We recently connected with Lucy Milligan Wahl and have shared our conversation below.

Lucy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

Once I came up with the plan to start a professional organizing business, I started talking about it to anyone I met. I did it for a couple of reasons. First, it provided me accountability. Once I started talking about it, it was real to other people, and friends and family would start asking me about how it was going. And second, it let me do some informal market research. The follow up questions I got and confusion I encountered when I talked about my business helped me refine my ideas. So there I was, talking about becoming a professional organizer to anyone who would listen, including a group trip I took to Southeast Asia in 2014. I became friendly with a woman on the trip, and she told me, “When we get home, call me, I’ll be your first client.” I didn’t really believe her, it seemed like a nice thing to say, but when I got home I did call her and she did hire me! It was absolutely terrifying and I had no idea what I was doing, but she was very understanding and ultimately believed that I could help her.

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

I created LMW Edits for my friends.

All through college, my early career, and graduate school, I was awed by the incredibly smart, driven, and hardworking people who surrounded me. In fact, I was mystified that I was able to keep up with them!

And then it dawned on me: I could keep up with my brilliant colleagues and classmates because I had a secret weapon. I was so used to living with an organized environment that I could spend more of my time pursuing my career, passions, and friendships. I realized that no one can out-work a cluttered space that stresses you out and demands enormous amounts of time and energy just to accomplish everyday tasks.

As I researched the organizing industry, I also realized that most professional organizing services were targeted at suburban families. Few organizers or product manufacturers seemed to understand the specific needs of driven high-achievers living in small urban spaces and trying to grow their relationships and families.

Since 2014, I’ve been helping busy professionals and their families get organized. Everything I do is designed to make the routine tasks of everyday life easier so that my clients can spend their precious time on the projects, passions, and relationships that light them up. There is no one right way to organize: each and every system and solution is tailored to the people who use it.

I’m most proud that my only repeat clients are those who want to repurpose a space – or organize a space that was out of the original project scope. When I create an organizing system, I’m designing it so that the client can maintain it themselves. I don’t want my clients to become dependent on me – rather, I empower them to take back control of their space.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

The business nearly went under during the pandemic. I was down to less than $1,000 in my business checking account, and this went on for months.

My entire business pre-pandemic was based on doing hands on organizing work in people’s homes. With the shelter in place order in San Francisco in March 2020, that was suddenly impossible.

I had never done virtual organizing before, and honestly I wasn’t interested! But I also didn’t want to lose my business, which had been steadily building traction through 2018 and 2019, and I didn’t want to look back and know I had lost it due to my own unwillingness to change.

So, after a few weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I started my pivot to virtual organizing. I created the offering, revamped my website. and got a couple of clients through referrals.

I’d love to tell you that the pivot was a huge success and that virtual organizing is now a major revenue stream for me. It’s not. But it did teach me some important lessons, and I was able to limp through until I could get vaccinated and feel comfortable working in person again.

First, I learned not to shut down other methods without trying them. Virtual organizing does actually work, and it was actually fun for me! Over the course of a year, I guided a client through the total cleanout of his parents’ 3 bedroom flat full of a lifetime of things. I don’t belive this client would ever have allowed me to enter the space in person, even without a pandemic, because of the extreme emotions and vulnerability involved.

Second, I learned that the audiences for the two types of organizing are different. The messaging I had used and the markets I had targeted for in person organizing just didn’t work for virtual. I was only able to convert one potential client who wanted in person service to virtual. This realization guides the way I currently talk about and market virtual organizing.

Third, I learned how to ask more and better questions to be able to give the clients success. When I was working in person before the pandemic, I could just jump in and move things for the client. Suddenly, I wasn’t in the room anymore, and I had to use communication skills to help the client understand what I was trying to do. This experience has made my in-home organizing service even deeper and better than it was before.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I have a small team, but very low turnover. I didn’t have any team members for a long time, and building a team was a very deliberate decision I made with ethical considerations to the forefornt.

I hire for people who understand my mission, want to be a part of it, and are going to be able to contribute in ways that are better and/or different than I do. I don’t worry much about traditional milestones like higher education or years of experience – in my business, those just really aren’t relevant. Instead, I look for emotional intelligence, positive and flexible attitude, creative problem solving, and willingness to learn new skills

Once the training/onboarding period is complete, I give my employees a lot of independence and leeway. I’m always responsive to questions and requests, but I do truly want them to be self directed and feel like they can make decisions on client projects without always deferring to me. Sure, I don’t love each and every decision, but overall projects go better when I’m not micromanaging.

I do want to mention that I hire employees rather than contractors and pay well above market rate. I live in an expensive city, and I find it highly unethical to cheap out on the people who impact your business the most. I trust my employees alone in the homes of wealthy people and public figures, and they need to be compensated accordingly.

I always want my employees to say about me, “She’s a different kind of boss,” which is what my first employee said after a year of working for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lmwedits.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lmwedits
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lmwedits
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-milligan-wahl/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@lmwedits
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/lmw-edits-san-francisco-2
• Other: Threads: https://www.threads.net/@lmwedits

Image Credits
Kelly Vorves Sari Blum