Vol. 17, No. 34 $2.00 / Pubished Weekly Two Sections SERVING GREATER Watertown www.bizjournal.com/Watertown May 19, 2000 helps make order out of chaos 
by Robert Mullins
The old adage that a messy desk is the sign of a busy mind doesn't wash with organizer guru Maria Gracia. "There's no way that a desk could have papers all over it that anybody could really find what they are looking for quickly," says Gracia, owner of Get Organized Now!™, an organizing consulting business she runs out of her Brown Deer condo. "They may be able to find the paper eventually, but they are still wasting a lot of time." Through speeches, books, organizer products, personal consulting, a Web site and an e-mail newsletter, Gracia helps people find a place for everything and put everything in its place. To the right of her home computer is a plastic organizer for letters; to the left, one for pens and paper clips. As she sat on her couch talking to a visitor, she referred to notes with bullet points to make. But there's a line between organized and anal retentive that Gracia doesn't cross. "If there's a magazine sitting on the sofa, that's OK. No big deal," she says. People wrongly confuse being neat with being organized. "To be organized means you find everything you need when you need it and get everything done when it's due without chaos or stress," Gracia says. 
While many of her clients are homemakers, others are owners of home-based or other small businesses whose productivity is sapped by disorganization.
"If you have to climb over things to get to your desk, or if you can't even get your fingers into your filing cabinet, then you can use a little bit of help," Gracia said. "Being disorganized keeps you from doing more important things to help your business grow." Gracia provides other advice on how to manage time, organize computer files and keep e-mails from piling up. She also co-owns Effective Business Systems with her husband, Joe Gracia, who does marketing consulting out of their Brown Deer residence. The Get Organized Now!™ division was created in 1996, the year Maria moved to Watertown from the East Coast to be with Joe, whom she married in 1997. NO WASTED EFFORT She started her business by going to individuals' homes to straighten out their housekeeping or home offices. But in time, it became difficult to keep up with the demand of making as many as three client visits a week. The trips averaged eight hours each, plus travel time. That's when Gracia discovered the Web as a way of disseminating that same advice to a broader audience. In late 1998, she launched http://www.getorganizednow.com, her Web site for providing organizing advice and selling her organizing products, which sell for $15 to $40. One is a book, Finally Organized, Finally Free, which she and her husband self-published last year. Organization is planning that helps avoid wasted effort, she preaches. That being the case, Gracia went to the Web to ask visitors if they would buy an advice book before she wrote it. "I didn't want to spend all this time writing the book if no one was going to read it," she says. "The first time I put up (a mention of the book on the site) I had 50 pre-publication sales on the first day. Now I was under the gun because I had to write this book." "The book itself was well-organized," says Amy Shellhase, Terre Haute, Ind., who reviewed Gracia's book for Digital Women Review, a Web site for women entrepreneurs launching businesses on the Internet. "Anything you can think of, she can organize it." INTERNET BOOST Besides the nearly 200-page advice book, Gracia also sells an organizer, a bill paying system and a holiday planner. The Web helped Get Organized Now!™ take off last year, Gracia says.
Born in Jersey City, N.J., Gracia's mother was a bookkeeper who did the accounting for a couple of small businesses. She kept the house Gracia grew up in as straight as the ledgers. "If there is a knick-knack just slightly out of place, that's it. My mother is kind of like that," she says. Nielsen Media Research is like that, too. Gracia worked in the New York City offices of the TV ratings service for 10 years, beginning in 1986. Nielsen has strict accounting and organizational systems in place to track ratings and other media research. Gracia absorbed all of that while on the job. Not everyone has to organize a company as big as Nielsen. But even the smallest project can be daunting unless you do it the Gracia way, breaking it into smaller, more manageable goals. "People are really seeking that kind of information out to live without so much chaos and frustration in their life," Gracia says. (c) Copyright May, 2000 - The Business Journal Return to the Get Organized Now!™ About Us Page Return to the Get Organized Now!™ Home Page |