Join us for our 2026 Professional Development (PD) Day, a virtual learning event designed to help professional organizers build resilient, sustainable, and adaptable businesses for the future.
This year’s theme, Future-Proofing Your Organizing Business, explores practical strategies, emerging opportunities, and long-term planning considerations that can help organizers navigate change and strengthen their businesses.
Event Schedule
All times Eastern (ET)
What You’ll Learn
Three sessions to future-proof your business
The Compassionate Business: Sustainable Growth for Organizers Supporting Vulnerable Clients
This session explores how professional organizers can build a sustainable business while ethically and effectively supporting clients navigating trauma, hoarding behaviors, or neurodivergence. Too often, those working with vulnerable populations face burnout, blurred boundaries, or business stagnation due to the emotional intensity of the work and the lack of clear models that center both sustainability and compassion. Through a lecture-based format enriched by real-world case studies and a trauma-informed lens, this session presents a framework for growing an organizing business without sacrificing ethics, empathy, or energy. Attendees will examine the hidden labor of working with marginalized or complex clients, identify patterns that lead to burnout or over-giving, and gain tools to re-align their services, pricing, and capacity with their values. Participants receive a printable worksheet with reflective questions, a sustainable service audit, and a sample boundary-setting script library to take home. Time is reserved for Q&A and discussion at the end.
From Solopreneur to Leaderpreneur: Grounded Growth Beyond Yourself
The scene: you’ve decided to hire your first contractor, expand to a full team, or even purchase another business. You’ve got a plan to grow and a dream for serving clients in a bigger, bolder way — but how will you shift from working on your own to leading, delegating, and managing a group? How will you navigate the sometimes murky waters of working with new people who bring multiple talents and skills as well as challenges and natural human idiosyncrasies? How will you build an organization that thrives on trust, authenticity, and mutual respect? In this session we’ll explore these questions, giving attendees clear, practical insights on grounded, mindful leadership. Through real-life examples, stories from other successful leaders in the field, interactive polls and reflections, and simple, clear slides, attendees will learn tools to lead with clarity, compassion, and confidence — building teams that not only perform well, but thrive together in purpose-aligned collaboration.
The Exit You Haven’t Planned Yet: Long-Term Sustainability & Exit Strategy for Professional Organizers
The professional organizing industry is built on helping others create order, systems, and peace of mind — yet many organizers have never applied that same intentionality to one of the most important systems in their own business: the plan for what happens when they leave. Exit planning is not a single event. It is a long-term strategy that begins with building a business that is sustainable without you at the centre of it, and ends with a clear, documented, and legally sound plan for transitioning out — whether that happens in five years or is triggered by something unexpected tomorrow. This session addresses the full spectrum of exit scenarios: planned retirement, business sale, partnership dissolution, capacity reduction due to health, and emergency exit due to incapacity or death. Attendees learn why exit planning and contingency planning are two sides of the same coin — and why beginning this work now, regardless of career stage, is one of the most sustainable and professionally responsible decisions a business owner can make. Draws on business continuity frameworks, Ontario and Canadian estate planning principles, and practical strategies for building a business that is resilient, transferable, and protected.
Reserve Your Spot
Wednesday, October 15, 2026 · 1:00–4:00 PM ET · Virtual
