Someone asked me the other day, via the amazing world of social media, how do they find a declutterer near them?
They were down south and I’m in Sheffield, not very practical for me to travel down there to help them with their decluttering.
There are a couple of ways you can do this, the first is using any search engine, pop in declutterer and wherever your location is, and that can bring you up some results.
But there is another way, and this way is a better way because there is an association. So it’s the association of professional declutterers and organisers.
On their website (www.APDO.co.uk) there is a find an organiser search function. There you can find somebody who is near you, you can also search for specialisms, so example if they work with people with hoarding behaviours or dementia or their Marie Kondo trained, all sorts of different searches that you can do on that site.
But what APDO do as an organisation is they actually verify members.
I am a member of APDO and I have to go through a process to make sure that I’ve got the correct insurance documents in place, I’ve got to make sure that I am ICO registered for the for the data side of my business, and that I’m not just you know treating things badly.
I also have to make sure that I approve any training to be registered with them, so I have to give them evidence of it – so it’s a verification process which gives you an extra level of security.
There may be people out there calling themselves professional organisers, who are just not up to par, it’s not for me to say that that’s definitely the case. But because of the verification that we go through becoming APDO member it means that you’ve got an extra level of security, an extra level of peace of mind that the people on there have actually gone through some checking procedures.
We’re also a great community and and looking forward to the conference that I’m going to soon, because we all help each other out. What we do is if somebody doesn’t know something, we’ll pop a question into our private group and we’ll say “Anybody know how I should deal with this?” “Or where we can get rid of this?” It gives us access to a whole world of information that we wouldn’t have just being on our own. And that can be really really valuable for the clients too.
So please use the function on the APDO site so www.APDO.co.uk and find an organiser local to you, and hopefully they’ll be able to help you.