Early in Linda Kunzs career as a paralegal secretary, when she barely knew the difference between a plaintiff and a defendant, her organizational skills were about all that kept her afloat in the legal community.


Thirty years later, armed with a great deal more organizing know-how, Kunz operates a tiny Spokane office-consulting company called Organization & More.


Kunz says her home-based, one-person venture can help a business become more organized or operate more efficiently, allowing it to save time and money and earn more profit.


The services she offers include reorganizing files or spaces, streamlining work flow, creating custom business forms, and suggesting time-management tips. Other services include selecting computers or software and teaching clients and their employees how to use them.


What Im doing is setting up systems for people, Kunz says. A lot of the time, its things we all know how to do, but need to be reminded of.


Most frequently, businesses that enlist her services cant find needed documents, dont have enough time to accomplish everything, or suffer from poor communication between workers, she says.


Mike Biallas, owner of a five-person, Spokane Valley commercial printing company called Biallas Printing, hired Kunz earlier this year to improve work flow so his employees could track printing jobs better. Kunz interviewed each of Biallas Printings employees, andafter identifying perceived weaknesses in the companys job-tracking systemdeveloped a centralized area in the print shop where jobs could be transferred from one employee to another. Kunz also put up a work-flow status display board, and made other improvements, Biallas says.


Biallas shop has stuck with the system Kunz installed, and the changes have improved the companys work flow and helped it move jobs along more quickly.


It allows me to be busier, but have control in my business so things arent lost in the shuffle, Biallas says.


Kunz, who launched her venture in late 1998, says that so far she has done organizing work mostly for small businesses or departments within larger companies. Clients have included Simpson Realty Inc., the Hennessey, Edwards & Boswell PS law firm, and the KXLY Radio Group sales department, she says.


She hopes to attract more home-based businesses in the future. She says people who have home-based businesses often struggle with unfamiliar tasks or responsibilities.


After working or free-lancing for attorneys for most of the last 30 years, Kunz believes she can easily identify ways to make a law firm operate more efficiently. Law firms, by their nature, constantly are working under a deadline of some sort, and by operating more efficiently, firms can reduce those pressures, Kunz says.


Kunz charges $40 an hour for consulting services, but drops her rate to $25 an hour for time she spends rearranging office files or equipment. Her jobs have varied in length from a single, 1 1/2-hour consulting session to the KXLY job, which took 20-plus hours over roughly four weeks. She recommends follow-up sessions to ensure that the changes she devises are being implemented, though not all of her clients take her up on that recommendation.


Part coach, part counselor


To be a professional organizer, Kunz says she must be part coach, to motivate people to implement organized systems, and part counselor, to listen to them explain their problems.


Often, a clients idea of where problems lie differs from Kunzs assessment.


They might tell me about the pebble in their shoe, and I might come back and tell them they need new shoes, she says.


Though her own office is organized, Kunz isnt a neat freak. In her office, which is in the basement of her North Side home, files fill an old laundry basket, and a former living room cabinet serves as a sort of book-and-paper repository. Her desk, which is neatly arranged, is oversized, and at one end of it, a table accommodates overflow work.


Despite the unorthodox system, Kunz says she knows where everything is and can retrieve desired information easily, which she proves by providing phone numbers and other requested information quickly. She does admit, however, to having a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do attitude when it comes to her own office.


She started her business at the suggestion of a neighbor who had heard a professional organizer speak at a school function and thought Kunz could use her skills in the same vocation. At the time, Kunz was supporting herself as a free-lance paralegal secretary while trying to launch a personal-services business venture called Get Results that never got off the ground. As she looked into becoming a professional organizer, she became convinced that she could be successful in that field.


She still does some free-lance paralegal secretary jobs for law firms here, but most of her workload now involves jobs obtained through Organization & More. On occasion, she speaks at public gatherings about getting organized.


Kunz is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers and has read several books on organizing, but claims her best qualifications come from her 30 years of experience as a paralegal secretary.


She says that when she went into that profession, she had some organizational skills that she learned from her mother while growing up on a farm outside of Davenport. Working at law firms taught her both how to handle elaborate filing systems and the value of establishing business forms for specific tasks.


She has worked for a handful of Spokane-area law firms since starting out with Delay, Curran, Thompson, Pontarolo, & Walker PS, of Spokane


It taught me to take information, condense it down, and learn faster what theyre talking about, Kunz says. Thats what organizing involves as well, she says. Its disseminating information and coming up with a plan.