63. SPECIAL GUEST SERIES 1 OF 3 – A PASSION FOR ORGANIZING WITH THEA RANNEY

Thea Ranney 1 of 3

Adrian Schermer   00:02

Hello future millionaires and welcome back to the get rich slow podcast. We’re your hosts Adrian Schermer, Rob Delavan, Mr. Brilliant at the basics Lance Johnson, good morning, gentlemen.

Robert Delavan   00:11

Good morning.

Lance Johnson   00:12

Good morning, Thea I’m excited to have you on today.

Adrian Schermer   00:17

Folks, you can catch us on Apple podcast, Spotify, audible, Amazon Music, YouTube, where we’ve got video as well and Stitcher, among other platforms. As Lance mentioned today, our special guest is Thea Ranney. Thea, thanks so much for joining us today, how are you doing?

Thea Ranney   00:34

I’m doing great, my pleasure, thanks for having me.

Adrian Schermer   00:36

Awesome and Thea is with Thea’s organising Services. Today we’re going to talk to her about her business. She’s a professional organiser located in the Portland metro and this is another one, I love that we find these jobs that I didn’t really know existed in our podcast and I’ve been amazed the amount of demand that you’ve just been slammed with, it’s really like a high need service.

Thea Ranney   00:59

Yes, we get everything from needing to pack for vacations to moving frantically and an emergency pack out. So I mean, we do everything in between. So it’s been crazy busy lately, it’s wonderful.

Adrian Schermer   01:11

I love it. Well, let’s learn about what made you into the person you are today

Thea Ranney   01:17

I am ready for that. Oh, the compound effect, such a good book if you guys have thought…

Robert Delavan   01:24

Tell us about why you picked this book as an important book that helps you in your life or your business?

Thea Ranney   01:31

So I mean, it’s definitely business, but it’s all around. Lately, I’ve been all about just becoming a better person and better at everything that I do, which includes just living and so the compound effect is so wonderful and the majority of the people that I meet, we’re all trying to better our lives and make these better progresses and moving forward and all of these things in the compound effect literally just talks to you about doing that and not beating yourself up about all of the little bad choices that you make. But instead giving yourself praise for all of the small, amazing things that you’re doing, that are eventually going to change your life down the road because everything’s a compound effect together, which is huge and what I do.

Robert Delavan   02:11

But give me an example of the some of the little things that impact your life, like, I’m a financial guy. So I think of financial, but it’s not always just financial that that means you’re successful. It can be personal things you do and making sure that you leave the house in the morning that everything’s cleaned, the dishes are put away the bed is made, just what is it for you?

Thea Ranney   02:33

You know and it’s funny that it’s about finances because this is one of my best examples is about finances and it’s actually if I’m not mistaken, they actually referenced this in the book and I started doing this at home and it was an immediate effect and I hate coffee. I don’t know if anyone else out there feels the same way but I iced mocha and so I was buying those from the store every day when I started trying to get caffeinated on a regular basis and was wasting so much money. It was unreal and because we were trying to get a hold of our finances our compound effect was we bought a coffee and iced mocha machine for me to have at home and make iced mocha here every day and the cost is that is by far less than what it was with us going out and actually purchasing iced mocha every day. So that one small thing that we do now every day has a huge compound effect on every day and how our money is managed.

Robert Delavan   03:30

Super simple, I love that.

Lance Johnson   03:37

So I’ll kick this off, did you always know you wanted to be a professional organiser or did something hit you?

Thea Ranney   03:45

Well, yes and no. So kind of like I think what Adrian was saying earlier, there’s a lot of, you guys are getting people on here, you didn’t know that career existed. This career didn’t exist. Back in the day when I was younger. I mean, this didn’t start until 1984 is when I actually became a profession for people and so when I was growing up, I would organise my friend’s house I was always the favourite of all of my friends as parents, we would go and organise their place or do little projects like that around their household and organising has just it’s been a part of my life forever. My mother was a realtor and we used to do short sales back in the day and property clear outs and we still do that today, which is super funny and it’s just kind of cascaded it seems like into where we are now but back in the day, you know, early 80s this was not a thing and so now it’s becoming a lot more prevalent. I remember when I first got started I was really excited. I thought I was gonna be the front runner and I was starting something new and nobody had done it before and that was not the case been around for…

Lance Johnson   05:03

All right, so being an organiser, give us some examples of how you really impacted people’s lives. So you got into this career, it’s a professional thing, you know, where’s the win for you, that you see that just get you up in the morning.

Thea Ranney   05:23

My when is when, so we’re getting ready to actually do very emotional job coming up and it’s not necessarily hoarding by any means, however, this woman is, so an emotionally broken down because of the state of her house and it is just emotionally done so much to her and when I went and did our consultation, I was there for two hours, which a lot of people know is very long time for consultation just to do a walkthrough and by the time we were done, she was bawling. As soon as I told her, I was like, no, we got this, we can handle this for you and get your life back in the way that your brain will appreciate it and she just melted and started bawling and that’s why I do what I do 1,000% it is a need but it’s absolutely a need, it’s not a luxury and it needs to be treated like that for sure.

Adrian Schermer   06:26

Okay, I like this one because I feel like the answers can vary a lot depends on who you are, what advice would you give your younger self?

Thea Ranney   06:39

So much of my life, I have not trusted myself or trusted my thoughts or the way that I would do things because we’re kind of taught growing up that there’s a right way to do this and that’s the right way and that’s the only way and that’s not really true and I really wish that when I was younger, I would have trusted the things that I knew to be true a lot more and that’s without a doubt the biggest thing I would have told myself growing up is just to trust who you are and the thoughts that you have and all the things that you want to do as stupid as they sound just do them and it’s okay and everything’s going to turn out fine.

Robert Delavan   07:18

You know, there’s a theme there, like this morning, Lance talked about, just trust the process of going through a bathroom remodel, I talked about, just trust the model, it takes me two to five years to get people to where I think they would be financially and they’re savers instead of spenders and you just got to trust the progress. It just that some people can do it in two years, some people it takes five years. I think it’s great advice is understand the process and trust is a hard thing. Especially if you’re a distrustful person, I’m not saying you are anything but people are but once you can get there, the process is half the battle on everything we do.

Lance Johnson   08:01

That’s a big deal with, it starts with that self-trust, right and then you put the people in place that around you that you can rely on to.

Adrian Schermer   08:18

That’s why we do pauses because one of us was talking so yeah, we can have this slice and dice out.

Lance Johnson   08:23

Well, it’s just moved to the next question and we can…

08:29

[Adrian, Lance and Rob talking to each other 08:29 – 14:18]

Robert Delavan   14:19

Okay, the last question we have for you today Thea is what kind of schooling education did you endure and I think we carefully use that word endure to get you on the path you’re on now.

Thea Ranney   14:46

None, so there is now, there is schooling that you can do to become nationally certified, which means you’re allowed to work in every major city in the United States. I am like to 10 hours away from being certified in every state, which is super awesome but in regards to schooling to prepare you for this no, there’s nothing. I feel that all I’ve had, I have a very eclectic background in my professional history and I feel that I did accounting and payroll for the state, I feel like that I can handle any office and any amount of paperwork that you throw at me. I also used to do audit preparations for small businesses. So I would go from business to business, go through all of their past files for like seven years and organize them and do all of the things and then when growing up my like I said earlier, my mother and my grandmother were real estate agents and they were the top realtors in the state of Oregon and a super small town for like four years running and working alongside a realtor as a child, you learn all kinds of things that random people just don’t know and that’s a very real thing and so yeah, I just I have an extremely eclectic background and that’s what really allows me to work with the serious variety of clientele that I have and be able to help them in all the different kinds of ways and phases that I do. So there is schooling, there was not schooling when I decided to embark on this professionally, but there is now.

Robert Delavan   16:25

So you’re 10 hours away, what does that look like? What did you have to go through on that side of things, was it an hourly X number of hours or organizing board?

Thea Ranney   16:38

Yes, there is so it’s called NAPO. National Association of Professional Organization and so it’s just to become a professional organizer, you have to have 1500 hours of paid organizing work and then once you have that and you can prove that, then you can actually take their courses and start learning about specialty skills. So, which I plan on doing all of them, I believe there’s about 50 different programs that you can actually get signed up for and target. I have a lot of my clients, I work with a lot of hoarding clients and I’ve been obsessed with psychology most of my life. So that’s going to be a huge thing that we embark on once we get to that stage for sure, but there’s ADHD stuff for you to really focus on there. There are so many different classifications of specialties that you can do with organizing; it’s something a lot of people don’t know.

Robert Delavan   17:36

So this concept and we’ve talked about this on other episodes, but this concept of like, you learn certain things in school, or trainings or what have you and then really, you don’t get into the meat of it until you really do it right? You got to get into the deep end and keep your head above water. So that background that you have, which is incredible. I know you’ve run other businesses. I mean, it allows you to empathize with whatever problem you’re solving, you know tackling for the client.

Thea Ranney   18:15

Oh, yeah 1,000% I have I mean, [Inaudible 18:20] company for 10 years. So plumbing issues we deal with a lot shockingly enough with what I do. I did disaster restoration for a few years so especially living in Pacific Northwest that comes in handy a lot because it’s amazing how often I go into someone’s house and then like you have mould damage, there’s been water damage around here and you need to call your insurance company and actually help walk them through how to deal with their insurance company dealing with an insurance claim. So yeah, I’m one of those people I’m a very firm believer in college. I think that it’s my mother was like a professional student she wanted she went to college for everything she just wanted to learn and the stuff that she knew is it’s unsurpassable by the amount of people that I’ve met, she knew so much stuff, so much random stuff and had such deep knowledge of so many different things. She was able to help almost anyone that came around her and I feel like that’s definitely a big portion of how I live my life. It seems like but firm believer in college, if you are going to go to college for something specific my advice as someone who has, I’m also a licensed massage therapist. Something that goes with that is interning, if you guys are going to college for something specific please intern while you’re going to school because you will learn more from that then you will, you need to know the basics and that stuff you learn in school and that’s super important but learning the job is entirely different than school, entirely different.

Robert Delavan   19:56

So what you’re saying is you don’t want recommend somebody getting out of college with no job experience and $100,000 worth of student loan debt and starting a business?

Thea Ranney   20:06

No

Robert Delavan   20:08

Like I don’t actually like this work…

Thea Ranney   20:12

My husband’s a prime example of that. My husband is a trained chef by trade. He went to culinary school for a while and it wasn’t until he got into the intern portion of that entire program that he’s like, I hate this and by then, he had already signed over all of his contracts, all of his student loans and didn’t want to finish after that, because he hated it so much. It’s important, whatever you guys are wanting to do before you go and you just go bankrupt, trying to go to college for it, in turn first somewhere and make sure it’s something you really enjoy because there’s a million different aspects to whatever career path it is you’re choosing and making sure you like 90% of them is pretty important.

Robert Delavan   20:56

Novel idea, I didn’t know that we would meander our way into college counts career counseling, but here we are incredibly valuable, especially for our younger listeners.

Thea Ranney   21:12

Yeah, I went to school for cosmetology, for massage therapy, for accounting and I can tell you right now, I like being a business owner, regardless of what that means in regards to what I went to school for. So, look into stuff before you just go there, it’s important.

Adrian Schermer   21:36

All right, the wonderful introduction to you and what you do and your theories on life really enjoyed hearing how education is more than just where you went to school too, you’re drawing on a lot of different life experiences. Where can folks find you and your business?

Thea Ranney   21:52

Everywhere, I’m everywhere, on Facebook, you can find us at Thea’s organizing services and hauling, yes, we have hauling services on our businesses as well, which is why we changed how it looks on Facebook. On Instagram we’re @Theasorganising and then we have of course, our website Theasorganisingservices.com and my email, which honestly I need to say this out loud. I was super shocked about this. So it’s TheasOS@outlook, it’s also [email protected] and then my phone number is 541-806-4734 and I answer day and night, so call me if you ever need me.

Robert Delavan   22:37

Unless you’re trying to sell you a home Auto Warranty

Adrian Schermer   22:42

Awesome theasorganizingservices, you can find our websites. Me and Rob and Lance are available in the show notes of the link you through. Again, thanks so much Thea for your time. This is episode one of three. We’re going to be continuing this series on the next two episodes learning more about where your business is at now and where it’s headed in the future and coming up for events, again, our site ROI-fa.com/events that’ll bounce you through Lance’s site, where we post all of our calendar events coming up. I know there’s a learning grow on August 12th, summer bash on August 20, some photos with Santa on the 12th and there’s always some sippin mingle events and they’re too great opportunity to network and meet people and we usually do some educational stuff in there as well with different speakers, just adding value.

Robert Delavan   23:35

Well, thank you so much for listening. This was episode one of three with Thea and we’ll look forward to number two and getting to know you better Thea, thank you.

Thea Ranney   23:45

Thank you