My family was in shock. I spent 4 (FOUR) straight hours deep cleaning our house and I was still in a good mood.😄
Typically when I’ve gone on a ‘cleaning rampage’ (their words, not mine) in the past, I can become...let’s just say, not my best self. When you’re a busy, working mom, you don’t have a lot of downtime which means cleaning projects happen on the weekends. Or not at all.
So historically, when the moment struck and I could no longer handle the clutter (or more likely, we were expecting dinner guests 😂), I would tell the whole family to block their calendar for a Saturday morning purge session.
This would often result in my quickly realizing we were barely peeling back the onion, getting overwhelmed with the amount of work to be done, being frustrated with entire family that they weren’t just naturally tidy people, and then becoming even more agitated because I was going to have to spend even more of my day doing something I didn’t want to do in the first place. They would be equally thrilled with me.😠
Ugh.😩
Well thank goodness those days have ended. I discovered a better solution.
It’s not a cleaning fairy 🧚🏼, but it’s close.
Cue the professional organizer.
This is a person who, like me, loves transformations, they just use a different means to get their fix, namely clutter.
We recently became empty nesters (aka “free birds”), and we’re also in the midst of renovating a 100 year old house, which we’ll move to once the renovation is complete. The combination of those two things means we currently live in a house that was meant to accommodate a family of five, and all their stuff, and we’re on a timeline to get it cleaned out so we can sell it.
If you’ve ever moved, you understand how daunting it is to prepare a ‘well-lived-in home’ for sale. It takes a lot of weekends, and many months, to wade through every nook and cranny and decide what to keep, donate, or ditch.
Which is why I thought a friend’s suggestion to call in a professional was brilliant.
Because although I could do this job myself, the reality is I wouldn’t have until I was down to the last minute. That would’ve created so much unnecessary stress😣 and resulted in a less than stellar job.
Working with a professional organizer held me accountable to make time to do the work in reasonable blocks of hours which we scheduled ahead of time over the period of a few months. She made the process easier and faster because she has ‘systems’ and knows the best practices.
And I’m not going to lie, having a ‘neutral party’ involved helped to quickly resolve any differences in opinion between the household ‘stakeholders’. 🤝
I think my reasons for hiring a professional organizer are the same reasons many of our clients engage us to help them manage their data. It’s overwhelming, they don’t have time to get it done, it’s not fun, and it can’t wait if they want to do effective marketing.
It’s not that they can’t do the work themselves, they just know they shouldn’t be doing it because it’s not the best use of their time.
The opportunity cost of not achieving their desired results is far more expensive than the cost of getting help.
Ensuring we have clean, accurate data is also one of the first steps in incorporating AI into our businesses. Emily Grotkin, Denamico’s VP of Client and Partner Success, spoke to this point specifically during her presentation, “Garbage In, Garbage Out: 4 Steps to Clean Data” during HubSpot’s Inbound conference last month (you can get the slides here if you missed it).
Machine learning AI is dynamic and gives us better and more accurate results, based on what it learns. So that also means that if it’s learning from bad data, it’s going to give us inaccurate answers.
Which is why Emily was so enthusiastic about HubSpot’s Breeze product announcements during a recent RevOps Champions podcast. She believes, as I do, that these tools will “revolutionize business operations and drive productivity”.
For example, with Breeze Intelligence, HubSpot can help identify duplicates, fill data gaps, and enrich existing data (a ‘professional organizer’ for our database✨). This not only maintains data integrity but also empowers sales and marketing teams to make informed decisions more quickly.
So for those of us who are constantly looking for better solutions to make life easier, we’re lucky to be living in the age of AI.
Our job in this is to be ready for it. And that means getting our data’s house in order.
Best wishes for a fabulous last quarter of 2024! 📈
Kristin
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Kristin Dennewill
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