Closets, kitchen cabinets, garages, offices — they’re often subjected to cramming and jamming by their busy, multitasking owners.
The beginning of the year is the time when many overloaded owners of these spaces stop, rethink, regroup and redo.
Along with “Get in Shape” and “Quit Smoking,” “Get Organized” is one of the top five New Year’s resolutions people make. And though it might take awhile to slog through that to-do list, getting organized is certainly a job worth tackling.
Sometimes, however, a little help is in order. That’s where a professional organizer like Dana Korey can step in and offer solutions. Her company’s focus is residential and corporate spatial organization and staging, and Korey says her business is split 60-40, residential to corporate.
“There isn’t a space we haven’t touched,” she said.
With a background in advertising sales, Korey, 40, came into the organizing business sort of by accident. In 2001, some friends down the street told her they were selling their house and that a caravan of real estate agents would be parading through it the next day.
Korey knew the condition of the neighbors’ home well enough to be completely honest with them. “I just looked at them and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,'” she recalled.
She offered to help them stage the house and make it look like a model home. Korey wasn’t an organizer at the time, but working among graphic artists and photographers in advertising had fine-tuned her visual sense.
The next day the agents came through and one of them told Korey it looked so nice she should do it professionally.
“I never thought any of it was going to amount to anything,” Korey said. “It came out of nowhere.” That agent got Korey on the company’s preferred list of vendors.
Korey founded Away With Clutter in October 2001 and later brought on a business partner — Misha Kuechenhoff, who handles the operations side of the business, while Korey is in charge of sales, marketing and promotion.
The key to Away With Clutter’s success, Korey said, is its organizational “SWAT team” of about 30 subcontractors, which makes it possible for the company to complete jobs in 24 hours.
“We all want it yesterday,” Korey said. “I realized the best way to do this was to have a team of people come in and get it done at once.”
Kuechenhoff starts with a consultation with the client. Then the team comes out and pre-sorts everything into categories.
After the sorting is done, the lead organizer will walk the client through each category. At that point, the client will make a decision as to whether he or she wants to keep, discard or donate each item.
Then the team goes back in and organizes everything.
“They give you a system,” said Stacia Conway of Rancho Penasquitos, in northeast San Diego County.
Away With Clutter organized almost every room in Conway’s house more than a year ago. She liked that the team used various containers and drawers to give every item a home.
A total house makeover can cost between $4,000 and $6,000, according to Korey. She said most jobs run between $2,000 and $4,000, but charges have gone as high as $15,000, depending on how much stuff a customer has.
The company’s sales have doubled every year since it opened, and Korey expects revenue will hit $1 million this year.
The professional organizing industry has grown substantially over the past 20 years. According to the National Association of Professional Organizers, businesses that charge from $50 to $200 per hour have grown from 16 in 1985 to 1,000 in 1998, to more than 2,400 in 2004.
For more information on professional organizers and how to find one locally, contact the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers at (415) 281-5681 or go to www.napo-sfba.org.