The Woman Behind The Piles – Exclusive Interview With Liz Crosswell
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 24, 2023
- 4 min read
Liz Crosswell worked through several early career endeavors before discovering her passion for professional organizing. Once she did, it wasn’t long before she founded Crosswell Organizing – a full-service organizing firm dedicated to discerning homeowners in Houston’s most premier neighborhoods since 2008. While CO calls Houston home, the team will travel to the ends of the earth to help a client organize a vacation home or manage a move.
Liz Crosswell, Crosswell Organizing LLC
Introduce yourself.
My name is Liz Crosswell, and I am the founding partner of Crosswell Organizing. A professional organizing company based in Houston, TX. I grew up in Houston, then headed off to The University of Texas at Austin, where I got a BA in Marketing. After moving back to Houston, I married the funniest/cutest guy in the room, with which now we are raising our 4 kids together. I’ve always been an entrepreneur and have started and run several successful companies before this one.
What inspired you to start a professional organizing business, and how long have you been in operation?
Well, I’ve been organizing my own spaces my whole life. Growing up, I was that weird kid who was always arranging and rearranging her room. I love to get into my kids’ rooms and completely clean them out. When kids are young, their sizes and interests change quickly, so giving their rooms an occasional overhaul was a fun necessity for me. I liked the feeling of giving them a fresh space to explore. I knew I was good at it, and thought… ”How can I make money doing this?” I didn’t really know how to start this kind of company. This was in 2009, before people like Maria Kondo and The Home Edit existed. Not a lot of people knew or understood this profession. So one day I sent an email out to my friends and said, “Hi, I’m a professional organized now, hire me!” And they did! Turns out, I was even better at organizing other people’s spaces than I was my own. I got to where I was working every day, and 2 months booked out. I started hiring assistants to help me with larger projects. Before I knew it, we were not only organizing, but doing these huge move-ins where we unpacked and organized the whole house. I was finding and training people as fast as I could. What really launched my company to a new level was when I brought on my lead organizer, Tammy Hiskey, as a partner in the company. This was about 7 years ago…best decision I ever made! Now we have about 14 people and can simultaneously work several teams at a time.
How do you tailor your organizing solutions to meet the unique needs of your clients?
First of all, you have to really listen to your clients. The client starts with us in a space and goes through it with us. During this time, we are finding out what they need and what they don’t need, what needs to be in their “prime real estate” and what can be less accessible. Every job is unique because every client is unique. People hire us for many reasons: downsizing, moving, the need for better space utilization, cleaning up clutter, changing of the current space usage, turn-key unpacking, and even maintaining a space we have already organized. We set up systems that work for each individual client to improve the flow of their home or office, giving everything a place.
What sets your organizing apart from others in your industry?
Two things: we are a full-service organizing company, and we pay great attention to detail.
I say full service because there is just about nothing we won’t do. We aren’t just organizing, but helping to simplify their lives. After organizing, we take away donations, haul off trash, take documents to be shredded, take old electronics and paint to be recycled, help clients find resellers, and much much more. Sometimes what really helps our clients is not just organizing their spaces, but then taking things off of their To-Do lists. It could be delivering a birthday present, or boxing up and taking returns to be shipped back. The list is endless!
Secondly, clients have always said how much they appreciate our attention to detail. We could just walk into a room and organize the stuff that’s currently in the room. We could make it look “pretty”. In the end, that’s not going to help them in the long run. We go through absolutely everything in a room and help them decide if they need it, and if so, is it living in the right room? We do a lot of closets that are overwhelmed by books. Books don’t belong in your closet! Important paperwork doesn’t belong in your laundry room! It’s our job to make sure that not only does everything have a place, but that that place makes sense.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
This is going to sound kind of weird and counterintuitive, but it has to do with growing my business. For years, I was a one-woman-show. As I started adding to my team, the new hires were doing great as my assistants, but they could never work on their own. My challenge was to train these people so they could work as a lead on their own, without me. I’ll never forget the first time someone called in and requested one of my leads, someone who wasn’t me! After I booked the job and hung up, I was so excited. I screamed ( to no one since I was by myself ), “Holy Sh*t, I did it!” My business was finally it’s own entity, not just me. I was no longer limited to how many hours I could work in a day. Fast forward to present day, and that is a natural occurrence. I will say that even now, I get a little high every time someone contacts me and specifically requests one of my leads, and not me.
