We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melanie Seaver a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Melanie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

I am honored to be a business owner. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve done and also one of the most rewarding. Occasionally, though, sometimes I do wonder how life might be less stressful if I had a regular 9-5 job. I have a small team of organizers who do a fantastic job on site with our clients. We are a well-oiled machine in most cases. The stress for me is making sure we have enough clients on the calendar to keep our team busy! It’s a big responsibility to attract the right clients who are looking for the services we provide. To be honest, sales and marketing are not my favorite parts of the job! I have to wear a lot of hats and keep a lot of plates spinning at once. But if the sales aren’t coming through, there are no plates to spin! In our industry, we have lots of peaks and valleys. I can be sure that spring and fall will be busy seasons and Christmas will be slow. But the other times of the year? Your guess is as good as mine. This past winter, for example, was astonishing quiet while last Jan/Feb, were our busiest months ever. Riding the roller coaster as a business owner is part of the job description. While sometimes I crave the predictability of a “regular job,” I love the flexibility and freedom I get from being a business owner. As long as I can keep those plates spinning and the sales coming in, I also get to enjoy days off to be with family and friends almost whenever I want to!

Melanie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I have a weird love of organization! I am a true enneagram 1 who is always looking for ways to improve something or make it more efficient. And at some point in my adult life, I realized that not everyone functions the way I do. Big surprise, I know! Before starting my business, I spent 14 years as a stay-at-home mom. Even though I love being a business owner, being home with my four kids was the best job ever. If you have kids, you know how quickly they grow and change which means the function of your home also changes. I found myself constantly organizing, re-organizing, decluttering and repurposing different parts of our home to fit the needs of our family. I really enjoyed doing that and it almost felt like a fun hobby that was relaxing to me. About a year before starting my company, I read Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up and really put it into action in my own home. I spent about three months going through all of our clothes, books, paperwork and other miscellaneous items. I got rid of SO MUCH STUFF! It felt so freeing. I started seeing how “less is more.” The more stuff we have, the more time it takes to manage it, clean it, organize it, etc. And all of that takes away time from being with our family or doing other things we love. I was hooked! I was on board with trying to keep our home tidy and free from clutter. I don’t consider myself a minimalist, but I am definitely thoughtful of how much we bring into our home.

After the Marie Kondo project, we were approached by our real estate agent asking if we would be interested in showing our house to his client. He knew that we were somewhat interested in moving to another neighborhood at some point and his buyer was on the hunt in our current neighborhood. We said, “sure, why not?!” And because I had just spent so much time downsizing, getting our house “show ready” took no effort at all. After one showing, we had a great offer on the table and sold our house!

Around that same time, I started learning about the professional organizing industry. This was back in 2017 before The Home Edit made it popular. I couldn’t believe that I could make money doing something that I love and that just comes so naturally to me. I started reading books, listening to podcasts and decided that I wanted to become a professional organizer one day. At the time, my youngest child (now 12) was still in preschool. I had very little extra time, but wanted to test the waters to see if I would really enjoy organizing for clients. It started with a simple Facebook post asking if anyone would be interested in me coming to organize for them. I had no business plan, website, name, or a clue about what I was doing! But I immediately had some interested clients. After working with a few, I realized that yes, I would enjoy this line of work. I loved coming up with solutions for them and taking some of the burdens away.

In 2021, I started to grow my team. I realized that I could accomplish so much more if I had help! Instead of taking weeks to finish a project, we can knock out a few spaces in a day or two. I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way and I continue to learn and grow as a business owner. Although I still love to organize, my biggest accomplishment is that I have a team of wonderful organizers whom I can send out into the field to service our clients and I don’t even have to be there! They represent our company so well and that gives me the time and margin to work on the back-end operations of the business.

We are so thankful for all our clients who have trusted us to help them meet their organizational goals in their homes. Our heart is to serve and to create calming spaces in our clients’ homes to be a respite in this crazy world.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Something that I am still trying to learn is that done is better than perfect. A lot of times I can be the bottle neck in my business because what I’m working on isn’t quite right. It’s not ready to reveal. I don’t have it all figured out. Instead of just taking the next step, I overthink things too long and before you know it, I’ve moved on to something else and the original project never gets launched.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

A lot of times, our clients begin to feel more like friends. We learn about their lives as we work our way through their homes. We make note of weddings coming up, new babies on the way, pending moves, home renovations and job changes. I try to make mental notes of those things so that I can check in periodically. With the recent Nashville ice storm, a few clients came to mind knowing that their neighborhoods were hit pretty hard. I made a point to send them a text to make sure they were OK. It’s more about maintaining a relationship than continuously seeking new business. When clients know that we care, they are more likely to keep us top of mind when a new organizing need arises.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nashvillehomeorganizers.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nashville.home.organizers/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nashvillehomeorganizers/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-seaver-0a16b81b6/

Image Credits

Jessica McIntosh Photography