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About the author
Jimenez Julien, the person behind TidyBlueprint
I build the software, I answer the support mail, and I sit in on consults with organizers who let me tag along.
Publication director for MLJ, SASU and product lead on TidyBlueprint.
Why I built a scoping tool for organizers
I did not come to professional organizing through a love of matching bins. I came to it through a spreadsheet. In 2023 I was building small operations tools for trades that run on site visits, and an organizer in Portland sent me a file she had been maintaining for six years: forty tabs, one per project type, with hour formulas she had tuned by hand after every job. She wanted to know if I could make it stop breaking. What I found in that file was a complete pricing model for residential organizing that nobody had ever written down properly, and a business owner losing two evenings a week keeping it alive.
I spent the following year talking with organizers in eleven states. I rode along on consults in Phoenix, sat in a garage in suburban Chicago while a client decided what to do with her late father's tools, and watched a two person crew empty and rebuild a pantry in a single day. The pattern was the same everywhere. The consult was excellent. These are women who can walk into a chaotic mudroom, see the finished version, and describe it convincingly in four minutes. Then they went home and lost the momentum they had just built, because turning that vision into a defensible number took hours of solitary arithmetic.
TidyBlueprint exists to close that gap. The design brief I wrote for myself was narrow on purpose: everything a person needs to price a project must be enterable while standing in the room, on a phone, with one hand. Everything the crew needs must arrive on their phone the night before. And nothing should ask an organizer to describe her work in a vocabulary invented by software people. So the app speaks in zones, sessions, categories, containers and linear feet, because that is what I heard in the field.
Experience and expertise
My background is product and operations software for service businesses that sell their time and their judgment on site. Before this I worked on estimating and scheduling tools for field trades, which is where I learned how much damage a bad hour estimate does to a small business: it does not just cost margin on one job, it teaches the owner to distrust her own pricing. I am not a professional organizer and I never claim to be. My expertise is in turning the practical knowledge of an experienced operator into a model that holds up under real conditions, and then getting out of her way.
Practically, that means I read every support message myself, I keep a running list of the estimates that came out wrong and why, and I publish what I change. Four times a year I run a call with a small group of organizers who are willing to argue with me about pricing logic. Several of the features on this site started as a complaint on one of those calls, including the difficulty rating and the separate approval of the product budget.
How this product is built and maintained
TidyBlueprint is published by MLJ, SASU, a French company, and is operated for a United States customer base. Development is continuous rather than in big annual releases, and changes to the estimating model are versioned so a project quoted in March can be reopened later and still show the numbers it was quoted with. Client photographs and addresses are treated as the most sensitive material in the system: encrypted at rest, never used to train models, never reused in marketing without a signed release from the organizer who owns the account.
Editorially, I hold this site to the same standard as the product. Every statistic on the home page comes from aggregate usage data or from a survey of paying accounts, and I will not publish a number I cannot reconstruct. Testimonials are from real customers who reviewed and approved the wording. When something is a projection or an average, it says so. If you find a claim on this site that you think is unsupportable, write to me and I will either show you the working or remove it.
Published articles
Everything below appears in The Zone Plan, the TidyBlueprint magazine for professional home organizers, and each piece answers a question organizers ask me during consults.
- How much should I charge for a full pantry organizing project in my first year? : published .
- What do I actually need to do before I let a client's clutter into my own vehicle? : published .
- Should I quote by the zone or by the hour when a client wants the whole house done? : published .
- How do I run a consult so the client signs the plan before I leave the house? : published .
- Why did my closet install go three days over, and what should I have caught at scoping? : published .
- What should I walk through before the crew leaves a job site on install day? : published .
- Do I need a contract clause for hoarding conditions, or should I refer that client out? : published .
- Is it worth hiring my first part time organizing assistant, or will payroll eat the margin? : published .
- What really happens to the money when I buy the bins and the client pays me back? : published .
Contact the author
The fastest way to reach me is email: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read messages from organizers before anything else in the inbox, and I answer within one business day. If you want to show me a project that priced badly, send the numbers and I will look at the model with you. If you would rather see the product first, book a walkthrough from the home page.