Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kendra Noll-scheier & Laura Wagner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kendra Noll-Scheier & , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?
Interesting enough, Laura and Kendra worked together at a non-profit for nearly ten years and then left their Director positions around the same time. They both managed teams, did counseling and educational work with youth, worked in direct service with children and families, and we were essential workers during COVID, While their work was very rewarding, they often found ourselves working after hours, experiencing high amounts of stress, and ultimately feeling a bit burned out. They are both very passionate about a lot of things, but the demand of our jobs left little time to focus on our mental health, hobbies, and other ideas. Laura and Kendra both care deeply about self care and mental wellness, and both individually were on our own journeys to learn more about themselves. The greatest lesson they learned at our prior job was the importance of slowing down, taking time for what matters, and that the go-go buzzing feeling is not what life is about.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Hello! We are Laura and Kendra with Authentic Living Organizing Co. We are a professional organizing business based out of the Kansas City and Lawrence areas. We provide declutter support, custom organization projects from pantries to garages to playrooms and more. We offer moving services both before and after a move. And we offer routine resets – a tidying service that keeps the homes of busy folks, clutter free. Lastly, we provide tips and support for maintaining the space that include making adjustments to your habits and your routines that work for you.
Our business was born out of our love for organizing, but also building relationships with and supporting others.
We both have a knack for organizing spaces and making them feel calm and cozy. As a child, Laura used to organize her kitchen cabinets for fun, and each year she spent time in her mother’s school classroom organizing her supplies and getting ready for school to start. She loves a good label maker and thinks it’s important for everything to have a home – drawer, cabinet, or spot on a shelf. Laura spent most of her professional career running before/after school programs focused on leadership and creating a welcoming and structured environment so everyone could thrive. As she has continued on her own journey, she’s realized just how important the feeling of empowerment is. And with this business she’s able to help others feel that empowerment in their homes which often trickles over into other areas of their lives.
Kendra is known for immediately making a space feel warm and inviting. The artwork goes up right away, the plants are put in place, and the furniture and lighting are arranged to feel nice and cozy. As she moved throughout college, she painted nearly every room and delighted in making spaces feel pretty and calm. In her free time she loves to organize her own house, read both fiction and self help books, and be in nature. She realized she may want to become a professional organizer after she realized how much she enjoyed remodel projects with her husband, creating beautiful, organized spaces, and by how often she enjoys doing this in her free time! Kendra always knew she wanted to work in a helping profession supporting women and/or children and families. She did this through her work in schools and nonprofits, but this business has become a truly unique way to use her counseling skills and love for organizing in a different way.
When we decided to leave our positions at the nonprofit, we threw out the idea to go into business together. We had spent many years helping students thrive – creating structure and routines. We provided support and guidance to families. We knew how much one’s physical space affected their emotional and mental space. We quickly realized this was a way we could bring multiple passions together.
What sets us apart from others is our focus on the client’s mental well-being during the process and the sustainability support we provide after the project. Admitting you need help is hard. Allowing people into your homes to see your clutter, your piles, is vulnerable. We don’t pass judgment and we meet you where you’re at. You can’t make change if you don’t start.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Similar to what we shared above, we both worked in high pressure situations with multiple stakeholders for years. After we both left our positions, overcoming the fatigue and buzzing in our nervous systems took personal work and time, but we have learned so much about how we want to live a slower life. And this is what led us to our business.
Since we started our business, life has been both wonderful and a huge challenge in a lot of ways. Kendra had two babies since we came up with Authentic Living. Laura still works a 9-5 job in addition to our business. Both of our families have experienced hardship with newly diagnosed autoimmune disease and health conditions. Laura moved into her first home, and we have just had lots of LIFE being thrown at us. There have been so many weeks where one of us has said we needed help, or have needed to just share about how heavy things feel at the moment. Life has tried to distract us from our business at times and what’s most important to us. But this is the beauty of having a business partner and close friend. When one needs a break, the other steps in. We have so much passion for how we are helping people through our business and for what we have created. And we truly believe that this coming year is going to be our year!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
We’ve learned a lot about owning a business from how to create our LLC to accounting to establishing our business plan. But the one that has been the hardest for us is navigating social media. Both of us are more private people and don’t often post about ourselves online. And we definitely didn’t know all the ins/outs of each platform. As we thought about content to share, it was easy to post about projects we did. But when we first started, those were few and far between. So we had to think of other things to post.
We had ideas based on what we saw others do, but it was hard to transfer that to our own content. We took awhile to figure out what we wanted our brand colors to be. So until we got that locked in, our brand was haphazard. Our posts were sporadic. And we quickly learned we weren’t thinking about the quality of photos we took at our projects or the types of photos we should take. At first, it was just before/after photos. Then when we started trying to post them, we realized we took before photos of some areas and after photos of others. We didn’t always get the process in between. And when we tried to post these online, it wasn’t always cohesive or the photos cropped weird.
We wanted to be consistent. We wanted our content to look like what we saw on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But we weren’t quite there. As we spent time strategizing how to get more awareness, more followers, more clients, we started talking through our options. And ultimately decided to outsource our social media. We have a friend that has her own marketing business and helps others run their social media. This decision was life changing!
We met with her so she could get a feel for our brand, our voice, and our mission. We shared our final brand guidelines. She taught us so much! She started a content calendar for us so we could map out social posts a month ahead of time. It was fluid, knowing things could change. But it gave us a starting point and allowed us to make our posts correlate to different categories – about us, our services, our results, emotions, data, and miscellaneous content. We color coded it so we could see if we had it evenly spread out or if we were too heavy in one category. She taught us how to put a link to our website in Instagram so posts could drive followers there.
After 3 months we learned a lot and loved what we were seeing. But in true entrepreneurial fashion, we didn’t have projects lined up and we didn’t have the money to keep paying her. We were also feeling empowered and wanted to take it back and try it on our own. So she held a training session with us. She taught us how to use Canva for content creation with our brand. She showed us how to make videos vs. photos. She helped us map out plans ahead of time. For example, if we wanted to run a promotion, we needed to create a few posts leading up to it. She taught us how to slightly change our captions based on the social platform and that posting through Meta allows you to create content once and it will upload to both Facebook and Instagram. The business center shares metrics and suggestions for you to increase your reach – best time of day to post, suggestions for posting, etc.
And then she left us to it! We’ve done pretty well. The content ideas are coming easier. We’re more intentional with our photography. We consistently use the content calendar. And we’re doing it! We’ve received feedback from friends and followers that they noticed an increase in our presence on social media and that it looked really good.
Our advice for those just starting out? – Start with the mindset that everything you do could be content. Iron out your brand colors and logo from the beginning. Make a content calendar! Keep your social channels and your website consistent and update them regularly. Be authentic to who you are. And just do it. The more we’ve done it, the better we’ve gotten.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.authenticlivingco.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authentic_living_co/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087683533921
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/91117561/admin/dashboard/
