It’s hard to imagine how a small business owner functions amid heaping piles of unsorted paperwork or hundreds of unopened e-mails.
The average executive wastes an hour a day looking for papers, says professional organizer Deb Gabinelle, owner/founder of InSightful Solutions CT, LLC. Gabinelle has been working as a professional organizer since 2007, specializing in helping entrepreneurs and small business owners get a grip on their chaos. She has an MBA in finance and over 12 years of experience working in banking.
“Before I finished my program at The Entrepreneurial Center at the University of Hartford, I had my first client who is still my client today,” Gabinelle said. “My friend’s husband was a small business owner, an investment advisor. He needed a lot of help with paperwork management. I worked with him on document management solutions, so he could reduce his paper flow. We were able to use his paper storage room, free it up and create a beautiful room with antique furniture for him to meet with clients.”
Paperwork is, by far, the biggest challenge Gabinelle says she comes across when she’s helping small businesses.
“It’s very costly to the company in terms of productivity. You’d be shocked at how many people have no idea where anything is because they didn’t set the system up, or they just don’t know. They need to maintain (the organization) once I leave, clearly that’s the goal,” she said.
Gabinelle says she meets many business owners who become paralyzed by e-mails in their inbox and paperwork overflow. She encourages them to create document retention guidelines, which outline how long they need to keep certain documents.
“What do I do with this paper? That’s the biggest question that comes up. People just put in a pile and that results in clutter,” she said. She recommends setting 15 minutes aside each day for organizing.
Gabinelle needed little start up money for her business, which she runs out of her home. She typically works 20 hours a week and says professional organizers charge “somewhere between the hourly fees charged by office cleaning companies and high-end interior designers” for their services.
Gabinelle finds most of her clients through her website and her listing with the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) directory. She is the marketing director for the NAPO CT Chapter, which she says has about 40 members.
One of them is Faith Manierre, who runs Busy Bees Professional Organizing. She is also certified in working with chronic disorganization. Manierre has been in business for 10 years and was the founding president of the NAPO CT Chapter. She has worked with over 500 clients, many of whom suffer from severe chronic disorganization such as the cases depicted on the popular A&E series, Hoarders.
“I work with many home-based business owners who may have been executives or skilled people in another life, now they have a home business. They have the knowledge, but they don’t know how to do the administration part. It can impact many areas of their business, not meeting deliverables/deadlines being one of them,” she said.
The two women see their services as complementary.
Gabinelle believes her specialty in helping small business owners allows her to stand out from her competition. Occasionally, she said, she does meet clients who are so far gone that they need more help than she can give. In these cases, she refers them tospecially trained organizers like Manierre.
Joanna Smiley, a Hartford area freelancer, writes the weekly Local Interest column for The Hartford Business Journal.
