V. Low Consulting

I’m writing this because I think that as a consumer people should be warned of possible deficiencies in service before they hire. I had Vicky come to my house, I though the first half hour was free and that I would have the option of making up my mind about weather to hire her or not. She came in with the misconception that having work that day was a done deal for some reason. I felt bad that maybe I had given her that impression, so I let her work for three hours. In short in the three hours that she had, she created more chaos than what was there before. She said she needed more time, that if I had given her more time (and spent even more money I suppose) she could have gotten the job done, at the speed she works, it would have taken her several hours, she never gave me any kind of expectation of how much time it would take her. I’ve learned since that setting up expectations on how much time and how much furniture to buy is in general something that a professional organizer will do, if they don’t do this they may be trying to drag the process on so that it takes as many hours as possible. She said that given enough time she could have the place organized that day, but the truth is for her to actually get the job done I would have had needed some time to gather new organizational units for my apartment before she really could have done the job she claimed to be capable of.
She has a business as selling a organizational professional but there are a lot of ways in witch she is not at all professional. Once again she did not start with setting up expectations, in the end she found the back of an envelope (She didn’t even have a notebook.) and wrote down a bunch of pretty useless advice on how I need to buy bookshelves and something about new hangars. She told me I should sort through the many boxes that she left scattered around the apartment, along with the laundry. Nothing about organization, or tips on how to sort through the boxes. This was the conclusion after three hours and 255 dollars.
I have since read a book that you should start with the things that are the biggest time wasters and what’s causing the most chaos and find ways to manage that. For instance having a place to find your keys and wallet ect. Vicky did not start with any questions about the ways in witch I waste the most time. Instead Vicky had three hours so she just kind of took things out of my closet, moved things around in boxes and left laundry laying around, (she thinks she did a good job) she re hung the clothes so they looked nice but they were not organized, It took me twenty minutes to find a sweater the next day (She hung them in the back, since SF is cold it would make sense to hang them closer to the front). The thing about the closet is that I can just close the door, it was kind of a low priority — I seriously think someone who was a professional with enough experience to warrant 85 dollars an hour, would have known to start with something she could manage to get done in three hours, like setting up a system for making sure keys and important documents and papers don’t get lost and take up a lot of time to find.
And that leads me to another way she shows a lack of any kind of acumen at organizing, she assumed things were trash if there were papers at the bottom of a bag, she didn’t sort through them first. At the bottom of one bag that she had marked for trash was a tax document with my name and social security number on it. It had a duvet on top that I put on the sidewalk thinking someone might want it. I did not find the tax document until the next day, it was basically on the sidewalk in plain view. I only found one page, hopefully that’s the only page of it. Either way, her negligence put my identity is at risk. Another thing is that my drivers license, passport and social security card were missing, she had dumped them into the bottom of a box, but in the hour or so it took me to find them was stressful, I was left believing that all my identification papers were in the bottom of a trash can somewhere, mainly because Vicky showed me with the tax document that she can be negligent.
Looking back on this, I’m really quite relieved that it was only 250 dollars, if she had continued it would have been a lot more. She is not exactly fast.
In short there are organizers out there who are a lot better and a lot cheaper, and have good reviews. I have since hired someone who is way more capable than Vicky and charges half the amount.
Her website appears to be a mix of stock photos on one hand and pictures from her own home that she showed me on her cell phone, I’m not sure what if any actual experience she actually has outside her own home, and she only has this review. I don’t know where, if she has any, professional credentials come from.