At age 30, Vicki Norris is the president of her own locally grown company, and now she’s positioning that company to reach a national audience.
                  
“We want to be the Krispy Kreme of professional organizing brands,” said Norris, a Sherwood resident. 
                               
Norris is the founder of Restoring Order, a professional organizing business based in Sherwood. This year she’s appearing on national television, beginning a Restoring Order product line and relaunching her Web site.

“I’ve always been somebody to think big,” she said.

Norris’ organizing philosophy involves the client in creating sustainable clutter-free systems.

“I really see a gap in the marketplace,” she said. “Everything we’re building here is totally innovative.”

The company’s motto is “Reclaim Your Life,” and Norris has had people call her panicking and begging for help in reclaiming their lives and their space.

“More than anything, our company’s about how organization is absolutely much more than ‘a place for everything and everything in its place,’” Norris said. “Organization’s about investment in quality of life.”

She and her team of organizing consultants work with residential clients, corporate offices and home-based businesses. Norris also books speaking engagements, appears on local television and publishes a company e-newsletter.

Her product line, expected to launch in February, includes organizational tools that aren’t available on the market now — her products are not, she said, “the nasty black stacking trays that crack and break and have no room for a label.”


Getting bigger

Restoring Order is five years old, and in 2003, Norris restructured it and added employees, including two consultants.

“I’ve trained them, and I believe if we send the other two, you’ll get the same services as if you hire me.”

She said her company is now the only professional organizing firm in the Pacific Northwest. The other organizing companies, Norris said, are sole proprietorships, like hers used to be.

The additional consultants are Dawn Grillo and Katie Skagerberg. Other members of the company are Kristi Dibbern, executive assistant, and Stacey Weerasinghe, client services manager. Norris’ husband Trevor is “the resident volunteer.” He has been building the Restoring Order product prototypes in the garage.

She said she isn’t prepared to franchise the company nationally, but that could be a possibility eventually.

“We’re building a national brand,” she said. “We really believe Restoring Order is on the cusp of going national, definitely with the products and the media, and we’ll see how services go.”


Combatting chaos

So what does a professional organizing consultant do? Norris said she and her colleagues start every project with a space tour of the house or office. It’s a causes and costs of disorder evaluation.

“We go in and we start from scratch,” she said. “We look at what’s going on in this room and what should be going on.”

The Restoring Order client, Norris said, should be someone who is ready to learn good stewardship of stuff, rather than a quick-fix seeker.

“We’re looking for the client who understands that chaos is costing you something, and because it’s costing you something, you’d be willing to invest in change.”

There are two major parts to any Restoring Order project — unburying the backlog and then moving forward with systems that will manage and maintain order.

“There’s a wonderful ripple effect of what organization can do for people,” Norris said. “You know you’re really touching them.”


On TV

Norris is no stranger to television. She does a monthly segment on organization for AM Northwest on the third Tuesday of every month. But live television is a little different from her latest gig, a spot as a regular professional organizer on HGTV’s “Mission: Organization.” She is featured in the first episode of the third season, scheduled to begin airing this spring. The episodes are based on “transforming environments,” Norris said. The show tracks four days of reorganization of a particular space.

The episode she has done so far featured a garage mess. It was filmed in 10 days, a shorter span than usual because Norris had to get back to her Sherwood business.

“Garages are really interesting, because often they are a subject of contention between husband and wife,” said Norris.

While she uses her regular clients for AM Northwest, Norris will be working with Philadelphia-area clients every time she is in a “Mission: Organization” episode. With live TV like AM Northwest, Norris said the adrenaline is flowing and if you mess up, you have to keep going.

The HGTV episode was full of takes and retakes, and Norris said because of time constraints, she tried to condense as much information as possible into her remarks on camera.

Norris graduated with honors from the University of Puget Sound with a major in communications, and she has lived in Sherwood since 1996. She was in real estate and office management prior to founding Restoring Order in 1999. Norris is the president of the state branch of the National Association of Professional Organizers.

“Our company has flourished,” she said. “We’re just building on that success and making sure we have purposeful growth. It’s been great.”

For more information, see www.restoringorder.com, call 503-625-5774 (1-888-625-5774 for outside the area), or e-mail Info@RestoringOrder.com.