Lynnfield resident Susan Parziale started her own consulting business for home and office organization.
By Stacey Marcus
When Susan Parziale was a little girl, she loved to organize her stuffed animals from biggest to smallest. During her teen years, her robust collection of hair products and makeup were next in line to get systematized.
“I had a lot of stuff, but it was all organized,” says the Lynnfield resident.
After studying Paralegal Studies/Law at Northeastern University, she held three administrative assistant jobs— one at a risk management firm, another at a small law practice and the last at Goodwin Proctor (known as Goodwin) where she worked for a decade.
Parziale he stands by one of her mantras. | Photo: Reba Saldanha
When her daughter Jenna enrolled in a private autism school in Bedford and she had to drive her back and forth, Parziale decided to launch her own consulting business, which she named Organizing Offices & Homes LLC. In looking to define her target audience she asked herself, “Who is overwhelmed? Who needs an extra set of hands?” She honed in on moms as a group that could use her help, put a few ads on Craigslist and networked.
“Bam, it blew up!” says Parziale who runs a successful business and is a Gold Circle member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). She even appeared on 20/20 with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary after helping him organize his wine cellar. Parziale notes that O’Leary shares the wine cellar with five other men and that she was tasked with organizing 3,000 bottles, which she arranged by region and then used Eric Levine’s CellarTracker to barcode each bottle.
Along with curating wine bottles for celebrities, Parziale uses her organizational talents to help clients downsize or oversee estate sales, help executives organize their offices and help busy moms organize their homes and lives. Basically, if you need to make sense of the mess, Parziale is the go-to gal to bring order to the chaos.
Parziale has used her talents to help Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary organize his wine cellar with CellarTracker. | Photo: Reba Saldanha
She also works (at a discounted rate) with special needs parents helping them manage the mounds of paperwork they need to keep track of.
“In the early days of diagnosis there is so much paperwork including medical testing, evaluations and appointments with specialists, it helps to have it all in one binder so the parents can grab it and go to appointments,” says Parziale.
So how does this busy professional, mother and wife keep it all together?
“My office is my car,” she says. “I am working all the time so I have to be organized.” She shared these tips to help us everyday folks keep on track:
- Don’t retrieve your mail from the mailbox until you are ready to deal with it. Put magazines in baskets, junk mail in the recycling and bills in their own bin. “If you are not ready to tackle the mail, don’t get it,” says Parziale.
- If everything has a home, you will always find it. She notes that when looking to wrap a birthday present, her family knows exactly where the tape and scissors are located. “No matter what it is, it needs a home,” she says.
- If you can, prepare lunches for the family the night before.
- Keep ingredients for quick meals on hand. Parziale often uses the crockpot and always has frozen shrimp and vegetables in the freezer for back up.
- Lists are great. Parziale loves to make lists and cross items off as she is done. When grocery shopping she creates her list by aisle noting, “When I’m in Market Basket I am not going down an aisle unless I have to.”
- Don’t hang onto anything you haven’t worn in a year. Give it someone who will wear it.
- If you start a project, finish it before you move onto the next thing.
As a writer always hanging off the edge of a comma, I took note of her sage advice to end with a period. Period.
