65. SPECIAL GUEST SERIES 3 OF 3 – ORGANIZING FOR THE FUTURE WITH THEA RANNEY

Thea ranney 3 of 3

Adrian Schermer   00:02

Hello future millionaires and welcome back to the get rich slow podcast we are your hosts Adrian Schermer, Rob Delavan and Lance Johnson. Good morning, gentlemen.

Robert Delavan   00:10

Good morning.

Lance Johnson   00:12

Good morning, everybody.

Adrian Schermer   00:13

You can find us online at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Amazon music, YouTube with video and Stitcher, among other streaming services. Today is episode three of three in our series with Thea Ranney, hi, Thea, how you doing?

Thea Ranney   00:28

I’m doing good, how are you guys doing?

Adrian Schermer   00:32

Thea is the owner of Thea’s organizing services and the powerhouse behind it and today’s episode is all about the future for her and her company and we got another beautiful visual aid to tie in here. It’s been a blast having you on the show. Today’s the final one and boy, here’s another just great before and after a kid’s room.

Thea Ranney   00:55

This was one of the most emotional jobs I’ve done. So the picture on top for the people who can see the visual portion of this feed is, the picture on top is something a lot of people don’t like to talk about. But this is hoarding. This is very typical standard hoarding. Walking into this little girl’s room, mom’s clothes were a little bit higher than my kneecap. The door where it is, it stayed there, it did not open did not close and a big part of doing this process was working extremely closely for months with the mom on downsizing and getting rid of stuff and then working on storage solutions to actually give her daughter her room back, which was her only goal and so it was amazing and I was actually lucky enough to be able to go back out this year and be able to do. This picture is about a year and a half old and we went back out in May just to do another quick purge. She was freaked out that it had gotten just as bad before it was nothing even near she barely had anything on the floor. But they just needed to have a refresher and just kind of go back through and get rid of the other things that we had set aside where if they didn’t use it in six months that needed to go. So we actually were able to get rid of those things because they weren’t used, which was amazing. So seeing the transformation in this one is huge for me, definitely and it’s even better now.

Robert Delavan   02:36

And for reference, how old was the little girl here?

Thea Ranney   02:39

When we started she was six.

Lance Johnson   02:43

She had like a bunk bed and you had to repurchase a new…

Thea Ranney   02:52

We bought a new bed, she really wanted to make this her daughter’s space because she had overtaken it for so long and just so other, hoarding is a topic of today. So just so everybody kind of knows my consultation with her when we first met. She was absolutely bawling to me because my biggest question working with anyone who’s hoarding is why are we taking this step now? And it’s not an insult? It’s a real question that I want to know the answer to. Her response to me and this is when she started crying was my daughter wakes up every morning, super excited because we’ve planned to clean and we’ve planned to get the house together that day and then by the end of the day, it doesn’t happen and by five o’clock, she is in my arms bawling to me that we couldn’t do this and we couldn’t make this happen and we didn’t clean the house and that’s why she actually reached out to me. So it may be hard to reach out when you have a situation like this and you feel at fault but it’s okay because that’s what we’re here to help fix.

Lance Johnson   04:00

All right, so Thea tell us about this book. So you’ve had two good books in the previous episode. Why is this one so important?

Thea Ranney   04:08

Because it is so good, again, hoarding is a big topic today. So Trevor Noah went through, he overcame so much to get to where he is, he literally started absolutely nothing and was thrown from moving vehicles and like all of these crazy things that happened to him just to try to keep him safe on a daily basis. So this book is amazing for overcoming any kind of personal obstacle in your life. It’s just an amazing thing to listen to.

Robert Delavan   04:41

It’s “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah

Lance Johnson   04:52

All right, so let me kick us off is first question, what are your three biggest goals for personally any business, you take it where you want to go.

Thea Ranney   05:03

So most of our goals are business wise because that allows us to do everything our personal life, so a big one is we are huge, actually, all of our goals are community related. We’re huge into the community and last year, we added hauling services on to what we do. We haul trash and donations and appliances and electronics and just literally everything and so a big thing that we are wanting to do because we are also friends with other small hauling companies is we want to yearly start getting together and rallying all of the small hauling businesses together and start doing a community cleanup once a year on areas that just seriously need to be cleaned up and with us living around Portland, that’s super easy for us to be able to do so. It’ll be great once that starts. Another one is and this one’s not community related, but we have two patents that we want to open up later for products related to the business. So we’ll be working on that and then the next one is our big end goal is we basically want to set up a giant warehouse, donations are the driving force behind our business, we are one of the few companies that will take away your donations without a fee. Unless it’s a big call, that’s a little different. But in general, we really want to make sure that the donations remain just that we want to make sure they remain a donation and so we have all kinds of fun outsourcing them currently, however, what we would like to do is be able to obtain a warehouse and create a non-profit and basically create a free store for anyone who can show that they’re having any kind of hardship and I say it that way because I don’t want it to just feel like low income communities are the only ones that would be welcomed. It’s not if you have a fire and you lost everything in your house, come see us, if you are a DV survivor and you’re starting over new, come shop at our store. Don’t just settle for the free stuff that people give you, feel free to come and shop for the things that you want to have in your home. It is such a huge thing mentally when you’re already dealing with something you feel super, super hard to be able to choose those things, super important. So that’s our third and biggest one for sure is we want to have that non-profit.

Lance Johnson   07:37

So you glossed over a little bit, not everybody our listeners know what DV stands for?

Thea Ranney   07:44

Domestic violence, men and women and children who have all been victims of DV, we want to make sure that since they’ve gotten out of this extremely hard situation that they have the opportunity to feel good about themselves moving forward and already dealing with all the turmoil they’re dealing with and choosing the things that surround you instead of selling those crap people give you is a big part of that, definitely.

Lance Johnson   08:11

So go through your three biggest goals just in a short.

Thea Ranney   08:14

So we want to do, I’m calling it the nonprofit warehouse, the store that’s the big one. We want to do community cleanup annually with other trash hauling companies and create a huge movement for that and then we have two products that we want to get patent, it’ll probably be next year by the time we get them patent and then really have those out on the market.

Adrian Schermer   08:46

All right, Thea what would you do if you knew you would not fail?

Thea Ranney   08:50

The warehouse store without question it would be opened yesterday if I knew it would be done without fail.

Robert Delavan   08:58

Interesting, what are some of the concerns there or fears?

Thea Ranney   09:03

Fears are, I have ran a lot of businesses, however, non-profit is not any of the ones on that spectrum and it is a whole different beast and being someone who’s done businesses and I’ve seen a lot of them fail as well, not my own just in general seeing businesses fail. It’s I think with the warehouse being our biggest end goal for sure if that failed, that would be a very hard thing to take. So taking my time making sure that it’s done properly and started the right way is worth it.

Robert Delavan   09:49

Okay, so last question we have for Thea is what are your plans here moving forward for growth?

Thea Ranney   09:58

To continue to be loud and obnoxious

Robert Delavan   10:03

You probably got that covered; you might have a couple of fellow customers here too, maybe even three…

Thea Ranney   10:12

Maybe but it’s one of those things where my biggest plans for growth, there’s two and one of them is to continue to network the way that it happen; so BNI as well as popping in on chamber meetings and doing all of the networking through Facebook that you can do, but actually creating connections and talking with people. By far, that’s the best way for anybody to grow their business, especially if you’re a service business, there’s nothing better you can do than that. But the other thing is that once we are officially fully nationally certified and everything else, we really want to start doing seminars and classes for hoarding. We want to make sure that we can bring a lot of awareness to the different types of hoarding, the different levels of hoarding and depending on what profession you’re and the different ways to actually deal with someone who hoards because I mean, I’m sure Rob is a realtor you know, as well hoarding all kinds of different service providers deal with people who hoard and it’s important to know how to do that in the right way and not be quote unquote grossed out by what you’re saying and typically, there’s nothing gross there to begin with. So that’s another big portion and if nothing else, that’s just for the stop the stigma, thought process that I have about hoarding and moving forward and people understanding how that looks.

Lance Johnson   11:49

Rob, I thought you could sell a house with hoarding.

Robert Delavan   11:54

I can and we have, but exactly, it’s definitely not top dollar is the problem and typically the input in my experience, the input for the cost and time and so forth with somebody like Thea, is well worth the higher sales price.

Thea Ranney   12:18

Absolutely and it’s one of those things where, you know while we’re going through dealing with hoard, we donate absolutely everything that’s worth being able to be donated, versus everything being trashed, which is extremely common with those situations. It’s a very different beast, for sure. I actually go out with realtors regularly when they get that dreaded phone call of please don’t judge my house and please don’t judge me. If you get that phone call, call me because I’ll go with you and while you assess the house, I assess the hoard and those are two very different things and making someone feel comfortable with anybody walking in their house. I mean, you’re just destined to have a good outcome from there

Lance Johnson   13:00

This isn’t a question, please don’t judge me but I’m looking for top dollar.

Thea Ranney   13:06

Pretty much a big problem is that depending on the kind of Ford you’ll have a lot of structural damage when it comes to hoarding. Like I said before, you know I’ve seen houses from the outside splitting at the same and that’s a very real thing and that’s very severe structural damage, still needs to be dealt with, still needs to be looked at and make sure that people know, but selling a house like that is a lot more complicated for sure.

Lance Johnson   13:30

So just the follow up on this for growth, is your plans to scale and you can’t be everywhere and how does that work and…

Thea Ranney   13:40

We can, too; so I mean, as of right now, we already travel all along the Western sea line and doing what I do. We were done in Arizona last year in California and Washington a lot. So there’s myself, my husband works for me full time our children are involved on projects that are safe for them to do and then we also have a team of several people that can come and help us deal with larger project jobs and we definitely want to be having I mean, if I could have a team of 20 people to do local work with that would be absolutely fantastic. So that’s what we’re building towards right now, for sure.

Lance Johnson   14:20

Awesome

Robert Delavan   14:21

Yeah, the scaling that’s gonna be really interesting, where you convert your passion for what you do and you’re giddy up being the horsepower driven business owner…

Thea Ranney   14:35

That’s the most accurate way to put that 1,000% I was like half asleep last night still writing down lists of things that need to be done, my husband just looked at me like he can’t stop counting no,

Robert Delavan   14:47

Looking forward to incredible things and I just hope to continue to be a little bit on long for the ride.

Thea Ranney   14:56

I don’t see that changing anytime soon, should be fine.

Adrian Schermer   15:01

All right, Thea thank you again this is episode three of three so we’re gonna have to say goodbye to you for now we’ll probably end up having you back though in the future. As we see your business grows. You’re getting pretty exponential results right now I know you’re super busy but if people want to get a hold, do where can they do that?

Thea Ranney   15:18

Everywhere 1,000%, queen of communication, so phone, call, text, email, all the random things through social media and my website, they all have different ways to reach out to me so theasorganizingservices.com is my email either one of our social media platforms if you go to @theasorganizing you’ll find us and then also our email which is amazingly comical theasos@outlook.com.

Adrian Schermer   15:48

Love it, fantastic, as always, you can find more information about our companies as well in the show notes if you’d like to reach out to me or Rob and Lance and then there’s links to Thea’s websites and social media on there as well go ahead and take a look at some of these before and after’s, they’re fantastic. Go to ROI-fa.com/events. To learn about what we’re doing locally. We’ve got our mix and mingle events, wine and mingle events, I should say. There’s a learn and grow on August 12th, a summer bash on the 20th and then later down the road. We’re gonna have some photos with Santa on the 12th of November. Thanks again, as always, for joining us on the get rich slow podcast. We look forward to seeing you next time, folks.

Lance Johnson   16:30

Thank you so much.

Robert Delavan   16:30

Thank you

Thea Ranney   16:32

Thank you