This is part one of a two-part episode about hiring a professional organizer to help you move. Sonya Weisshappel is CEO and founder of New York-based Seriatim, a professional organizer and inventory management firm. Sonya discusses the importance of knowing what you have in order to determine what to keep, sell or donate. Whether you're downsizing, moving or have had a death in the family, knowing what you have helps you manage insurance premiums and storage fees.
Sonya Weisshappel, CEO and founder of Seriatim (seriatim.net) was born and raised in San Francisco. When she was 13, her parents moved to New York, and living on Central Park West gave Sonya a whole new vision of herself in the world...especially when her dad died a year later. It taught her empathy, a key skill in dealing with people in her business, who call her when they don't know where to start.
Proudly dyslexic, Sonya founded Seriatim in 1999, when she was at a loss for writing out a resume and applying to jobs in the usual way.
But she'd learned the primal skills of organization from her mother, who handled her aunt's design business in San Francisco, from a summer job at a Brooklyn table linens business (and where she learned to rub elbows with Bloomingdale's, Saks and other high-end retailers) and in Hawaii, where she worked for a fish and fruit exporter.
In this episode, we discuss what's in storage, and how much do you pay?
Appraisals help you understand what to keep, sell or donate. Knowing what you have helps you not lose valuable possessions, and not have them stolen. In part 2 we deal with household help and how having a full inventory of what you own can protect you.
Insurance premiums may be way overblown if you don't know what's in that storage locker. Whether inheritances or flea market finds, know what you have so you can understand its value and whether you want to save what you have.
Yes, no and maybe piles help you organize your basic things like books and "miscellaneous" drawers.
In part 2, we delve deeper into the value of keeping a list of what's in your home, especially when you hire help. How to organize your stuff in order to cut insurance premiums. The value of inventory management when it comes to saving money.
The audio is a little crinkly in part 1. Part 2 is clearer. Check out the transcript--and email Christi--if you have any questions.
Learn more about Sonya and Seriatim, professional organizing and inventory management experts : seriatim.com
Places mentioned in this episode:
San Francisco
New York City
Manhattan
Central Park West
Brooklyn
Hawaii
Music by Eves Blue
Want more? Contact your host, Christi Cassidy, at christi@movingalongpodcast.com
Moving Along - Ep. 6 - Sonya Weisshappel
[00:00:00] Christi: Welcome to Moving Along, an exploration of travel, moving and life transitions today. We have a very, very special guest, Sonya Weisshappel founder, and CEO of New York-based Seriatim, professional organizing and inventory management experts
Sonya is president of the New York Council of Relocation Professionals and was the first organizer to be accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. She was recently featured in the New York Times. And over the last 23 years has worked with thousands of celebrity and ordinary clients who need help understanding their stuff.
She is also the author of the forthcoming book, Confessions of a Chaos Whisperer. Welcome Sonya.
[00:00:51] Sonya: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me it's full circle to have met in the past and to come back [00:01:00] and to be involved in all the creations that you do. So. Oh,
[00:01:05] Christi: it's great to have you. That's right. We've met more than 20 years ago when you helped me organize my books. When I was living in Chelsea in a one bedroom, 475 square foot apartment before Nan and I moved to Santa Fe, then I guess it was about five years ago.
Now you are the person I called to help when we were trying to find a moving company to move back East. And it was a great success because we made it and have enough space for all this stuff. But I want to ask you, you grew up in San Francisco and moved to New York. When you were 13, you moved to Central Park West with your mom and dad.
And what did travel and moving mean to you as a child?
[00:01:57] Sonya: Oh, as a 13 year old, it meant. [00:02:00] It was, it was both it was very bittersweet. It was both exciting and also really sad because that was such an awkward age to be leaving childhood best friends and routines, which I had grown up with in San Francisco to come to the East Coast, to be thrust into a new school.
And even a new way of going to class because in San Francisco, I was in a school that you sat at your desk and the teachers rotated in New York. You went room to room between periods and everyone in New York, all the students had so many more experiences. I felt so sheltered as a child. I wasn't.
And as aware of Europe as I was of the Orient, given that I grew up on the West Coast. It was bittersweet. [00:03:00] I'm grateful for that experience, but it was an awkward age. 13 is an awkward time with nothing else going on and then a change of location added to it. And then unfortunately, a lot of life events that also changed.
My life, so not, not a a hundred percent positive time, but I'm grateful for it.
[00:03:22] Christi: That's your dad died not long after you moved to New York
[00:03:26] Sonya: True it was about nine months after we moved to New York. We were living in temporary housing and He flew back to the west coast to have a meeting and had an episode that started a chain of events for medical appointments, which ultimately led to a diagnosis of being terminally ill.
And so just the coming to grips with the new city, a new way of life, and then losing The [00:04:00] kind of the family unit having no siblings and just two parents. Our dog even died the day we found out we were moving to New York. So it was not, it was a rough year. But it gives me an incredible empathy to people on the move and people in life transitions because.
They may put on a stoic face, but there's a lot going on in the undercurrent. I mean, even when you move to and from west to east and back it's like a dull pain that goes through your head.
[00:04:34] Christi: It's a combination of, you don't know what's going to happen next and, all the excitement I imagine empathy is probably one of your strongest skills in your skillset. Would you agree?
[00:04:48] Sonya: I actually didn't value it for a long time. I always thought that that was just everyone's way, but it has come to be [00:05:00] very much our secret sauce. The team that I hired. They all have to have that ability to not judge, to accept someone where they're at and to be really good huggers COVID aside.
But to be people who can hold someone, when they find the top of a wedding cake and their husband's deceased, you know, or have to touch their late parents. Belongings and it just sets off a series of memories and tears or in a divorce sometimes anger. You just have to have the ability to to, to see the person as a human and to help them from where they are.
So, yes, empathy is crucial.
[00:05:49] Christi: I want to go back to how you got into the business of professional organizing you worked in Brooklyn, right? For a linen [00:06:00] importer. then went to Hawaii with a fish and fruit exporter, and these seem to be seminal experiences in the formation of your professional life.
[00:06:12] Sonya: Stringing together the pearls of experience into a succinct resume was not an easy task.
And having grown up in San Francisco with a mother who ran her older sister's architectural interior design company, my whole childhood was after school working in the interior design architecture. You know, double checking sample books and being onsite during installations that logistical management and experience of all the moving parts with vendors gave me the opportunity to have some level of knowledge when I was hired by.
the linen company for the [00:07:00] sewing the shaping, the selling the production and warehousing of table linens and his accounts and the shipping of all of that was again, logistics and conversations with what people really need. And then being in Hawaii, working with the fruit exporter I also worked with Fossil Watches, and Napier jewelry for a sales rep, which my job was to go around and organize the displays, make sure that their inventory that had just shipped and arrived at the store actually was out on the floor.
To be sold it's business 1 0 1. You can't sell it if it's not visible to the clients and potential customers. So all of those experiences were the foundation for my creation of a company, but truthfully the. [00:08:00] Post-college and having a film major and being able to learn with my eyes and have really specialized in kind of continuity issues within films and the production of film, which was again, logistics and timeline, and taking apart the pieces and stringing it back up to tell the story, although you may not have shot it that way.
I love that. Really what I do, and I could not write a resume. It was the time pre-internet pre email, where you actually had to get the typewriter out and type the resume with whiteout and fold the paper and mail the cover letter. And I just didn't have enough self-confidence or ability to string those pearls back together into a succinct resume.
And so I started a company.
[00:08:54] Christi: That's so great. How old were you?
[00:08:56] Sonya: 23.
[00:08:57] Christi: Wow. That's like. [00:09:00] But like you say, you have this foundation and you watched your mom do all this, and you had this actual experience and you also say that you're proudly dyslexic. Right. And that probably contributed to not wanting to get out that a good old Selectric typewriter.
[00:09:20] Sonya: Exactly. And not knowing how to, you know, and, and really knowing that. Formatted on a page because it was visual, but not knowing what to say to sell. And I think being 23, you don't always have the self-confidence but you also don't have the awareness you feel more invincible and it was like, sure, I can do this.
And I did not know how hard it was to own a company, but I'm 51 now. So it's almost 30 years of running a company. And I know a lot more than I did when I started, you know, so [00:10:00] for sure, I'm grateful for the experience. And I think if I had known how to write a resume, I don't think I would have created the company
[00:10:08] Christi: It's like this level of faith that leads us hither and Yon. You kind of believe in that too. The notion of karma fate, right?
[00:10:17] Sonya: I do. I think As my father passed my mom's older sister is a geriatric nurse. She has two sisters, one's the designer and one's a geriatric nurse.
Her being present while my father illness was running, its course was very helpful emotionally for my mom and I to have someone who actually understands the changes in one's body and needs. And when he was really getting to a place of, of going to take his final breaths.
Within that day, at one point we were sitting around him singing songs and praying and just telling stories. [00:11:00] And at one point I just saw. Like a Wolf like smoke, like like the jellyfish kind of, it just came up from his belly and sat there for a little while, and then it just dissipated.
And as a 14 year old, not with a lot of experiences like that, it made me realize that we are. More than our shell of our body. And that started a much more spiritual outlook for my future years. I really do believe that we're an essence and that sometimes you meet someone and you immediately adore them and you could talk to them forever.
I think that that's someone you must have known and another time, and sometimes you meet someone and you have a visceral reaction that you can't stand them. And that doesn't happen very often for me, but that's every now and then I have to [00:12:00] take that as a warning that that's just someone I'm not supposed to be around.
And so that being highly sensitive or that impact piece for the work is also tuning into. The people that come across your path and the opportunities. I mean, here we are playing and talking and sharing and those opportunities don't come in unless you're open to them and believe that things will unfold the way that they're supposed to be.
[00:12:29] Christi: You say that most people call you when they don't know where to begin where do you suggest people start to better understand what they have and how to make sense of their stuff?
[00:12:41] Sonya: There's typically an underlying. Crisis for lack of a better word. There's a, there is a major change happening in their world, which requires some of their attention. And if your attention is finite and suddenly[00:13:00] your day to day practice is being. Drained because you have to pay attention to something you weren't prepared to pay attention to.
Other things start to fall apart. So if God forbid a parent passes or has taken ill and suddenly you're distracted with having to deal with care or arrangements for a funeral or cleaning out in this state, your work and your family life and your. Self care may take a backseat for the time of that project.
So when someone calls and says, I don't know where to begin, it's often a conversation of what's happening. What's really happening for you. What's going on, or what are you trying to avoid happening and where do you want to be? Because. That stuff and people's time are normally [00:14:00] at odds and that's when I get the phone call.
[00:14:02] Christi: Would you say that's part of the change that you're trying to create in the world is to, I think you said it to help people have a little more time without stress, and to be together with one another, without having to worry about.
[00:14:16] Sonya: Yes, I think, if you were on a boat and you hit rough waters and the captain didn't know where to get the life preservers or equipment that would help save people's lives.
Or it was buried somewhere underneath piles of something that would be bad. And if you went into God forbid the emergency room and the emergency room had piles and piles of other things around and they couldn't actually get to what they needed to operate. Those would be two circumstances that w lives would be at risk.
And I know that people's [00:15:00] household goods and property at their offices is not a matter of life and death, but when you put yourself in circumstances that are challenging and by not knowing what is where people's. Fight or flight is initiated in their brain as if they're in a dramatic situation and they stop being able to remember and to see and things start to get more nerve wracking.
So I remember silly, but I remember I had a little black cat and he got into everything. And one day I had a shipment where some of those styrofoam pop corn pieces where in the box and I took out of the box, what I needed. And some of those. Popcorn hit the floor. So of course the cat starts to bat
one of the little pieces of popcorn back and forth [00:16:00] and on the carpet and then the static electricity started. And next thing I know this. Looks like he's got chicken pox because all this, the styrofoam pieces have attached themselves to him. He's covered in styrofoam
he's gone from being very playful to being, you can see the absolute panic in his face because the more he moves, the more these pieces attached to him, can't get it off. You know, you a little water helped get it off instantly. When I finally figured out that he was scared and it wasn't funny, but I do think that that is what happens to all of us.
You kind of start with like, oh, okay. I'm okay. Yeah, sure. No, this is good. And then suddenly it's like, Hmm, not so good. And then it gets worse. You get deeper and deeper into whatever life transition or crisis you're within. And you're like, [00:17:00] Not so good help. I need help. And and I do think that no one should go it alone.
That really is my philosophy that you should not suffer through the ambiguity alone.
[00:17:17] Christi: Is it always. dire over the years, have you had totally unexpected experiences where fun pops out of it all?
[00:17:28] Sonya: I think we always have fun even in the dire scenarios. Yes. There is a lot of death and divorce scenarios where we've stepped in and you're fixing.
But there's also the fun scenarios where someone's downsizing and deciding to. No longer caregive for a big house or that their kids have gone off to school and they need less. And they want more [00:18:00] time. Or I remember one client who lived on the Upper East Side. And I remember standing in the hallway with her.
She was probably about 80 and. Giving up her New York apartment, her husband had passed many years before the kids didn't want the New York apartment. And she was going to go live down in Florida, Palm Springs. And I said, well, what about the ironing board? And she stomped her little foot and said to me, I am so done with ironing
I'm not taking the ironing board. I'm not taking the kitchen items. Someone is going to cook and clean for me for the rest of my years. Done
for you, you know, at this point. So, no, you know, it's just finding the joy in those little life decision events. And actually when people are more organized, they have more time [00:19:00] for their heart pursuits. I really believe the things that. If every day you spend 15 minutes trying to find your keys or you know, digging through the laundry room, trying to find your pair of socks, that match kind of thing, which people do.
Maybe those 15 minutes could be. To write the book or to do a photo project or to volunteer, to change someone's life. I mean, it's just the choices people make. And some people weren't ready to make the choices and other people are really ready to make the choices and you can laugh and giggle all the way through the experience.
And sometimes. People just need the help and they need you to swoop in and solve it.
[00:19:46] Christi: Your mantra is know what you have. It's how do you help your clients understand what they have
[00:19:53] Sonya: knowing what you have is important to me primarily because [00:20:00] I've seen so many people. Lose what they have or have it stolen. And so the first step is to organize it in such a way that everything has a place. So you know, where your books are, you know, where your vases are, you know, where your clothes are, you know, where your socks are.
And and then inventory is very quick This lesson was taught to me in particular from a family in California who had an incredible series of homes, but they were paying on their insurance policy for things that no longer existed in their life and the wasting of money to ensure what you own when you get.
Even own, it seems so basic not to repeat, but yet people do it because they're not clear what they own. So gathering what you have [00:21:00] photographing what you have, and then sometimes getting appraisals, which have a three to five year shelf life getting appraisals for things to set the baseline of the valuation for.
Insurance purposes, replacement costs or estate values for what it would be worth in the current market. If there's a division to be had distribution to be planned for, it's just a financial tool to know what you own. It helps make informed decisions. And having worked with a lot of the trusted advisors for a lot of the families that we've worked with for these past few decades, we've seen some mistakes that people have made and each one of those has been, huh?
Could we have prevented that by knowing what they own and really 99.9% of the time? Yes, we could have prevented it by knowing what they own.
[00:21:56] Christi: I think you told me one time, sometimes it's just a [00:22:00] matter of opening boxes and looking in places where people haven't looked in a long time.
[00:22:06] Sonya: Sometimes that's the cabinet.
It's not even a cardboard box. Sometimes it's a cabinet above the refrigerator or in the attic up the stairs, or people's storage lockers in the basement or better yet people's storage units that they paid for. People have stopped and they don't want to unleash it or face decisions.
I'm dealing with a client now who's moving an office and none of the workers want to make a decision about what to keep or not. They just so their modus operandi is to just throw it all in storage. So I asked how much is in storage and got the confession that no one actually knows what's in storage, but they know that they're paying hefty premiums every month for what's in storage.
So here we are facing, you know, moving for them [00:23:00] and saying, okay, we should sell it because we know what you own and you don't want. And their response is,, maybe we'll just store it. Cause they're scared. They don't want to make a wrong choice.
[00:23:12] Christi: Is it that people get afraid that well, I'll speak from experience.
People get afraid that they might throw out the wrong thing.
[00:23:21] Sonya: And I think that goes back to if you know, Or try to figure out through appraisals that that thing is replaceable or that thing really has a value of X, the throwing out the giving away, or the gifting to someone it's easier to do, because you're like, okay, it's a $500 lamp.
Do I want a friend to have it? Do I want to give it to a donation card? Or am I just going to throw it in the bin or put it on the street and let [00:24:00] someone else have it? Because you're clear a lot of times people inherit things from family or they'd purchase it in flea markets or they picked it up somewhere and they hold on to it because they're unclear of its value and the inventorying and putting it in the list to get it appraised
It's like going to the doctor and getting your blood work. It's just setting the baseline. These things are worth. This family fights often come over. The perceived notion that something is worth way more than it actually is.
[00:24:36] Christi: I know so many people who are learning that with their parents, beautiful furniture and the Haviland china, and nobody seems to want any more
[00:24:47] Sonya: that's right.
So this very precious stuff that they said was very expensive and very valuable. It was at the time that they purchased it currently, it's not as in vogue so the question is, do [00:25:00] you say. And store it, which has a cost mentally and literally sometimes, or do you release it to someone new and let it have a new journey?
[00:25:12] Christi: That's a lot of psychological, if this goes way beyond empathy, let's put it that way.
[00:25:19] Sonya: So yes, there is a, there is a lot of practical pieces within it, for sure, but it does go past empathy, but the, the empathy piece is the holding the place for someone to waffle in their decisions. You give facts. You bring that horse to the water .
They're going to either take it or they're not
[00:25:38] Christi: It's like the, yes, no. And maybe piles of my books that maybe piles like I got higher and higher after a while, but it was a place to say, okay, it's still a maybe.
[00:25:49] Sonya: Yes, exactly. Everyone has maybes and I, and I think.
It's being kind to yourself around the maybes and then trying to look at the maybe pile and say, is there a [00:26:00] pattern in this, you know, this, this, all the things from my grandmother that I'm maybe, or is this I I'm waffling on getting an another home and this may be, will fit and be perfect there. It's just.
Taking the maybe, and forcing your hand a little bit towards, okay, well, what are we really, what's going to change it from a, maybe to a yes, no,
[00:26:26] Christi: That's the organizational piece that, and that's a big part of what, what your role is.
[00:26:33] Sonya: Absolutely. That's what our role is. That's what our job is, is to help you clear out that miscellaneous drawer and the maybes to just, okay, you have X, Y, and Z, and it's worth X, Y, and Z.
And your insurance policy shows that it's X, Y, and Z. Okay. You're good. You can hold all of this. They say, you know what? I want to bring down my insurance [00:27:00] premiums. I want to lessen what I own. I don't want to pay for storage anymore. And it's like, okay, well that's a distribution project. Should we sell it or donate it?
Let's figure that out. And then we take it on and they choose.
[00:27:13] Christi: That's great.