Serena Chapman doesn’t mind cleaning others’ messes or sorting
the chaos of their lives. She enjoys tidying, and even makes a
decent living at it.
Serena Chapman doesn’t mind cleaning others’ messes or sorting the chaos of their lives. She enjoys tidying, and even makes a decent living at it.
As a professional organizer based in Hollister, Chapman, who primarily serves residential clientele, says she has sorted every imaginable room of a house. Considering the wide scope of her unorthodox services, Chapman can recall several random experiences and an array of peculiar conversations since she started consulting people on their lack of orderliness three years ago.
Chapman recalls one time sorting through a woman’s closet.
“I had a client that said, ‘Oh, I haven’t worn that since I was married to my first husband 10 years ago.’
“I told her, ‘That’s got to go,'” says Chapman, who is originally from England.
Chapman doesn’t just clean messes, though. She motivates. She systematizes lives, and families. She gives advice on schedules and “to-do lists.” Chapman has even gone grocery shopping for clients.
Regardless of the job she takes on, Chapman says she takes pride in the chain reaction of results.
“The lunch boxes were cleaned and laid out the night before; the kids had decided what to wear; the school notes were signed,” she says. “All that because we had a routine set in place.
“Therefore, the kids got to school on time; you (the parent) managed to pick up some coffee; and you got into work on time. And the desk is organized because you already made a to-do list the night before for the things that were priority.”
Chapman, admittedly, is high energy.
As unique of an occupation Chapman holds in San Benito County, the number of professional organizers has steadily increased since the mid-1980s.
Chapman, 30, says she noticed a spike in the demand for such services during the economic boom of the 1990s, particularly in the Silicon Valley.
The National Association of Professional Organizers has branches throughout the country, including the “world’s largest” chapter in San Francisco.
The growth of her profession is not only a sign of people struggling with the time-crunch nature of modern culture, but also, especially in San Jose, she says a rise in disposable incomes played heavily into the swelled attraction for professional organizers.
“I actually think that more people had the money for it,” she says. “Unorganized people have been unorganized since way before the ’80s. … The difference is, when the boom hit, it became fashionable to hire people to help you.”
She moved here from the Silicon Valley, where most of her clientele had resided in Los Altos and Palo Alto. Chapman, whose business is called Actively Organized, doesn’t expect enough demand locally for full-time work. Ironically enough, she doesn’t have time for it.
Chapman has a 3-year-old daughter and says, ideally, she would work only one day per week, or even one day per month. She realizes, for obvious reasons, the difficulty of juggling a career and raising a young child.
A natural talent
She didn’t learn rigid organization from childhood experiences or from her mother, who Chapman says was “not tidy and neat.” She doesn’t know where her structured personality originated.
“Just naturally, I’m very organized,” she says.
During a nine-year period as a nanny, while constantly sorting the household’s linen closet and bathroom cupboards, the “light bulb” went off.
“I was doing it without even realizing it,” she says.
Chapman began devising organizational schemes for her husband’s company out of her house. In her spare time, she would check out library material on the subject. The books Chapman would read, however, didn’t teach her much. Through past experiences, she had already become astute on the subject matter.
She decided to join the NAPO and soon afterward helped her first client. Through word of mouth, she says, “It blew from there.”
The two years Chapman worked full-time out of San Jose before the birth of her daughter, part of that time doing work for Sun Microsystems, “the industry was booming,” she says.
Now she treats herself only on that occasional work day, when she can share her wisdom on leading a structured lifestyle.
“I’m not a mom on that day. I’m really a woman, and I actually have a career. And it’s nice to have that day,” she says.
Even with her scaled back work schedule, Chapman often stays in contact with customers – some of whom call for repeat business.
“Even if I implement a great system that works for them, sometimes they’re still just too busy to keep it up,” she says.
Chapman has a “photographic memory for people’s houses,” she says, which often helps when clients sometimes call months later and ask the location, within their own home, of their own missing things.
“And I can say, ‘It’s in the back room, on the third shelf on the right.’ They look and it’s still there,” she says.
Since the realization of her talent set in, Chapman has produced a Web site, www.activelyorganized.com,that features several lists of organizational tips.
Above all, success in a career and happiness in family life, she says, often correlate with a person’s level of organization.
And with the array of disorganization in daily lives, she says, “you can never have enough professional organizers.”
For more information on Actively Organized, call Serena Chapman at 637-4705.
