We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kirsten Fisher. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kirsten below.

Kirsten, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

I always had a big vision and ambition for Imagine Home Organization, the luxury home services company servicing Tampa Bay and Sarasota. However, when I started, it was just me, figuring out all the things that were going to work (and not work) along the way. It was a shoulder surgery that forced me to hire my first employee. My mom came to jobs and moved things around where I told her. During that time I realized how much I loved the collaboration of a team and how much my clients loved having projects be completed twice as fast. From there I hired another team member and discovered that a team of three was a real sweet spot for on-site efficiency in most organizing project. Our bigger team allowed us to take on bigger projects and expand into move management where we would pack, manage the movers, unpack and organize an entire home within about a week. We now have a team of six professional organizers and the additional service support required additional staff to ensure all of those projects can be properly managed. First I brought in an assistant who has since become our operations coordinator and then I expanded our sales team so that someone beside me could meet with clients, develop a project plan and move the project forward through completion.

Throughout this growth and staffing additions, the critical aspect to keeping the highest level of service for our clients has been to implement processes for everything we do. Processes are about more than just adding software, although that is very important for efficiency, it is about adding a way of doing things and ensuring everyone is on the same page and communicating. Our biggest growing pains were in communication. When we went from a team of three that saw each other every day, to a team of six who sometimes didn’t work together for weeks on end, we suddenly realized gaps in communication.

The implementation of project management software gave us the ability to have repeatable processes for every client and for the entire team to know what was happening on every project. In addition to project management software we have many processes that are implemented through on-line services from a CRM, email marketing, proposal development, phone systems and social media implementation. This year we are implementing one platform on Go High Level that can do all of these for us and allow us to integrate many levels of automation that will ensure that our team can focus on the things they do best – on-site problem solving – and spend less time following up on administrative tasks.

As you grow and scale a business, it is critically important that you think through the processes to get the best result so that anyone can step in and perform a role, taking and one specific person, including myself, out of the success of our growth. The success is based on the entire team working together with the systems we have in place to create the very best result for our clients.

Now as we expand into new services including home management where we relieve the everyday burdens felt within a family from laundry to errands and general home tidy up, we are able to stretch our systems to perform well in these new areas.

Kirsten, 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?

The world is busier than it has ever been and expectations for moms have never been higher. They are managing more stresses, things and activities than every before. I founded Imagine Home Organization to relieve the burden felt by families when their home is chaotic and disorganized. We bring in systems to improve the structure and processes of the home, making it function better and we don’t just fix the issue temporarily, we also provide ongoing support with our membership and now our weekly home management services.

After working in professional tennis for nearly 20 years, I left the industry burnt out. I was wife and the mom of two very young boys and I was working all the time and feeling like there was never enough time to do all the things I left my job to figure out what else I could do and that is when I started to anxiety organize. That is my natural instinct when I want to procrastinate and don’t know what comes next – I start eliminating things I don’t need and arranging the rest to work better. I was waking up every day so excited to tackle another area of my home and I realized that I could help women like me. Women with families and jobs and not enough time in the day to keep their home manageable.

Organizing is a dream job for me because it makes people so happy. I can see the weight lifted from their shoulders. My first client hugged me and I knew that is exactly where I wanted to be. In marketing, no one was every happy. Sponsors and players, they all wanted more and were never truly happy with the results, no matter how amazing. I didn’t realize how draining that was until I started really problem solving for my clients. It may have been smaller scale than global tennis but it felt so big and so rewarding.

Now we provide home organization, closet design and installation, concierge move management, holiday decorating and weekly home management services.

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

As a working mom of young boys, I always dreaded the late winter, the time when you need to start planning summer camps so you can register before camps sell out. Usually that is going to mean your entire summer needs to be set by Feb 1. Doing the research, coordinating with your kids’ moms, completing registration jobs is a second full time job. Ask any mom that relies on summer camps as summer childcare and they will tell you the same. In 2022, I had a brilliant idea. Summer camp shouldn’t be this hard. Surely someone could create an app that would find the best camps for you based on your child’s preferences and then share those choices with other moms so you could all get into the same camps and then register just once for the whole summer. In 2023, I did an analog trial of my idea and I ran into SO many stumbling blocks. I discovered all the reasons why my idea had not yet been implemented. I registered a small number of kids for camp that first summer and although those families were very happy, I was miserable. I took the activity I hated and amplified it so I had to do it for 10 kids instead of 2. When I realized I couldn’t take the company digital, I pivoted away from the idea and sadly shut down further testing.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to learn to be more flexible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.imaginehomeorganization.com
• Instagram: @imaginehomeorganization
• Facebook: @imaginehomeorganization

Image Credits

@wesleywallace (headshot)