Written by Gillian Shaw. Originally published in The Vancouver Sun.
The A-Z of Careers: C Is for Clutter Consultants (professional organizers)
Reporter Gillian Shaw helps you chart your course with The Vancouver Sun’s A-Z of careers, jobs and training. Today, we introduce you to the growing business service of helping people organize their physical spaces.
There’s the woman whose cluttered closet was home to her umbilical cord, lovingly wrapped in a box and saved by her mother at her birth.
There’s the vice-president arguing over how many old toothbrushes he should keep in his overflowing desk drawer.
Or the woman who found cleaning her household clutter so therapeutic that she continued the sweep through the rest of her life, casting off a deadbeat boyfriend in the process.
It’s all in a day’s work for clutter consultants who are on a fast-growing and relatively new career track, pushed into prime time by our time-strapped society and by television shows like TLC’s Clean Sweep.
“It’s a huge growth industry, the growth is amazing,” said Linda Chu, owner of her own professional organizing company, Out of Chaos, and vice-president of the B.C. chapter of Professional Organizers in Canada.
“Just last week alone I had five people call me from various self-employment programs saying, ‘I need to talk to you, this is a business I want to get into.'”
The U.S. National Association of Professional Organizers, which launched in the ’80s, has 1,700 members. Professional Organizers in Canada started in 1998 and today has more than 200 members, up from 100 a little over a year ago.
A B.C. chapter opened last September with 12 members and it has now grown to 24.
“And that’s just the people who are registered,” said Chu. “There are people who do this type of work but aren’t registered with a professional association.”
Chu was an office manager for 20 years with the Metropolitan Hotel and she has transferred her skills in managing people and processes to her new work.
It’s a concept that is catching on, as people are willing to pay someone to force them to deal with their clutter, just as fitness wannabes are willing to pay a personal trainer to keep them off the couch.
Clutter consultants here typically charge around $50 an hour, but Chu said in the U.S. and Toronto, where the service is even more entrenched, organizers can command up to $150 an hour, in a career that can combine teaching, speaking engagements, and workshops as well as work with individual clients.
Chu said clients are driven to save time and to save money. One client, a professor, had an office in such disarray that he has misplaced three Ph.D. assignments and Chu has already spent 14 hours on his desk alone.
“Basically what we as organizers do is we really give them a kick in the rear so to speak,” said Chu. “Often after we’ve worked with someone, they’ll say, ‘don’t go, if you’re not here, I don’t do it.'”
Professional clutter consultants are also free of the emotional baggage that stops their clients from cleaning house. Clients are often holding on to old items, from the boring – outdated receipts and ticket stubs, to the bizarre – like the umbilical cord.
“She got rid of it in the end, but you can see how serious it is,” said Chu. “It’s the same at work where people hold onto to a whole bunch of stuff – all the ‘shoulds,’ because these are your hopes and dreams.”
Elinor Warkentin was one of seven children growing up in a Mennonite family where organization was key, with four sisters sharing a room and spring and fall housekeeping bees regular events.
It’s a background that prepared her well for her business as a clutter consultant with her own company, Goodbye Clutter! Consulting and Organizing Services that she runs out of an extremely well-organized one-bedroom apartment she shares with her teacher husband.
Ostensibly clutter consultants help clean out closets and crackdown on chaos, both in homes and businesses.
But their work can be the catalyst for their clients to get rid of other garbage in their lives — from bad partnerships to family feuds and unfulfilling jobs.
“A lot of my clients are embarrassed and not prepared to have anybody see what they live like,” said Warkentin. “Sometimes there is a lot of shame involved.”
“It’s about assisting a person to let go of that stuff, coaching them to understand what’s attached to the clutter.
“One of my clients described me as being halfway between a housecleaner and a therapist.”
Judy Brown does most of her clutter consulting online. A mother of five who also provided a home to foster children, Brown took early retirement when her job as a justice of the peace disappeared with the closing of her local courthouse.
Brown’s varied background includes extensive training in communications and she used to be a librarian, a job that left her with excellent records management skills.
“I use all the skills I’ve learned in my life, through my family and through jobs I’ve had, to help others get organized,” said Brown, who lives in Yale but who works with clients as far afield as Holland and Portugal.
Brown has also taught an online course called conquering chaos and counts many successes among her clients.
“They’ve made great strides in getting rid of stuff and feeling more in control of things,” she said. “You can see the enthusiasm as they come back and tell you how things worked.”
Janis Nylund honed her organizational skills as an NHL wife who was often left on her own to move house when her hockey-playing husband Gary Nylund was transferred. The mother of triplets, Nylund started her business to create her own part-time work.
“I started my business in May 2000 and I was the lone ranger as far as anyone who belonged to Professional Organizers in Canada,” she said. “I knew there were a few other women doing it in the city.”
“I found I could find enough work just by posting my business cards and brochures and calls were flying in.”
“People were saying, ‘wow, will someone come in and do this?'”
If you feel that someone coming into the closet to help you declutter would be helpful, contact the team at Out Of Chaos today.
