This is the time of year when many people are making resolutions or setting goals for the new year, whether it has to do with getting organized, starting or growing a business, or some other area of life. In this month’s Professional Organizers Blog Carnival, you’ll find lots of great advice for making and achieving your goals.
Although December is the busiest month in the retail industry, as a professional organizer, you may find that business is slow at this time of year, as clients are busy with holiday shopping, parties, and preparations. Why not take advantage of this downtime to review your activities and achievements over the past year?
As a professional organizer, you probably spent a fair bit of time figuring out how much to charge for your services, whether to bill by the hour or the project, and whether or not to offer free consultations. An equally important decision is whether to bill for the time you spend travelling to your clients’ location and any expenses you occur doing so.
It’s amazing how many different forms you need in order to operate a professional organizing business! Some are just for your own use, such as client information sheets, assessment forms, and checklists. Others, such as invoices and letters of agreement, communicate important information to your clients.
If you have a blog or a website, you probably put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into writing your content, or paid a professional copywriter to do it for you. Either way, when you’ve made the effort to publish something that’s uniquely yours, it can be beyond frustrating to discover that someone has adopted it as their own.
During Improve Management Skills Month, I’ve touched on a few of the essential skills for business success, including written communication, social networking, and public speaking. As March draws to a close, I’m going to cover one more skill that is often overlooked by busy entrepreneurs, and that is the ability to switch off and relax.
As a business owner and manager, I’m sure that not a day goes by where you don’t have to write an email, a blog post, a proposal, or some other type of business document. Since everything you write is a reflection of you and your business, you need to make sure that your vocabulary and writing style are suited to your reader and that your spelling and grammar are flawless.
Since becoming involved with the industry, I’ve seen many people become successful organizing consultants, but sadly, I’ve seen many others who started an organizing business only to shut it down after a few years, or even a few months. Sometimes there’s an unforeseen change in health or family situation, but often it’s because they lacked the skills required to effectively manage a business.
I’ve blogged previously about the benefits of creating information products, whether they’re related to organizing or to one of your other interests, but even if you’ve developed a product, unless you have a very popular website, you may have found that you’re not bringing in nearly as much income as you’d hoped. Why not increase your earning potential by hiring a sales force?
I know how important it is for professional organizers and other service-based small business owners to generate earnings over and above their professional fees, so when I learned that my client Judi Suraci of Organized Homes had become a consultant for Tomboy Tools, I invited her to share some information about the company.
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