passed away). Hubby and I cracked open one of the bottles of wine that night and toasted my new career!
I'm not working a lot... I've got a few jobs that are repeat customers. We try to do only 2 hours at a time (makes it affordable for most people), and focus on one area at a time. Instead of saying, "We're going to clean out the garage", we say, "We're going to make room for all the gardening supplies." I've done master bedroom closets, hall closets, pantries, bedrooms, offices... spaces rather than whole areas. In an office we might work on disposing of unnecessary paperwork and save re-doing the actual files for another time. Many times people just need a kick-start to get going. They hire me for one project, see how it works, and realize they can do the rest on their own. Sometimes not, and I get a repeat customer, LOL!
The jobs that are the worst are the "begetting" jobs. One thing begets another, like the book in the bible. You take one item out of an area and then there's no place to put it because the customer's storage issues are so severe. Those are gold, baby, but only if they call you back. In the meantime you can end up like I did with one customer -- a dining room table full of stuff that the client isn't ready to let go of, but can't sit blocking the place where people eat! I don't like to leave a client with a bigger mess than when we started, but occasionally that happens. In that particular case she needed to clean out two shelves of her pantry for her son who was returning home to live after attending culinary school. He needed a place for a big marble baking slab and the rest of his tools. We accomplished that (as well as cleaned out the rest of her pantry + two additional drawers), but the depth of her disorder is pretty severe.
I have door panels on my car advertising my business, business cards, Facebook, eblasts through a service called Constant Contact, and word of mouth. Any time a women's group needs a speaker I volunteer to talk about decluttering.
The verse on our chore sheet here at home is Matthew 12:44 -- "Then it says, "I will return to the house I left." When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean, and put in order." I've raised my kids to do their work before they leave the house so that when they arrive home, tired and hungry, they don't have to do things like clean out a kitty box before they can rest. I'm still working on training my husband, but he's only 63 and needs a little more time
I tried placing a couple of ads on Craigslist, but am not getting much response. I tried fashioning the last ad as a "family helper" since I do a lot of what I would call "another pair of hands" work for clients. I'm not getting the types of calls I want from that ad, either. Lowering my rate to $15/hour hasn't made a difference at all. The type of clients who use me can afford $25, which is a good thing. Fortunately I live in an affluent neighborhood.
It's time to make some new door panels for my car, so I may jazz up the graphic and see if I can get some more attention. I've seen people looking at my panels as I drive; some even follow me into parking lots to get my card (of course I keep business cards in my glove box). They're not making that call to get me out there, though, so that's my new priority.
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