We were lucky to catch up with Jennifer Martin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, appreciate you joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

When I started Reset Your Nest, I knew that I had a passion for home organization and making phones functional and beautiful place to live that invited peace and calm. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like, I initially thought that my services would include staging homes in preparation for listing and simple home styling projects. Though I am not very tech savvy, I figured out how to set up the website on my own, a friend gifted me a photo shoot so that I could have some beautiful pictures taken of organization in my own home as examples of my work, I paid $7 to Fiverr to create a logo and my girlfriends helped come up with the name Reset Your Nest. Within a few weeks, I was up and running and announcing to the world that I was now a professional home organizer. I spent hundreds of hours reading every book I could get my hands on and devouring content on social media to see what other organizers across the country were doing and how I could create my own method that would be authentic to the type of business I wanted to build. I definitely bootstrapped it at the beginning as my ability to invest in start up costs was very limited, so I made it for it in sweat equity. As I became more clear about my offering than my brand, I knew I wanted Reset Your Nest to have a very aesthetic focus while still bringing systems and order to real homes and families. As I got my first few clients and started experimenting with different products, I quickly learned that I wanted to deliver a very high-end service in a very short amount of time. I wanted clients to feel like their house completely transformed within a few hours. I also quickly realize that doing it on my own was super challenging, and I was being stretched too thin, managing everything. After about nine months of organizing on my own, I started hiring others to join me so that we could complete jobs faster. I trained them in the method I had developed and by the next year.
At each stage of growth, I often felt like I was building the plane as I was flying it, but we pushed forward as we continued to grow. By my second year in business, I had trained a couple of women to be lead organizer, which meant that we could send more than one team out each day. At the end of the second year, we moved all inventory to an office building and purchased a van for delivering product to job sites. We continue to grow and experiment with ways that we could service more clients and also hire more women who wanted to make this their career. It has been a wild ride, figuring out how to build a business in a relatively unknown industry, that has been very rewarding and my team and I are grateful every day for what we get to do.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Jen and here’s a little bit about me. I have always loved organization and being organized has been my most identifiable trait throughout my life. When I babysat kids as a teenager, I would always organize the homes of the kids I was babysitting. When I was in college, my roommates tease me about my color-coded closet and my excessive list making. However, after having four children, my love for and need of organization and systems became even greater. I truly believe that when you have an organized home, stress is minimized, life feels easier, and home becomes a sanctuary. As a mom to young kids, I loved figuring out ways to manage a household in a way that would reduce stress and teach my children how to be involved with all that is required to keep things going. The systems I created in my home allowed my busy family to maintain a clean and organized home that was easy to maintain so we could spend time as a family doing the things that we love to do like hiking, snow skiing and bike riding. I always knew I wanted to do start a business once my children were in school full-time. I didn’t know exactly what it would be, but I knew I wanted to help people create homes that they loved. However, when my family found itself in financial hardship after my husband experienced multiple job losses, I decided to push my timeline forward a few years. What started as a passion project for me individually creating homes of common peace for others turned into it a different passionate project entirely. After hiring a team, my passion for employing women so they can also help support their families has brought so much purpose to Reset Your Nest. Reset Your Nest has become a brand that means a lot of different things. The systems we curate for clients are unique to each person and space. Our priority is to create spaces that are not just functional but also beautiful. Another differentiator of Reset Your Nest is that our large team is not only trained in the Reset Your Nest method, but every person has been with Reset Your Nest for many years and we can tackle the biggest projects in the fastest amount of time. We genuinely love our clients and love helping them knowing that we are creating spaces for them that help them spend more time doing the things that are the greatest importance in their lives. I think what I am the most proud of what has been accomplished by Reset Your Nest is the quality of work and the genuine care we consistently provide to our clients.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

A story of when I had to pivot in business is a summary of the journey I went through in 2022 and 2023. They were two years full of nothing but pivots. Big ones. Because Reset Your Nest had experienced rapid and overnight success, my desire to scale and share my success with others also grew. In January 2022 I hired a CEO who had a desire and passion to also grow Reset Your Nest with the intent to empower women and add value to the care economy. We first explored a franchise model in hopes to quickly share the brand, training method, and everything we had learned with as many small business owners as possible. After creating a franchise disclosure document, we realized that we would not be able to have the control we wanted and stay true to our number one priority in our social mission, which was to make sure that people working for Reset Your Nest were paid above average wages. Thus our first pivot began, and we decided to create a growth strategy around keeping things centrally funded and controlled operationally while opening up regions around the country. Within six months we opened seven new regions. We found women who wanted to start organizing companies, but had never had the courage to do so and we taught them everything we knew. We set them up with supplies, training, marketing and gave them a generous salary. We were confident that with all of these tools, we would be able to replicate the success we had seen in Utah. It was a huge expense and didn’t take long before we realized that finding clients and opening an organizing company in a new region is something that takes time, grit, and hustle. After spending significant amounts of money, we acquired an already existing and thriving company in Denver. The owner we found in Denver, Stephanie Sikora of Sikora solutions, was such a dream to work with, and the acquisition went so smoothly that we decided to pivot once again to an acquisition growth model. Stephanie and I worked together tirelessly to reach out to organizers who are already had existing companies throughout the country and better understand their businesses and their needs. Our hope was to help consolidate and streamline their backend operations and expenses so that they could continue to do with their companies what they were already doing a great job of: delivering great customer service. After interviewing many other professional organizing companies, we realized that small business owners did not want to relinquish any control and we also realized that professional home organizers were not making nearly as much money as we had originally assumed based on our individual experiences with our businesses. Without companies wanting to be acquired or making enough revenue to uphold our business model, our final pivot was to recognize that our dreams of scaling Reset Your Nest to be a nationwide collective of organizers was not something our industry was ready for. The beginning of 2024 Reset Your Nest the c-corp closed all regions outside of Utah and Stephanie Sikora and I bought back our respective companies from the C-corporation. The final pivot was to go back to what we knew worked. Reset Your Nest is now exclusively an Utah company and we are back to doing what we do best: serving clients in Utah with an incredible team and primary focus on customer service. Two years of pivots, so many lessons learned, and it might be easy to think that at the end of two years we went right back to where we started, but I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned and the relationships that were created along the way for anything. Reset Your Nest is a stronger company culturally and operationally for having gone through the many pivots we went through.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I have worked very hard to build my reputation for my business and establish myself as an industry leader these last five years. I think the most important things I’ve done intentionally to make this happen is by focusing on good energy and building relationships. In the very beginning of establishing my business, I knew I wanted to stay in my lane and not compare my success or my brand to anyone else. I wanted to show up authentically and create something that was unique to me. I’ve always shown up very generously sharing the knowledge I have gained, and also only using pictures that I’ve taken. I believe that showing up this way has helped me to create trust with other organizers as well as my followers and to establish myself as an expert early on. I know that in small business life, there are always unpleasant things that happen that cannot be avoided, but showing up generously is something I have never regretted. Building great relationships has also been a great way to create a reputation that means something. From excellent client care to being generous with donating time and baskets to local events, to creating genuine relationships with local companies in similar industries and professional organizers everywhere, I have been able to quickly establish myself as a trusted company and a genuine friend. Social media has also been a great way to establish our reputation. For five years, Reset Your Nest has shown up on Instagram freely, sharing all the tips and tricks of our method and trying to help our followers through education. We freely share this information trusting that clients will still come to us because they recognize the value our services offer even when information is shared.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.resetyournest.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reset_your_nest/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResetYourNest
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-martin-94445719b
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@resetyournest