Small business success: When Jasmine quit her corporate career people thought she was having a midlife crisis. Now she’s making $5000 a month decluttering people’s homes

When Jasmine Njegovan quit her corporate career of 17 years in her 40s to start her own business, people wondered if she was having a midlife crisis.

Even the beginning of the COVID pandemic couldn’t stop the single mum from following through on the goal of achieving her “biggest dream to work for myself and to live a life on my own terms”.

“I was not going to back off from the decision. It felt really, really, deeply close to my heart that I am doing the right thing,” she tells 9honey Money.

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Now the south-west Sydney local runs a decluttering business, has 150 clients, earns $5,000 a month working part-time and has been crowned AirTasker’s NSW top tasker of the year.

But being a professional organiser wasn’t part of the plan until Njegovan started working as a life coach and realised how much clutter impacts people’s lives.

So she set up a profile on AirTasker and hasn’t looked back.

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“I was like, ‘OK, I’m just gonna make my own profile and, you know, introduce myself’ and I know I’m very good with people, so I knew once people do get to know me, they will want to be connected, not just for that session but for long term,” she said.

And she was right. With a staggering 98 per cent return business, Njegovan’s decluttering business is thriving thanks to her holistic approach, which combines her life coaching skills with decluttering.

“I find it so relative to mindfulness because I have a background in that area, I’m a life coach as well… so I see it very differently when I go to people’s houses, than just someone who is focused on clearing up the rubbish,” she says.

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While Marie Kondo has the KonMari Method, Njegovan uses the “three-second rule”.

“If you can’t find it in the three seconds, it means you have a problem and then it comes to, ‘Are we going to ignore the problem, or are we going to deal with it?’. So, people are kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, I have many problems, Jasmine.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, you do. Let’s get into it’.

“That’s like kind of a simple [method], I don’t want to go too deep with people because I also don’t know how far they are in their journey and to go into the guru of life coaching is a little bit too much for people when they just approach it as a declutter.”

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Often clients find Njegovan’s decluttering and regorganising expertise so beneficial they ask her back for more sessions to declutter other rooms or to look at how they’re shopping and why they’re buying so much.

But other than the three-second rule, the decluttering process she uses is individualised.

“No one ever has called me and said, ‘Jasmine, this is not working’ because I know that my system works. It’s catered separately for everyone’s style, so I don’t have, a cookie cutter thing…

For example when Njegovan is decluttering and reorganising a wardrobe, “I get to know the person, know your lifestyle, how much time do you spend in the gym? Are you a corporate? Are you an artist? We set up the wardrobe the way your lifestyle is right now.” 

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Currently working part-time, Njegovan is looking at expanding her business so that she can offer her decluttering services and philosophy to more people. She’s considering hiring staff but would need to train them to provide the same style of service.

“The feedback that I’m getting from people if I ask them what made them pick my profile out of so many other people most of the time they say, ‘It’s because you are not just decluttering, you are a life coach, you’re looking things in a more holistic way’. So I am working on the plan, how I can train other people to develop this in a bigger way.”

Looking back on her move from a corporate career to being her own boss, Njegovan describes it as a “beautiful journey”. She is passionate about encouraging others to pursue their dreams and reconsider why they think they can’t.

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“I love talking about it because lots of people are sitting on so many ideas and they think they can’t do it or they also think ‘I’m too old’, you know, ‘I can’t, it’s too late what’s the point’, and all this stuff,” she says.

“But honestly, once you break through those questions, that’s where the beauty is. There’s really so many beautiful opportunities out there when we break through [the stories we’re] telling ourselves.”

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