We recently connected with Erin Mahoney and have shared our conversation below.

Erin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

When I started my professional organizing company, I thought I had to do it all, but I quickly learned that I am not Superwoman. Even a small organizing job can require four hands! Clearly, I needed to start recruiting for help. Because my business wasn’t stable enough to support a traditional payroll, I advertised for independent contractors on Facebook. Over time I assembled a team of reliable talent. Training my team was difficult, though. Early on I didn’t have the words to articulate my vision and my philosophies, nor was I able to effectively communicate the actual tasks of the job. Since organizing has always been an intuitive process for me, breaking down the steps to train my team took a lot of time and thought.
That’s the organizing side of Unscrambled, but the business side is a completely different learning curve. I knew how to organize, but my education was in psychology instead of business. I was introduced to a free business mentoring organization called Project SCORE. My mentor gave me both the confidence and the tools to grow my company. Today my business systems are in place and my operations are sustainable – yet, until recently, something was missing.
Being a business owner can be lonely. It was important to have other people help with the physical aspect of the job and to have professional resources, but I still felt alone and sometimes overwhelmed.
Many of the successful organizing businesses that I admire started as a partnership. I wanted a collaborator. I wanted someone who was emotionally invested in the business, who really understood the daily challenges, and who could balance out my weaknesses. After all, one person can only be good at so many things!
I am fortunate to have a contractor who has been with me from the early stages of the company. She has learned my system and is eager to be more involved in the business. In fact, she says she wants to help me “blow this thing up.” Game changer! As soon as I had another person who could share in both the stresses and the successes, any burden was suddenly more manageable.
My business is still my name and my face, but it’s bigger than me now – and that’s exciting!

Erin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Unscrambled By Erin, LLC is a professional organizing business with one core value: your environment has a profound impact on your wellbeing. I’ve always enjoyed organization, in fact I have a picture of myself at four years old arranging balls by color. After helping family and friends get organized, I realized I was good at it. Being an organizer requires more than having a tidy closet. I used my background in psychology to explore how people are affected by their living situations, and I learned how to tailor systems to the person instead of what I thought a pantry should look like. I love when a client’s face lights up when they see our work or they text me to tell me how it’s improved their life. Unscrambled cares more about how the organization will function than our after-pictures.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

By far our best source of new clients has been word of mouth. One happy customer’s post in a Facebook mom’s group led to at least half a dozen clients. Most of the people we work with are in the midst of some major life change, are busy parents, and are trying to improve their lives. Our clients are people who just need a little help getting organized, and when they share their experience with others, it’s the best marketing there is.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

If someone told me three years ago that I would own my own business, I would’ve said they were nuts. When I graduated from college I thought I was going to be a child therapist. I believed I was pursuing what I was passionate about, but I learned it’s possible to be passionate about more than one thing. I took a leap of faith and left my teaching job. I knew how to organize a pantry, but forming an LLC and accounting were totally foreign. I switched from researching Master’s programs to taking an organizing certification course and learning an entirely new industry. A huge shift in my career path was scary, but it’s been more rewarding than I thought possible. In the past year and a half I’ve grown as a person and as a business owner. My business is still new, and it’s only up from here.

Contact Info:

• Website: unscrambledbyerin.com
• Instagram: @unscrambled_byerin
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unscrambledbyerin
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-mahoney-001958180/

Image Credits
Katya Vilchyk