Manchester Resident Matt Davis Wants to Organize Your Life

Manchester resident Matt Davis is a firm believer in living an organized life. In that spirit, he founded Watchtower Organizing in 2009 and has been trying to steadily build a client base as well as a reputation.

“My main objective is to help people have a more livable and happy life through organization,” Davis said. “If you always know where to find the things you need, your life will go much more smoothly.”

Unlike most people, Davis, 31, enjoys cleaning and creating orderliness out of chaos. He said that while he cleans and tidies up he feels a sense of calm, and afterward he feels a definite sense of accomplishment.

The origin of Davis's appreciation for organization is not hard to identify.

“I remember as a kid (my mom) was such a pack rat that we would literally only have a walkway to get from room to room there was so much stuff,” Davis said. The exact opposite of most mother-son relationships, Davis said he was always bugging her to clean the place up and often took the initiative to do so himself.

After finishing high school in Lee’s Summit, IL, Davis moved to St. Louis and eventually started working at Applebee’s where he became a corporate trainer and worked for the franchise all across the country.

“While I worked at Applebee’s, all the locations changed their interior from artifacts all over the walls--like Marilyn Monroe pictures and stuff like that--to a more cleaned-up look. I wasn’t necessarily in charge of all that, but at the locations that I worked at I tore out all the artifacts and redid all those stores and did what needed to be done,” Davis said.

After 11 years at Applebee’s, Matt joined the staff at the Napoli family of restaurants in 2007 as a private party and event planner as well as occasional waiter. Just like Applebee’s, Matt has found plenty to organize at in Town and Country and Café Napoli in Clayton.

“Napoli 2 is kind of the finest organizing project that I have done,” Matt said. “Anything and everything that’s organized there, I put it there.”

Matt also organized the wine collection at Café Napoli, a task that involved organizing several thousand bottles of wine based on the region of the world where they were made.

While still working for Napoli, Matt decided he wanted to try to build his own business and his own brand. So in November 2009, he started Watchtower Organizing.

"I initially wanted to start working for St. Louis Closet Company. I thought that would be a great gig to get my foot in the door. But they weren’t hiring, and I would have to do it the way that they said it had to be done. I want to give the customer an option and give them say in the situation,” Davis said. “I just kind of try to figure out how people would like it and then do it for them because...not everyone is the same and I can’t say this is the best or this is the wrong way for everyone.”

As the founder, CEO, and sole employee of Watchtower, Davis has organized the showroom floor for off Manchester Road and has also taken jobs organizing closets, bedrooms and entire houses.

Davis said that waiting tables at Napoli 2 allows him to meet new people and help expand his client base. Earlier this year, a doctor whom he waited on mentioned that he was moving his offices and Watchtower was able to land the job organizing the filing system in the doctor’s new offices.

But not every job Davis has taken has been exactly what he had in mind.

Soon after forming Watchtower, Davis was contacted through an ad he had placed by a man who had a house full of stuff he needed to sell and, not wanting to turn down a new client, Davis took on the job. Davis said the stuff was not as buyer-friendly as he had hoped, and his apartment is now full of the client’s old clothes, golf clubs and even a bed for a toddler.

“I went ahead and took the job on because I thought maybe it would be good experience, and I guess it was because it taught me I need to be more discerning about who I take on as a client,” Davis said.

Despite the occasional less-than-rewarding project like that one, Matt Davis remains energized by an entrepreneurial spirit and driven by a genuine love for organizing.

“People ask me what I do on my time off and I tell them that I cleaned this or that and organized and I tell them I had fun doing it,” Davis said. “Some people are like ‘Oh god I gotta go clean my room,’ I’m like ‘Yeah, I’m going to go clean my room!’”

Davis said that he would be more than happy to give any Patch reader a free consultation and estimate. Contact Watchtower Organizing at WatchtowerMatt@live.com or 314-800-8336 with questions.