The Failure Gap

Speaker 2 (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Failure Gap where we talk with leaders about moving between agreement and alignment. We love talking with interesting people and today we're joined by Sonya Weisshappel. Sonya grew up in New York City where she started her organizing company, Seriatim, in 1999. Proudly dyslexic, Sonia founded her business in order to avoid writing a resume and now almost two decades later, she and her team have earned themselves a reputation as the Chaos Whisperers.

In 2017, Sonya became the first organizer to be accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. Her debut memoir, Confessions of a Chaos Whisperer, was published in 2024 by Post Hill Press. She's currently president of the New York Council of Relocation Professionals. In her spare time, Sonya likes to organize her husband, their three children, and their rescue dog, Finn. Sonya, welcome to The Failure Gap.

Speaker 1 (00:54)
Thank you, Julie. So nice to see you. Happy New Year.

Speaker 2 (00:57)
Same to you, we're delighted to have you here today. think professional organizing is definitely one of those things where people can use a lot of help and there's a lot of great intentions. People agree that they should be more organized, but there's a lot of people in the failure gap. It's hard to move into alignment and to actually make it happen. So I love that you are fully embracing your skills and the contribution that you can make in helping people to cross the failure gap in this particular space.

Speaker 1 (01:25)
for sure, and I think people do get stuck in particular because they think of it as too big instead of small little pieces.

Speaker 2 (01:36)
Yeah, I think they get overwhelmed, by the magnitude of it. Before we dive into that, do you want to just give the listeners a little bit of background on you and what brought you to this point in your career and in your business ownership journey and kind of how the path that you followed to get into the role that you're in today?

Speaker 1 (01:55)
I think it really started as a child. I'm the only daughter of a mother who has two sisters, my two aunts, who had no children. So collectively, I have three mothers and their brother, my uncle. Those two aunts, one was a geriatric nurse and one was an architect interior designer and my uncle commercial real estate.

And after we moved to New York in my teenage years and my father passed away as an only child, my mom had worked for her sister my whole childhood as the coordinator for an interior design architecture company, which means that we were on renovations and watching things change in people's homes and in hotels and restaurants and things like that. So when we came to New York, mom got a job as a

real estate agent with Barbara Corcoran. She had just started her business and my mom was one of the original brokers. So when you take residential commercial real estate, you take geriatric caregiving, and you take renovations through interior design and architecture, and you put them all together, that's what organizing has become for me. So that's my childhood bringing that forward and pulling on those skills.

Speaker 2 (03:24)
I love how you reflect on that opportunity to bring together all of these adults who cared for you in your life and what they contributed to your worldview as you think about the contribution that you want to make. It's a really, it's a lovely path to have followed.

Speaker 1 (03:37)
through thick or thin, you learn through experience and being dyslexic and having a hard time in traditional school. If I've seen it, I learn it. If I don't see it, it's gone. So I studied film and I created a process in my business for inventorying because in order to manage my staff,

I needed to see what they were doing. so knowing where my weaknesses were and knowing where my strengths were helped to navigate it. because I watched my family and discussed things over and over, my mom and her sisters are very close and their brother, it was family conversations, what worked, what didn't work. And so all of that.

and being an only child in the youngest and shared collectively, I was always at the table for the discussions. There was no daycare or... I was daycare. And in fact, I remember when I just reflected on it with my aunt as a child going with her to do all of her geriatric visits. And it would, I'd spend a summer with her in LA and...

Speaker 2 (04:48)
That was daycare, right?

Speaker 1 (05:05)
We would wake up each day, get dressed, go, and spend eight hours on the road driving and visiting her seniors. Are you taking your meds? What's your this? And I'd sit on the sofa swinging my feet or maybe go to the bathroom and see what's in their bathroom. was visiting people's homes and lives as they were taking ill or someone had passed away. And so that's...

brings it back into seriatim.

Speaker 2 (05:38)
And I think there is also something in there about the power of conversation. For you, the power of conversation around the dinner table and being included in that as the adults in your life reflected on what they were doing and the impact they were having on their clients. And then seeing firsthand the power of your aunt interacting with her clients and the people in her world in a way that was caring and professional and bringing those two things together in a really powerful sense.

Speaker 1 (06:07)
I love that, I think conversation is one of the most important skills. I think even having three kids, two step-sons and a daughter, the older children are much more conversational. And the younger we get, the more it was electronic conversations. But I think COVID in particular taught my daughter

a little bit more about, it is kind of nice to see a person in person and not just online, because that was taken away so they could feel the fact that that was missing in their lifetime. So I hope that conversations continue to be taught to younger generation, that it's just, you learn. You learn, you share, you have community.

It gives you strength and heart.

Speaker 2 (07:08)
And it's a connection, it's a palpable connection when you are in dialogue with people in lots of different modalities. And they it up? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:18)
And it starts with our relationship of chatting before. So, I guess we are big believers in that. Good observation.

Speaker 2 (07:29)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Sonya, you have done something that many people agree they would like to do. Many people are stuck in the failure gap about and it's tough to move into alignment. I know from personal experience as well that writing a book is no small feat. And so you at some point in the last few years decided that was something that you wanted to do and you managed to move from agreement to alignment on it and you have it out in the world. That was published last year. Confessions of a Chaos Whisperer. I love the title.

And we'd love for you just to share a little bit maybe for our audience about what inspired you to write the book and also what do you think it was that propelled you to move from the legions of people who say they want to write a book to being someone who has actually done it and gotten it out into the world?

Speaker 1 (08:15)
It was a labor of love.

had no intention of doing it. But I did, for marketing purposes, want to share stories, going back to conversation and learning. I wanted to share, we in our database track and have for the last 25 years what life transition someone's going through. So are they getting married?

they having a baby? Are they job transferring? Is it a renovation? Is it illness or someone's passed away? did they say? Cradle to grave. Thank you. And so that whole trajectory of tracking life transitions, there are consistent things that one needs when you

having that life transition. So I wanted to share some of the observations in marketing and in conversations. ultimately, it was when I put it all down, it started to, the pieces that came out of it were, these were problems that people had that trusted advisors were supposed to protect them.

from, and yet as an organizer, know, kind of a frou-frou-y kind of industry at, you know, for a long time, this was organizers coming in and cleaning up the mess. And I decided that it was really important to teach those trusted advisors, fellow people who may go through that life event.

and whoever's willing to listen, that these things happen. They're normal. These lifequakes happen. But you could be a little bit more prepared. And during COVID, we were considered first responders. We had a lot of real estate deals. We were allowed to go in and clean out people's properties. We got FedExed keys all the time and given complete access to people's lives. And the...

opportunity to take care of them with their stuff. One of my assistants couldn't ride the train to and from and was home and there wasn't as much other work, networking and marketing happening. So he took on the job of starting to write and compile some of those stories we had done for marketing.

and try to change them up to present them outward. And that's how the book came to be. And then when COVID lifted, the book was done, but it kind of sat there, because I didn't actually know what to do with it. And then we had some trial and tribulations of like picking the wrong person, doing the wrong.

not knowing that you needed to have a cover, not knowing that you needed to do X, Y, it just, every mistake I think one could make in that process, we made, and here we are. And we finally just printed it, launched it, and it was for me metaphorically a stake in the sand of what was and what will be.

The book is the line for me.

Speaker 2 (12:13)
I love that and I know that you're talking about a pivot in your business, which I want to get to in just a minute. But before we go there, I just want to reflect back on something you just said about people having trusted advisors and you moving into this space of helping those trusted advisors also to understand the power of getting organized around a lot of things that are in people's lives, whether it's their, you know, collection of owls, which is one of your clients, or, you know, lots of paperwork and

family legacy papers and things like that. But one story that you told in Confessions of a Chaos Whisperer that really stuck with me was of a gentleman who had a fairly large collection and his attorney who was a trusted advisor for many years to him in your mind was taking advantage a little bit. So you intervened to try and make sure that an auctioneer who could really give him a fair assessment of his collection.

was available. And I want to say that the way that the lawyer had organized it, he was going to get about $15,000. And at the end of the day, he got about $75,000 because you were able to get someone in who really had his best interests at heart. And I think that must happen. Some of your stories, by the way, are amazing. So thank you for telling them. But I think about that in terms of

an organizer really having to get under the covers and really having to be able to see what's happening for somebody at this point in their life. It's not just about stacking boxes and getting things color coded. It's really about trying to understand what does this person need in their life right now. And it goes far beyond organizing stuff. And it's also about organizing relationships and emotions and the way that people are

are standing in their world at that time.

Speaker 1 (14:08)
I think there are many organizers out there, which is great because when I started 30 years ago, because 1993, there were only a handful of us in the phone book. So there are some who want to just color code and don't want to deal with the emotions, but I chose from my background to get very involved in all of those pieces of someone's life because

That was what I learned. That was normal for me. You meet someone where they're at and you solve the problem. You don't just identify the problem and then walk away. You know, like a consultant of sorts who's like, hey, here are your 15 problems, see ya. You know, it's here are your 15 problems and let's tackle these three now and I can do this for you.

Speaker 2 (15:04)
Yeah. And I wonder also if it might have to do with where you tend to show up in people's lives at those inflection points that you talked about earlier that are often very disruptive versus somebody who just feels like the garage needs to be more organized. they're just trying to get their lifestyle maybe a little bit more under control, but they're not actually making a big move or experiencing a big upheaval in their personal life. And it just might call for a different

approach to organizing.

Speaker 1 (15:36)
think you're absolutely right. When you are in one of these life transitions, you are in a pivot point or kind of a, there's so much chaos happening around you that of course there are going to be things that go wrong because there's too many parts to manage and there's the emotional part also. When you look at, when I look at an estate,

You can look at a business estate, end of a business, closure, or you can look at a person's life in their home. When you look at the end and you walk in, there tends to be three things to consider. Three columns, tangible assets, things you can touch, coffee cups, desk, lamps, filing cabinets. Then there's paperwork.

digital files and literal files, filing cabinets full. And then there's memorabilia, things that are either archives for the business or memorabilia like the wedding dress and the cake topper and the first baby shoe and the lock of hair and the baby teeth and all the photos. Those are the things when you boil it all down, those are the three categories that everyone has.

And it's just, how organized are they? And what are you going to do with them? And when you're in these life transitions, you're often having a real estate moment where you're closing down or rolling up or opening up, it doesn't matter, a piece of real estate. those three things need to carry over or go away.

So as you mentioned for the client who sold things at a higher price, he wanted to distribute things, liquidate. Well, that's letting go and you sell, you donate and you trash. So that's how it goes.

Speaker 2 (17:52)
It sounds so sensible when we talk about it, and yet, as you know, and we've all seen, it is so difficult for people to do. And you've had 30 years of experience in this space, and you step boldly into these often very emotional transition points. What do you think holds people back from being able to sort and catalog in that way? You keep, donate, trash, the organizing structure.

might be the people agree a lot that they want their lives to be more organized, but they don't organize their lives. And I'm curious about what your thoughts are, not just in the moment of transition, but in the years leading up to it. We all get to this point where things suddenly said suddenly feel chaotic, but in fact, the chaos has been building for a long time.

Speaker 1 (18:43)
If you look at a house on a corner who they haven't done their yard and the grass is up to your knees, and that is the equivalent of clutter. They did not do things on a regular basis to take care. They did not weed their own garden. They did not maintain it.

So when you go into your home and you go to make a cup of coffee and you haven't filled out the beans or you didn't even buy the beans, you can't get to where you want, which is your drink. In people's lives, if you want your possessions to go to your loved ones, but you didn't write a will, there's a disconnect. And if you wrote a will, but it's outdated,

there's a disconnect or you have a will with your ex on it, it's outdated. So at every transition point, it is a time of reflection as to where things stand with files, memorabilia, and objects. So each year we deal, when you're an adult, you tend to deal with your property insurance.

That is a very good time to just ask yourself one simple question, which they normally have in the insurance renewal, but people just sign. It's like, did I buy anything new? Okay, maybe you did because the insurance company wants your premiums for something new. But did you let go of anything that you are insuring? And that's the

that's the organization of it because so many times at a time of an estate, you pull out the insurance policy to see what was actually on the deck sheet, what's in the rider. And oftentimes those things don't even exist and people are paying money and premiums on things that don't even exist. if it's habits, it's habits. If you renewing your insurance policy,

What did I buy? What did I let go of? And do they net out? And what is here? Is it true?

Speaker 2 (21:17)
That's a cute for people, right? At Karrikins Group, we like to say small things done consistently over time change the world, right? that's a small thing you can do consistently. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:29)
And when you come home and you put your keys in a different place every day, or you don't hang up all of your coats and you just keep putting them out, the mud room becomes unmanaged. And so for me, every day is about

Speaker 2 (21:51)
Chaotic, right? So the chaos comes in.

Speaker 1 (21:59)
going back to baseline. So you're in a, God forbid, an emergency situation and you're being rolled into the ER. You do not want to hear, is my? Where is? Everything is in its place, ready for that next emergency. And I really believe that if we managed our lives,

in a sense of, don't know if there is going to be a problem, but I'm ready when it happens. That is such a different mindset. It's a, I'm sure there's some.

Speaker 2 (22:48)
I wonder though if there are people who don't want to think about it because they don't want to think about bad things happening. And it's sort of this weird, well, maybe to me it seems odd, it's resistance to the reality that things do happen. And so better to be prepared than unprepared. And maybe there's just a fear around that, that you don't want to prepare for something that you don't like to think about.

Speaker 1 (23:15)
Of course. Of course. So one of the situations that we often find ourselves in is an adult child our age, parent passes away. And if that house was 40 years of contents and no one ever went through the closets, the drawers, the attics, the garage, you are dealing with a lot to do.

at the time of grief. And that is a very big burden for you or one or a family. If you've experienced that level of burden, you will not leave that to your children. You will not do that again. If you haven't had those experiences, you often don't pay attention.

If you have not been in a fire flood scenario, you don't think about your insurance and whether or not your premiums you've taken care of ensuring the contents properly, because it doesn't matter. It's not necessary. But if you've had a fire or a flood or a car accident, you're looking at your insurance. And so a life event is the same thing. And what often makes

me crazy is that appraisals for items above maybe $1,500 an item often aren't done. And if you don't have an appraisal, the insurance company isn't going to deal with you. Or if your appraisals, they time out between three and five years. They're valid or not valid. So if you have appraisals from 20, 30 years ago,

That's like going to the doctor and saying my blood work from 20, 30 years ago. How am I doing doc? It's not you. Yeah, no.

Speaker 2 (25:20)
It's a great analogy, right? We think that because we did something many, many years ago that it's still valid and that's just not the case in life or in business, right? We have to keep things current and keep doing things in small ways so that big things become easier to manage.

Speaker 1 (25:37)
And that is the basis of small little habits, little trigger points. So insurance is one of them.

Speaker 2 (25:48)
Yeah. I know that as you are growing your business, if we shift gears from this idea of how do people think about organizing their lives, there's also the question of as a business owner, you are looking at your business and thinking about where do I want to go with this and how do I build a habit of working, I think you mentioned in your book, working on the business instead of in the business. Talk to me a little bit about that. I think that business leaders often struggle

to pick their heads up and to think more broadly about how do we grow this rather than delivering on what is sometimes their passion, the work that they love to do. And doing the work is different from growing the work. And that's actually a place where a lot of business owners and also leaders in bigger companies get stuck in the failure gap because they agree it's a good idea, but they have a very hard time pulling themselves out of it.

Speaker 1 (26:43)
I

went to a new primary care doctor a few, about two years ago, and had blood work done. And then through the portal, got a diagnosis that basically said I was dying. It gave me a, you've got two to three months to live, you've got this rare blood disease. To tell you that I went into a tailspin is an understatement.

Speaker 2 (27:00)
no, it-

Speaker 1 (27:13)
And I felt it so deeply of, my gosh, I need to get my affairs in order. What will I do with my team? What will I do with my family? Where am I? It ended up being a complete and utter false alarm.

Speaker 2 (27:33)
my gosh.

Speaker 1 (27:35)
but

it was a whole three months of unknown and anxiety. That was the pivot point for me at which I decided that I have to take Seriatim from a lifestyle business to a scalable company and that the business cannot have me in the center of it, that it has to be something that can run without me. And that

Every time I'm doing something now, it becomes, this a, does Sonia have to do this or someone else, can someone else do this? And how would someone else know how to do it? And then trying to do small little habits to make it better and better and better that someone else can take it over. And that's what changed for

Speaker 2 (28:28)
Yeah, well you had a compelling event that has gotten you there as you reflect on where you are now in this journey of growing the business instead of being in the business. I'm curious if there are some unexpected joys or energizers that come out of that that might be inspiring to somebody who's working on this for themselves without that impetus of a potential life-changing event.

Speaker 1 (28:58)
think definitely, definitely.

When I meet other business owners who are doing everything themselves.

I feel such a sense of breathlessness or worry for their well-being because you really can't get out of doing everything and so you go down with the business goes down with you. so the going back to tangible paperwork and memorabilia.

The archives, the memorabilia of the company is and will be the legacy and the standard operating procedures of the company. How does this work? It's the workbook. And that is my gift to the company. And as a founder, any founder, that is your gift to the business is

How do you want it done? It is the same at the end of someone's life. How do you want your last, how do you want to be remembered? How do you want to go out in this world? What kind of ceremony, what kind of circumstance do you want to be seen at? That is the same with a business. How do you want to retire? How do you want to

make this company prosper and work. And people don't always know that they need to do that. They just assume that they're always going to be there.

Speaker 2 (30:54)
I think that's true in founder-led companies. It's also true in bigger businesses with senior leaders. The question of what's the imprint that you want to leave behind and how does that help make this better and bring it forward is such a great question for leaders to be asking themselves. And especially if you are a founder and an owner of the company, how do you envision that?

that unfolding for you and for your team and for your clients as well. How does the impact that you know you're able to have scale so that it can continue beyond you? Such a rich and wonderful question. I think it's also a daunting one for people.

Speaker 1 (31:38)
For sure. I've gone into complete and utter overwhelm. I've gone into dreaming really big and then going, I'm right here, but I want to go there. And then realizing that it doesn't have to be all in one day. And that it can actually be over a course of a couple of years. Or decades. That if you know where you want to go,

How do you work with someone to bring yourself from where you're at to where you want to go? For us as organizers, going into someone's life and asking them, what do you need? What do you want to be? And making sure that what surrounds them supports them. If you want to make quilts and your sewing machine is in the basement, you know, under a pile of boxes,

hard to make a quilt. So it's putting your tools next to you and as a founder, putting your people or putting your processes or putting the right...

Speaker 2 (32:53)
Structure. Yeah, around you. the right organization around you, right? Yeah. How do you organize things so that they're accessible and available to you as you need them? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think it also seems like there's, what is the expression? Let me think about it. People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. I really like your

Speaker 1 (33:03)
Click reference.

Speaker 2 (33:21)
call to action to say, doesn't have to all happen today or right away. But if you don't think about what is it that you want to accomplish and how do you do that over time, then you don't do it, right? You don't get there. And so I think that's a really important takeaway here in terms of moving through what is, I think, a very common failure gap. How do we get aligned to understanding what we want the future plan to be and what that strategy looks like?

is you don't have to do it all today. I have observed, and I wonder if you have too, both in organizing with your clients and also in running your business, I think that people kick the can down the road because they think it's going to be fast and easy once they decide to do it. And I'm going to call to mind another example from your book of a woman who had a belief that she could just show up at a consignment store in New York City with a wheelbarrow full of stuff.

and be like, here you go, take my stuff. And you make the point in the book that consignment shops don't work that way. They can't just take a huge load off your hands and do something productive with it. They're very selective. So it takes time to be able to find the right people for those things that you want to pass on. Or in your business, it takes time to figure out who are the new leaders who are coming up and can take over some of the things. It doesn't all have to happen in a weekend.

And I thought that was just an interesting story and an interesting parallel to what we're talking about here, which is give yourself the grace of that time,

Speaker 1 (34:59)
One of the things that I like to do at the New Year is to make a mind map or a visual board, which is cutting out from magazines or pictures of what I want to accomplish in that year or what feelings I want to have during that year. Part of the importance for me in that little trick has been

Trying to give yourself the grace to know that you don't know what's coming but you might there is no harm in dreaming as big as you want blue sky dreams just go big and have those because the more you dream it the the little pieces start to fall into place and you have to

Want it. If you don't want it, you don't tinker with it in your head.

Speaker 2 (36:04)
Yeah, and I think some of wanting it is articulating it, right? Once you sort of speak things into being in the way. I like your push to say, don't make a resolution, make a vision board and see where it takes you.

Speaker 1 (36:16)
We also, as a family, tend to take a plate at the New Year's Eve and write all the things we don't want in the New Year on the plate and break it.

Speaker 2 (36:29)
I love that idea. So what are you shedding, right? Also, what are you moving on?

Speaker 1 (36:33)
What are you divesting of? It's just clutter. Mental and physical. What are you going to let go of?

Speaker 2 (36:42)
That is such a wonderful idea. Not just what are you bringing in, but what are you assuring out?

Speaker 1 (36:48)
But it goes back to the insurance piece. What are you bringing in? What did you let go of? It's a math equation. It has to be balanced. The seesaw can't be one or the other. Where is neutral?

Speaker 2 (37:06)
Yeah. And when you're in crisis. I'm trying to maintain neutrality with my shoes. I'm imagining that you have seen a lot of shoe collections in your day.

Speaker 1 (37:18)
I

have, it's true, multi-million dollar shoe collection.

Speaker 2 (37:23)
yeah, I am trying to hold myself to a one in one out standard But it does hurt sometimes I won't And every now and then one will sneak in without one going out. That's right

Speaker 1 (37:36)
That's absolutely right, and then two will go out someday. You'll make up for it. It's just that if you give it a space and it outlives that space, you need to reconsider.

Speaker 2 (37:40)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been so interesting, Sonya, to talk through not just from an organizing support and the impact that you have with your clients, the value of decluttering and making sure that you are ready for the transitions that are coming or if you're in the transitions that you're managing them as well as possible. I think that's fascinating. And your book shares a lot of those stories and I found them to be so, so interesting. It's such

amazing people that you've had the opportunity to interact with and have an impact on. There's all of that. And then also your perspective as a business owner and a founder and congratulations on growing a business over the last 30 years that really has had a meaningful and lasting impact. One of the other things that struck me in your book was the length of the relationships that you've developed over the years and the people who you stay in touch with and that you continue to care for even after your process is done with them.

I think that's a real testament to how you lead and how you have nurtured your business over the years. So thank you for sharing some of those perspectives too. think as a leader and as a founder, it can be really hard to be organized and to be ready for your own transitions and your own path forward. And so it's really exciting to hear about and to see you taking charge of what that's going to look like for you over the next few years.

as you take your world forward. So I'm excited to see where that goes for you.

Speaker 1 (39:16)
Thank you so much. I do think that people often don't take the time. So just take the time.

Speaker 2 (39:26)
Yeah, just give yourself some time. Well, one of my last questions is if you had a few things, a few tips and tricks that you would offer to people about moving from agreement to alignment on anything that you're doing, and in this case, getting organized, I'm curious, what would some of those be? And maybe one of them is make sure that you just give yourself some time.

Speaker 1 (39:46)
time but going back to habit. Pick a day. Do 20 minutes a day. Just look around what can be brought back to neutral. Do I have a place where I put my pens and pencils? Do I have my pens and pencils all over the house? Can I put them there? Do I have coins all over the house? Putting things in one spot is a helpful

so that when you need something, you're not guessing where you left it. You're going back to the one spot for your shoes. It's like one spot for the shoes. You might divide them up between fancy and not fancy, or boots and, you know, not boots, but one spot where each of those categories are. And the thing that I see often making it the hardest for people...

is that you touch a pencil, you touch a shoe, you touch a piece of paper, and you decide to keep them all because they're not in relation to each other. They are individual. So of course you're gonna keep them all. But when the shoe goes with the other shoes and that's the only spot you have, now you have to make a decision. When your pencil holder is overly full,

You make a decision as to, I don't like that one. No, that pen doesn't work. and you start to make decisions. Otherwise, you just keep them all. And so just to pick one category.

as a project a week and do that. But also every day, make your bed, hang up your coat, put it away, start, empty your garbage cans, start fresh. And if those aren't, if you can't do that start fresh, like you don't have a place to put it away, pick one spot that you take apart and decide what you need to keep and not keep.

and put it back. But that's really, starts to make people cannot make the decisions when you're not looking category to category.

Speaker 2 (42:15)
really appreciate that. I've never thought of it from that perspective. So thank you for sharing that. I'm thinking in my own house and my own business, what is it that we could catalog a little bit better and then focus on that category instead of looking at everything because it does feel overwhelming when you're looking at everything.

Speaker 1 (42:33)
Well, when we talk about business, we talk about lead generation, marketing, client fulfillment, teams, finance. But if you start to deal with all of those processes as equal, your head's going back and forth. You might need help in the finance or you might need help with the HR.

Or you might be a master of those and need help with the other things. So as a founder, you tend not to be good at everything.

Speaker 2 (43:10)
as painful as that might be for founders to admit it is true.

Speaker 1 (43:13)
It is true. so pick what you're good at and ask for help with what you're not. But things need to be divided into categories. Otherwise, it's really hard to manage.

Speaker 2 (43:27)
I think that's a great call to action for people. And one of my last questions is around how do you, if you were able to get people inspired to get into alignment on one thing, what would that be? And for me, it's going to be coming out of this, get some catalogs going, start thinking about how to catalog things a little differently and a little more precisely, and then think about that for myself. But I'm curious if you had a magic wand that you could wave and people could...

start to get their behaviors aligned to something, what would it be?

Speaker 1 (44:02)
I would really recommend thinking about their insurances and making sure that you know what you own. And if something has been passed to you as an heirloom or as a gift that is not something that you can find on the internet easily, you might want to get it appraised because oftentimes people

don't know what they own, and if there's a problem or it gets stolen or it goes through a fire or a flood, you can't claim what you didn't know. And you can't protect what you didn't know that needed protection. So I would just be mindful of knowing what you own and create an inventory. That's really what I would recommend.

Speaker 2 (44:57)
And that might require professional help for some people is what I'm... For some. For some. Yeah. For sure. And you know, it brings to mind one last story from your book that I remember is about the woman who found a first edition hand-printed James Joyce book in the bottom of a crate somewhere. And how valuable is that? And she didn't even know it was there. And that happened over years, right? That things had just accumulated around it. And I think...

for all of us, there might be some of those little hidden treasures that we don't even know. It might not be actually a super valuable thing financially, but it might be valuable to you or to others personally and emotionally. Yeah, that is just gotten buried under some clutter and it's hard to find it or even remember that you have it. So there might be some great discoveries along the way as you take on the work of getting organized, both in your personal life and in your professional life. So thank you so much.

This has been a wonderful conversation. And I just want to say, Sonya, I'm so impressed with the work that you do and how you do it and the authenticity with which you show up for your clients and the way in which you're growing your business. It's exciting to see. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds for you and the company and the clients that you serve, because I think it has a tremendous impact on the world. So thank you very much for all that you do. Thank you, Julie. Yeah.

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