How This Former Teacher Went From Earning $500 a Week to Building a $2M Business | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E8

Lisa Woodruff never imagined she’d build a multimillion-dollar business from an everyday skill. After leaving her teaching career at age 40, she started by charging clients to organize their homes before transforming that hands-on service into Organize 365, a company that now helps thousands of people run their households more effectively. In this episode, Lisa shares how she grew from charging $40 an hour for in-home organizing to building a $2 million education company. She also explains how entrepreneurs can turn hands-on expertise into recurring revenue and build a business that scales. In this episode, Hala and Lisa will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:11) Her Journey From Teacher to Entrepreneur (05:14) Launching and Scaling an Organizing Business (15:22) Understanding the Professional Organizing Market (19:56) Launching the Sunday Basket System (32:23) Organize 365’s Audience and Reach (34:49) Three Strategies for Better Organization (40:37) How Organize 365 Generates Sales (49:44) Shutting Down a $1M Product Line (55:08) Margins, Profit Sharing, and Business Growth (59:29) Organize 365’s SWOT Analysis (1:06:15) Using Existing Customers to Drive Growth Lisa Woodruff is the founder and CEO of Organize 365, a home and paper organization company built around physical products, online courses, planning systems, and community support. She is the creator of the Sunday Basket, a weekly paper organization system designed to help people externalize the invisible tasks involved in managing a household. Lisa is also an author and the host of the Organize 365 Podcast, which has surpassed 25 million downloads. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off. AT&T Business - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com. HoneyLove - Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/PROFITING! #honeylovepod ElevenLabs - ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs helps businesses deliver better customer experiences. Start with a demo at ElevenLabs.io/profiting Quo - Bring your calls, texts, and contacts together in one place. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting. Resources Mentioned: Lisa’s Website: organize365.com Lisa’s Instagram: instagram.com/organize365 Lisa’s Podcast, Organize 365: bit.ly/Org365-applepodcasts Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'sBook.com/yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungAndProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  All of the amount of money that moves in the United States, 68% comes from households. The government, military, and us, that is what is our economy. Like if the household stops spending, the world shuts down.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  We're joined by Lisa Woodruff, founder and CEO of Organized365 and creator of The Sunday Basket, to unpack exactly how Organized365 profits.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  When I started PhD, we're a $2.5 million company. We're still 60% profitable. We were profitable the last two years enough that we could do profit sharing, which I really loved doing for my team.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  What are the top three things you could recommend for somebody to do right now to get better organized?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  My husband asks that question often.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Number one, stop doing your housework hidden. If you live with people, they should be watching you vacuum, fold laundry, do dishes. If everybody else is having fun, you have fun too. Number two.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  So you were also selling work systems and organization. Why'd you decide to sunset that part of your business? Especially if it was making, I guess, how much money?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  A million dollars a year.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  It was making a million dollars a year?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  It was making a million dollars a year. And the interesting thing about my company that I realized is.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Lisa, welcome to How We Profit.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I think this is going to be such a great conversation because so many entrepreneurs, even though their business seems really organized and amazing, they actually are very unorganized in their home. And I personally have always dreamed of having an organization business because I feel like it would be so lucrative. And so when I got your email inquiry, I was like, this would be a really cool episode to really unpack how somebody makes money off of an organization business. So welcome. I can't wait to unpack all of it. How would you describe Organized365 in one sentence?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So what people think when they hear Organized365 is exactly what you said. Like, oh, I need you to come organize my house. And that is what I teach you how to do. But really, Organized365 is an online school and coaching program where I teach you the skill of organizing so that your house get organized. But along the way, you also learn time management, productivity, planning, and you step into being the CEO of your household.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Amazing. So basically, you've expanded into having programs and courses and masterclasses essentially, which is super cool. But I love your origin story because I feel like it's going to be very inspiring for our young improfitters. So you were actually a teacher and you didn't become an entrepreneur until age 40. Tell us about that.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Right. In my twenties and thirties, I was a stay-at-home mom and I did a lot of direct sales companies. I was in 23 different direct sales companies.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  And I made money in a lot of them. And then when my kids went into middle school, I went back to teaching again, thinking, oh, this is the time I can step back into teaching. But the needs of our family and our extended family were beyond what I could do during non-school hours. So yeah, at the age of 39, I quit my teaching job. And I was like, I am just going to have to be self-employed because I need flexibility of time. So I joined another direct sales company. And I started the blog Organized365. No idea how I'd make money, but I knew that was a good SEO keyword and I knew I loved talking about organizing.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Something that I love about your story is that sometimes rejection actually helps redirect you. So you actually quit your job because they told you you're a bad teacher.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  They did. Thanks for reminding me.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did. Like, I was missing a lot of work and I was even taking time off unpaid just because our family needs were beyond what we could cover during the non-school hours. And so I was being held back by my headmistress of the school after a parent-teacher conference that did not need to be done the Thursday before winter break. And I really needed to get home. One of my kids was sick. My personal kids was sick. And so she said, you know, we have to have a conversation because you're not a really good teacher. And I was at that time teaching middle school math, Montessori style. So I had 16 students and I had 16 different lesson plans. I was doing a great job teaching, but whether I was or wasn't, it really didn't matter because my boss didn't value me anymore.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  And so if my boss didn't value me, and I was definitely not being a good wife, I was definitely not being a good mom, my house I didn't even recognize. I was like, who am I doing this for? Like, it was only $500 a week. That's how much money I was making. That was it.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And now she makes over $2 million a year in her business. So who's laughing now? Like, you're making way more than any of the teachers at that school because you became an entrepreneur and took your career and your earning potential in your own hands. So you started this blog. You called it Organized365 from the start.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yes, because there were some really big bloggers in Cincinnati. So I was in a blogging group. I had had a blog in 2009, so I understood SEO keywords. That's all I understood. All these bloggers got like really great deals with Procter & Gamble and all these other big consumer package. I could never land any deals. Like, I have never gotten, I've never gotten viral. Like, any of the things that you would normally do in business, I have not done. So I started the blog. I started working with the direct sales company. And a couple of months into the blog, I had this huge home show. Like, if you've ever been to a direct sales party, like Mary Kay, Pampered Chef, like, just a few people go. 25 people were there.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I was like, Maria, why are all these people here? And she goes, oh, well, everybody wants to know what a professional organizer has to say. I was like, I'm a professional organizer. I had been charging people to go in their houses and organize their offices for direct sales or organize their kids because I was a teacher. I didn't realize it was a marketable skill, even though I was already charging people for it.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Interesting. Okay. So you had this blog. You were like on the side, charging people. At what point were you like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm going to actually create this organization business?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I create things really fast. I think that's because I'm a teacher, so content is like no big deal to me. So I found that out in March of 2012. By April of 2012, I had a five-page website and I was already selling professional organization services. Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  So you were charging about $5,000, correct?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  No, at that time, I was charging $40 an hour, two and a half hour minimum. So it was $100 to have me come to your house.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. We have to talk about this.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  It was $5,000 for the week to organize your whole house with my team.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Okay. Tell us the whole journey of how you started the organizing service part of your business. Like, from the beginning, how did you get started? How much did you invest? How much did you charge? How did that evolve?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yep. I could do it really quick. So I started at $40 an hour because I was earning $35 an hour cleaning houses, so I should make more.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Okay. Just five bucks, actually.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Just five bucks, actually. I did a two and a half hour minimum because I thought I could do two houses in one day. You can't. So then I quickly moved to a four-hour minimum. So now I was making $200 because I raised my rates to $50, like in the summer going into the fall.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Then by November of the first year, I hired somebody to work with me and I paid her, I think, $25 an hour. So now I was charging $100 an hour if we both went. So I was making money when she worked also. And then by the time I started the podcast at year three, I wasn't doing any of the in-home organizing. I was just vetting the clients. I could actually quote them over the phone and know if it was going to work or not. I would send my team out to do the job. They just wanted to work. Whenever I had a job, they didn't want to collect money. They didn't want to do anything related to that. They only wanted to organize. So for three years, I did in-home organizing and then three years, I had a team do it. And then year six, we went all in on the courses and the products and I dropped the in-home professional organizing entirely.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And the pricing for that is $75 an hour per person. So it was $150 for the team because I would send two people. Five-hour minimum, so it was $750 a day. We would quote a whole house in one week was $5,000 and I would come too. And we'd get the whole house done in one week.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Got it. Okay. Now, were you making money on that business?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Why did you decide to stop? Like, how did you think like, okay, I'm going to make more money doing the products and courses? Like, for me, I think I would have went the route of franchising it, then getting other people in other cities and like making it this like huge brand of like we were going to. Because there's nothing like that that exists. So I feel like it's a great market.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  All right, tell me.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  So in November, when I hired somebody to work with me, I'd replace my $500 a week teaching salary. And then it was, I think, a year and a half later when I had my first 10-figure month. Now, what's interesting when you're going for a 10-figure month, my highest month before that was $7,000 a month, and that month I made $17,000 a month. So sometimes it's a lot more. And at that time, we were doing in-home professional organizing. I was starting to specialize in paper organizing. So I'd collect bankers' boxes of paper for $250 and bring it into my basement. I had three or four people working on my basement organizing paper. And then I used to be a Creative Memory scrapbook consultant. So I was also making scrapbooks for $900 per scrapbook in my bedroom at night when I was

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Your ass, Larry.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And all those things came together and made $17,000. So yeah, you could scale that, right? Especially like in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I'm from, everything but the house is headquartered there. So I met the owner and I was talking about like what they do when someone passes away and they go in and they sell everything in the house and they get it ready for sale. That's what they originally did back then. And I said, what do you do with all the paper you find in the house? And she goes, what paper? And I said, you do everything but the house and paper. So I had this idea that I'd go collect all the paper and I'd build a warehouse facility where I'd process the paper next to where they processed all the other things that went through there. And I could have grown that way and I could have grown the in-home organizing, but there have been a couple of companies that have started doing that franchising. There is so much liability.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Like I had a client where we broke something. So I also had a client, you know, sometimes when you're organizing people's houses, there are animals, like mice or, you know, and I had, one of my employees fell on a job and it wasn't serious, so it didn't turn into anything, but I was like, whoa, this is way more liability than I want. And then if I did the paper processing thing, which I still would love to do, oh my gosh, you have people's like bank accounts, the social security numbers, like it's just way more liability than I wanted. So I was like, okay. And also I was landlocked with time, your dollars are built on your time.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And so I was scaling this team and I love growing teams. So that was great, but it was only going to be so scalable. And I really wanted a business that, where you can make money when you sleep.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And like you, like to your point, it's just like any other agency business. Like for me, I have a social media podcast agency and I love that side of the business, but I purposely am like, I'm having 20 clients, max, white glove, two pods for social, like two pods for production, and I don't want to keep growing the agency because you just have to keep hiring and hiring. It's like very people intensive.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  So this gave you a way to scale your IP and all the knowledge that you accumulated without having to have all the extra people, right?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think the other thing that happened in year three, which is why I started the podcast and started pivoting away already at year three, was that in-home professional organization is really expensive.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  It is.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  And it doesn't last. Like no matter who does it, even if I do it, like it doesn't last. Like if you didn't do the organizing and you didn't learn the skill, I have to keep coming back, which is great if you're rich. And it's great for me, but it's not great for you if you move away or I'm not available. And I started realizing that my clients that were really saying, I only have this much per month, but they had me come back month after month after month, were learning the skill of organizing. I was teaching them how to organize. And I was like, okay, if I can figure out how to teach this virtually, how would you do that? So the podcast was not video, still isn't video today, because I want you in your kitchen thinking about what you're organizing when I'm talking, not looking at my kitchen going, I wish I had those counters, I wish I had those dishes, I wish I, I wish I, you know,

• 12:55Speaker 01

  you're just kind of listening and I'm teaching you.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm definitely going to ask you about the podcast and why it works so well, because that's like a big marketing channel for you. But first, let's talk about your business overall. So what was your peak? Like how much money were you making on the service business per month?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, before we flipped and totally got rid of it, we made $400,000. And I remember we went from like-

• 13:18Speaker 00

  A year.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we went from like 140 to 400. And I went to my accountant, and this is important, I went to my accountant, I said, we're going to make more money next year. And we were just an LLC, so all that money like flows through your tax return. And I knew I was getting ready to buy products, so I was going to need to have some retained earnings. She's like, that'll be fine. So I went out and I found a tax lawyer and changed my whole tax structure, which is a good thing.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Because $400,000 going through our personal taxes, plus my husband's salary, we would have had to give like 50% of that to the government. I wouldn't have been able to utilize it inside the business to actually grow to the next

• 13:51Speaker 00

  That's what happened to me for at least two years of my business where everything was flowing through my LLC and I lost so much money. It's actually one of the reasons why I moved to Austin and we changed some of our business structures. So talk about the business structure change. What did you do exactly?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I used a company out in Nevada and I met with a tax lawyer. I said, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm growing, I'm going to do this for a long time. And he actually set up a C corp, which is not normal. Like normally you'll take your LLC and you'll tax it as an S corp. But he actually made a C corp. Because I was going to have employees, I was going to have physical product and I need to retain earnings in order to order inventory. But he had me keep the LLC and he said eventually tax it as an S corp. And he had me keep the original company and all the intellectual property in the S corp and create the C corp for the new company that was going to have the website, the W2 employees, because I didn't have W2 employees before then, and the inventory and the loans and the liability.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Got it. What is the benefit of that? Like, does it help you sell? Like, what does it do?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  So the benefit is a C corp is its own entity. Like when you have an S corp, it's still you, it's still your personal tax return, you'll get a K1 and all the money still flows through your social security number, even if you have an EIN number. And you basically zero out the company every year and you take all the distributions or whatever you do with it.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  In a C corp, currently it's taxed at 21% flat. So let's say you have $100,000 in profit, you pay $21,000 in taxes, and now you can use that remaining $79,000 to buy inventory or whatever. That $79,000 can just sit there in a bank account and you can have that rainy day fund. I haven't figured out how you do that in an S corp, because it's your money. You've already paid taxes on it. So if you use S corp money that you've already paid taxes on, you're actually making a loan back to the business and I can't keep track of all that.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  But I-

• 15:42Speaker 00

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• 18:55Speaker 01

  Your understanding of the problem you solve is going to grow and evolve and you should be sunsetting like really big parts of your company every once in a while as you keep growing, pivoting and changing.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so take us back to the kinds of people that you saw when you were organizing. Like, what are the different like profiles that you saw?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I started organizing, the first package I had was the mommy makeover package because I was a mommy. And so the mommy makeover package was four areas.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  New boobs, new ass.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  I didn't know about that then. So it was your laundry room, your closet, your kitchen, and then wherever your home office was. And I would organize those four spaces and that's where you spent 80% of your time. And that would really make a marked change for women. But then, as I kept going, I started organizing women and men who had been divorced. And so now they're in a house on their own. In Cincinnati, we have a couple of Fortune 50 companies. And so you'll come into Cincinnati for a period of time from the coasts.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And housing is so cheap in Cincinnati compared to like the coasts. And also, we don't have a good rental market at all. So they'll come in and they'll just buy a house and then they'd need to set up the house. So these were, you know, corporate women who are coming into Cincinnati with or without their families and they would just have you set it up because having a professional organizer wasn't a big deal. And then there were a lot of women who were in their later years, you know, 60s, 70s, who maybe had lost a spouse. They did a lot of those or they were just ready for their next act. And they were like, I'm getting all new carpeting and I'm redoing all this stuff and I'm getting remarried or like that. So I just, and then I organized kids too. And I would never let the parents in the room when I organized the kids. That was so fun. So all the different ages, different generations, there's a lot of variety.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  How about your ADHD clients? They're probably the best. You make the most money on them because they'll never learn. That's like my, I have a housekeeper and she's probably like, thank God Holla doesn't fold her laundry because it keeps me getting some work.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  So the ADHD is really, really interesting. Uh, when I was a teacher before I had children, I was an intervention specialist. And so often I would get the kids who were having trouble learning whatever it was in the classroom. And I would come up with all these crazy ways to teach them whatever they needed to learn. And eventually they usually were diagnosed with ADHD. Then my kids ended up being diagnosed with ADHD and went to a special school in Cincinnati called Springer School and Center. And I learned even more about ADHD and executive function. Then I had an employee say, you know, at least it'd be really funny if we found out that you had ADHD and that the Sunday basket you created was the solution for ADHD. I said, ha, ha, ha, Monique, that'd be really funny.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Well, I then went and got tested and I was like, oh, turns out apparently I do have ADHD. So now I went back to school. I just got my PhD and my goal with my PhD is to test the Sunday basket and the executive function and see if it does what I think it does. As a school teacher, how I created it, I created it as an intervention for household managers to be able to organize all the invisible work that we do, just like I would do as an intervention for anyone else who had executive function issues in school. And if we find support for that, it will be the first non-medical intervention for ADHD that'll be scientifically shown.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  What would be the intervention? Like, what would you do?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  The Sunday basket.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Oh, the Sunday basket.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  You know, we run our households with no school supplies, with no office supplies, with no operating system. We are 68% of US GDP and we have no operating systems.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Every single person has to create them from scratch.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  So you want household managers, which are usually women, to be, to feel like they're the CEO of their, of their household?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the more I've grown organized 365 and the bigger it's gotten as a company, I've had to grow myself as my understanding of, you know, initially it was just I needed to replace my teaching salary and then I needed to manage people. And now I need to think about the fact that I own a company that someday will be sold as a CEO and that the, the company has value and all those things that I've learned by doing EOS and all these other things that I've done. And I turn around, I look at my household and I go, oh my gosh, every single person is running a household, somebody's running every single household, responsible for 68% of US GDP. You're born and you die in a household. Like it is, it is the economic entity. We don't do planning days. We don't have operational structures. We don't have school supplies.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Like every single person is cobbling together whatever they're doing at home from printables off Pinterest and podcasts they're listening to and whatever their girlfriend's doing or what they remember their mom doing or like, how are we doing? I can't believe we're doing it at all, actually.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's so interesting.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  We haven't put any of those business principles in the household.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  So the Sunday basket was your first product. What year did you decide to do it? What made you think like this is going to actually work? And it seems like, so basically what it is, I, I looked it up. It's like a bin with like lots of folders.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  It's a project management box. It's a weekly planning system.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  As somebody who has ADHD, like I love that. I love like physical.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Like colors, like anything that will like make it like somewhat fun to do the thing that I'm like despising to do.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally trick you. That's my whole goal.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  So what is the Sunday basket? And, and talk to us about the evolution of you selling it? How it started, like how much money were you making it? How much, like, did you invest to create it? How did you talk to somebody in China and get it made? Like, what was the story?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so the reason I think you like it and I, the ADHD people like it is because it is physical.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Because so much of what we do is cognitive and executive function is cognitive. So if you can externalize it, which is my thesis, then you can.

• 24:42Speaker 00

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• 25:27Speaker 00

  go to Shopify.com/profitting to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/profitting. Go to Shopify.com/profitting today to hear your first.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  What's up Yap fam? You guys know we love reading on this show. So I'm always excited when I find a book I genuinely think is worth sharing. Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love by Mark Pincus is one of those books. Mark is a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. And this fast-paced 170-page book is his playbook for testing ideas quickly, navigating uncertainty and figuring out what's actually worth pursuing. One of my favorite concepts is what he calls the abyss. Those moments when you feel stuck or unsure of what's next. Instead of fearing uncertainty, he shows you how to use it as a tool for discovery. Right now, Mark is doing a buy one, get one offer for Yap listeners.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Go to GetMark'sBook.com/Yap, buy one copy for $32 and get a second copy free. So you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  What's up yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious. So I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W H A T N O T in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store. Supplies, is that what you mean?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yep. The government, military and us, that is what is our economy. That's why we get stimulus. That's why we reduce our, like if the household stops spending, the world shuts down. So the household is, we move the world.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  And yet $179 is too much to externalize the invisible load of the head of household and all the projects that usually she does, the bill pay, the menu planning, the mail, this kid's school stuff, all of that. It's a one-time purchase. So I only say that because I truly would like to know the, you know what the alternative is? Paying nothing and just using your brain and forgetting things and just running around like.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, living like a hot mess, like so many people are.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we started a study right as COVID started and I'm going to get it started again soon. But we have anecdotally found that the Sunday basket saves you five hours per week, every week. We just passed 15 million hours saved just with the baskets that have been purchased and most people DIY it.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Okay, let's talk about like why the Sunday basket works. Why is it so important to take what is in your head and externalize it? And like, what are the different categories in the basket that make it easy?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Okay. So I'm going to play a trick on you.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  You ready?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  I am just coming home from work. I'm pulling in the driveway. I've got to change the laundry, grab something for dinner and put my Pilates clothes on. So I grabbed the mail as I'm walking in the house. Cause I mean, I'm walking by it anyway. I start flipping through, I'm like, ah, I should really recycle what I need to recycle. You don't want to bring that into the house, right? That's a productivity hack. So I get in the kitchen, I've recycled what I need to recycle. I put the mail down, I grab what I need to eat, I go change for Pilates, I get in the car. What did I forget to do?

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Something about dinner?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  No. I grabbed my dinner. Everyone I've done this with can't remember. It was change the laundry. Now I'm on my way to Pilates and I have forgotten to change my laundry. This is why you need a Sunday basket. We have a to-do list. We know what we're doing. We have a plan for our day and all of the other things, like the text message that comes in, the phone call, the getting the mail, the kids ask you a request, the dog is barking, needs to go out. All of these things derail us from what we're already doing. And you can only remember so many things in your working memory, usually about three. So when you picked up the mail, you dropped the laundry and the laundry was the thing you actually needed to do today. The mail can wait till Sunday.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So the mail all just goes in the Sunday basket. Then people think, well, the Sunday basket is only a mail.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  I would never open up the Sunday basket. I'd be like, I'll see you next year.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  That's the easiest example. Once you start using the Sunday basket, you realize, oh my gosh, there are so many things I'm trying to hold on to in my head. Like, so for example, I get this sourdough bread delivered, but I don't, I need to change the delivery date because I don't need more sourdough bread. Or I get water delivered to the house and I'm out of water. So I need to speed up when I'm going to get that water. Like we're trying to remember all of these things. So I just write all these notes to myself, throw it in the Sunday basket. And just like you plan in business every week, you should plan at home every week.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  So every week, the things that everybody does is whatever's important, the phone calls you have to make, the bills you need to pay, the ordering, the groceries, getting ready for your errands for the week, anything that's done that needs to go into a binder will go in a separate section. And then whatever the other projects are, are going to be you dependent and there are four categories. Anything related to your house. So like maintenance or getting money for the person that's going to clean it, all of that. Anything related to the people, including pets that live with you and what are they going to need for the week? Anything financial related? And then the one that I always created for and didn't really start until this year is anything related to you. What do you want to do? And we're so busy always checking things off the list. We don't actually get around to anything we want to do at home.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  I have such bad ADHD, I'm going to just share this with my listeners, that I didn't check my mail for like four months and I had a $40,000 check in the mail that got like expired because I waited over 180 days and I got another $40,000 check, thank God, that got resent to me. But that's how, like, what if you can't even check your mail?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of people are overwhelmed. ADHD, not ADHD, almost everyone, especially every woman today is overwhelmed. So the Sunday basket usually takes about six weeks to set it up. And then beginning, all you're doing is going, oh my gosh, I can't believe I missed this. Oh my gosh, how can I be this disorganized? I can't believe that, you know, everybody has that same story. But after about six weeks, you go, okay, I'm kind of on top of the fires. My dumpster fire is smaller now.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  It's in a Sunday basket and I'm just going to pull out and tackle whatever I can each week. And then you start to realize, you know what? This to-do list is never going to go away. So I need a better perpetual to-do list where I could pull things out as I could do them instead of just trying to make a really big list and check it all off.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  What was the, any like hurdles or challenges in relation to actually making the basket?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  We don't have enough time. So when we were making the basket here in Texas, it was actually a paper over cardboard box that was glued together. And they do actually manufacture in China, they just bring it in here. Well, China's really bad with glue. So then like the third version, like we were like, this would be cute. We're going to do like a lattice pattern. Well, whatever we did on that pattern made the glue not stick. So then all the boxes were like coming apart.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Oh God.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  The colored slash pockets that come in it, the first four orders were all wrong. And the first order was like a hundred percent defective, like a hundred percent defective. It was so much money. So I just went live in Facebook and I was like, okay, so good news, the slash pockets are here. Bad news are all defective and I'd already collected money. I said, so here's what we're going to do. You're going to get two for the price of one. I'm shipping them all out anyway, and we're just going to go with it. And my audience has always been so supportive. They were like, yay, we got double the slash pockets, but are defective. Like the holes weren't punched right, the whatever, whatever. They like just took it and they went with it. But the funny thing about if you do do physical organizing or physical products, the first

• 33:40Speaker 01

  thing that I did was one set, the rainbow set of slash pockets. And I had those shipped to my house because I mean, I worked from home.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  So the truck came and there were a lot of boxes, which filled my garage. And the other order was coming, which was four times the size. And I had not, when you think about doubling a business, well, if you're doubling an online business, whatever, get more customer service people. If you're doubling a physical products business, I was like, I need a place right away.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  You need a warehouse.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  250 square foot place, two months later, we're in 400 square feet. Six months later, we're in 1,500 square feet. I was like, wow, this doubling thing really takes up a lot of space.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you have to charge a lot for it and include the other services. So at what point, did you always have the other services involved with it?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Okay. So that was a start into courses and programs.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So because I was a teacher, I really love physical products and apparently ADHD. So I really like physical products. And what I know to be true in organizing is that you learn organization best in analog. Digitization is increasing productivity and individual of the person, but analog is universal. Everybody can sort paper. But when you go to digital, it's like, well, what kind of phone do you have? What kind of cloud service do you have? Like it's all very different, but paper is paper is paper. So I love taking it to that basic level. And I like office supplies. Like when my mom would take me to Office Max as a kid, I didn't want to go to the mall. I wanted to go to the office supply store. So I like office supplies and office supplies over time have really gone downhill.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  They weren't as bad when I started making them, but now like they're bad. If you look like they're, they have not been improved.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  They're basic. And since COVID, like half of the binder manufacturers have gone out of business.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Because for a while, like nobody was using planners or binders. I literally just bought a new weekly planner and it's like super colorful and I use it every day and I love it. And I'm like, I can't believe I wasn't writing anything down anymore. And I feel so much more productive now that I'm actually writing things down. It's, it's pretty crazy how much more productive you can get just by writing things down.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think when we first went digital, we were more productive digital because we had so many analog systems. And we're like, we were putting it all into one thing. We're putting it all into a Google calendar or all into a Word document or whatever. But now, I mean, there's so many digital things that I use. I can't remember where anything is. So now paper seems more simple, like everything kind of goes around.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  So crazy. Okay, let's talk about your audience and your marketing channel. So you've got a great podcast, 25 million downloads. I'm going to try to have you in my network and get you some sponsorship money maybe one day. You've accumulated this audience and what you do is so visual. So like, I would assume that you would want to show everything and be visual, but you've had really great success just talking to people. Why is that?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Well, one, I don't want the complexity of digital. Like to have to have your hair done and then are you going to wear the same outfit?

• 36:40Speaker 00

  It's a pain in the ass.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And once you get your house organized, what am I going to do? Make a mess to then show you how to make it clean? And then whenever you're thinking about visual, for me, okay, I'm, was a stay-at-home mom. Now I'm in a multi-generational family. My grandkids live with me, like I share all those, that information. But 60% of my audience is not married with kids under the age of 18. And once I found that out, I was like, whoa.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Really?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now that I have my PhD, I know that it is 81% of Americans are not married with children under the age of 18. It's only 17.9%. So I want to help any person of any age, anywhere in the world, in any size dwelling, get organized. And so I don't have a mommy makeover package anymore. I'm really getting down to what are the basics of what we need to get organized? We have housework, we have organizational work, we have invisible work that goes in the Sunday basket, which is administrative. We have information work and then we have the work of self-actualization at home. That is my theoretical orientation that I'm going to be doing research on.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Everything else, like if you have kids, if you're a caregiver, if you're settling in a state, if you're planning for the holidays, some people do all of those things, but not everybody does all of those things. So what are the universal things we need to organize as humans that are lacking? And then what are the things that are extra that you can add on for your family?

• 38:03Speaker 00

  So you feel like because you're just a voice. You can speak to everyone.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and I talk much more theoretical and big picture and teaching you how to think about things, teaching you how to think about your time, how to think about productivity, how to reorganize your house for the phase of life that you're in versus how the house was designed to be used.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Let's stick on that for a moment because I feel like people are curious about like, how can I get better organized? How can I better manage my household? What are like the top three things you could recommend for somebody to do right now? Or today or this week? To get better organized? What are three things they can do?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Okay, number one, stop doing your housework hidden. So like step on a stage and do your housework. If you live with people, they should be watching you vacuum, fold laundry, do dishes, like, don't do it when they all go off to work and soccer or wherever they go and you're like, oh, finally the house is quiet. I'm gonna do the dishes. Don't do that. I know it's great.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  So don't make it invisible. You call this invisible labor.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, if everybody else is having fun, you have fun too. Like, and when everybody else is here, do the housework with them. They can help or not, but at least they'll see that it's getting done. So that's number one.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Why though? Because then it makes it more appreciative or?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Well, it makes it not invisible because when you do it when everybody else is not in the house and then everybody else is in the house and they're doing leisure and you don't feel like you have time to do leisure because you need to do other things, then you are frustrated with them and they don't understand what the big deal is.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Got it. Yeah, okay.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  So that'd be number one. Number two, organize your spaces first. Organize your closet, your bedroom, your backpack, your laundry room, like whatever impacts you organize that first because number one, it will stay organized a lot longer than any of the family spaces. And number two, you will start living an organized life and so you will feel better. Because we default to everybody else around us and organizing all of them and then they don't appreciate it. It gets unorganized. And then again, we get frustrated.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And they're like, why are you mad?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so that'd be the second one. And the third one is, what is the one thing that has just been bothering you? And you're like, if I just had time to work on this thing, like use paper plates and order takeout in and then work on that thing. So like for me right now, it's my nutrition, my wellness. So I'm really trying to dial in like, now I'm hungry and I want to eat, but now I know all the food is bad, so I don't have any of the good foods. And then I just don't even know what to eat. So I really need to take some time to figure out what to eat because I could be hungry.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we talked about this word invisible labor. And I noticed that you create a lot of like terms in your marketing, things that I've never heard of before and you coin them. And I'm curious how that impacts your uh, stickiness to your audience, the way that they resonate with you, like, why do you come up with all these terms? And give us some examples.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Okay, great. So invisible labor is definitely an academic term. It's not my own. So I just want to make clear with that one. Um, but I think it's just the teacher, like, how do you through a podcast? Help someone who's in their own home, think about their home differently so that they can make decisions and make change. So I have to like explain and give examples of other households that might be similar to yours. And then give you a business analogy or a different analogy and then apply it to the home. So one would be Swiss cheese organizing. So Swiss cheese organizing actually came from when my kids were at this learning disability school and they talked about how an ADHD brain has Swiss cheese learning because of the executive function deficits, like one day the student will know their colors and the next day they won't.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  And that's, you know, Swiss cheese learning was coined by um, one of the teachers there. So I took that and I applied it to organizing and I was like, okay, well, women, we're like, I'm gonna take my house back and I organize the kitchen and the toy room and the family room and I do it all weekend long. And then I get to Monday, I'm like, house looks great. And then the next Friday, it's a mess again. Because you're organizing spaces that aren't going to stay organized. But if you organize your bathroom, your bedroom, your closet, those spaces will stay organized and now you can get your whole house organized in a year. You have an order of operations problem, not an effort problem. So I'm pulling that in from being a math teacher, like, you remember order of operations, like the pandas thing? So I'm applying that. And then I did a whole series on that where I was like,

• 42:26Speaker 01

  you must subtract, which is declutter, and then you must add, and then you must, you know, organization multiplies your time. And I did all these little analogies around math. Another one is golden windows. So we talk, I talk about when there are these unique periods of time where everybody wants to get organized, September, January.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  When you turn a milestone birthday, like forty.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Spring cleaning.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Have a baby, all that stuff. So some are universal, like everybody wants to get organized in September and some are unique to you. You're getting married and you're turning forty and you're having a baby or whatever it is. And you can stack these golden windows and then you have a lot of energy and this is when you should really go deep on getting organized.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Why is it that sometimes like I'm in the mood to clean and I like, I'll notice that there's stuff everywhere and then other times like I don't even notice that it's messy, like as an ADHD brain?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I could guess. So I'll just say for myself, sometimes it's like, okay, it's messy, but I really don't have the energy or I'm really excited about something I'm doing in business. So I'm like, whatever.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And then other times, maybe it'll be like, I'm stuck on something at work or I'll be like, I really need to figure this out, but I can't figure it out. And then I'll come home and I'll be like, this place is a mess and I'll put all my energy into organizing the house. And as I do that, I get the breakthrough for the business. So I find that a lot of times when we do some of that kinesthetic work, at least for myself personally, I'll make breakthroughs in other areas. Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  How are people finding you mostly? Like, how are you getting your sales? Where are the different channels? We talked about your podcasts, like, if you could break down like where you get a majority of your sales to different channels?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  You don't know?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. Oh, my God.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  She just like, I just make two million. I don't know.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I don't know. So um, I'm on Instagram. I pulled everybody onto my own app. So we're not on Facebook. I mean, I have accounts on Facebook, but I haven't been on Facebook in like six years because people like to organize in private.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  And people don't want like Facebook having all their information. So I have my own app. I have a custom coded website. Like I'm not on Shopify. I'm not, I am in Amazon just for one product. So yeah, I'm not in a lot of the places all the other people are. So that's kind of a problem. I do have the podcast and people do refer the podcast. I have books. People will find me when I'm on other podcasts like yours or I do a summit or things like that. But um, no, I've never been able to like dial it in. This is how you like.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Really? What about SEO from your website? It's so like word heavy. I'm assuming you get a lot of traffic from there. You don't know?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  People will say they find me. Somehow they end up on the podcast and that's where they.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  When you want to grow, like, do you care about growing?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  So when you want to grow, what do you, what do you do?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  So um, yeah, that's a great question. The only time I ever ran ads was we were running ads in February of 2020 and we ran them until May of 2020. I do think they kind of worked. But just like you said, I mean, you've looked at everything in the company and you're like, the Sunday basket is too expensive. Well, an ad, I mean, you see what I'm saying? On Facebook, that's not, people aren't gonna buy a hundred and seventy-nine dollar basket.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  The, the podcast works for you because you're building trust.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  You're getting people to like, listen to your voice, feel connected with you, listen to you every day until finally they're like,

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Lisa's given me so much advice. I'm gonna buy her two hundred and fifty dollar basket and get this started. And at least I get something physical in the process. Probably easier to make the, the course sale in 2026 with a physical product, to be honest, because courses are kind of going a little downhill. But you're, talk to us about your model of your course because it's actually, you're involved. It's, it's more of a, is it like live kind of like group coaching?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I didn't finish that earlier. There's always three components to anything that we sell. There's a physical product.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  There's an online course, like an on-demand course, and then there's some kind of a co-working. So in the Sunday basket, you get the Sunday basket, you get the online course. And then about forty out of fifty-two Sundays from five to six thirty Eastern, there's one of two people that'll lead a Sunday basket club. Um, the productive home solution, we don't have a physical product anymore, but that's our whole system to organize your entire house. And then Tanya on Thursday will lead you in, like, what does that look like in her house with twins that are twelve? Whereas I am, you know, an empty nester now.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  And then my live components are when I do planning days. So now I'm taking you up to that level five CEO thinking leader of the house.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  VIP premium package. So how much is somebody spending on that?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  So the planning day right now is two hundred and fifty dollars per session.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  It's a live event. So we just charge and once you're in that, you can get the subscription, which drops it a little bit.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Many people can join that.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Many people can join that. We have a thousand people in it.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  You have a thousand people in it and they, they join every, a thousand people join the call?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  A thousand people are in the subscription plan and they have been for like five years.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Okay, cool.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have very, very little churn.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  And they show up on Sundays and do it with you.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  So this is the planning day. It's kind of like quarterly planning in business. It's kind of modeled after the EOS model. So it's a two-day event, a Thursday and a Friday. Thursday, we prep and we get ready and we pull all of our resources, clean out our Sunday basket and get all our binders ready. And then I do a four-hour live and there's a six-week replay where we go through like, thinking through our time and thinking through our housework and our goals and objectives and plan out our house, all the things we want to do in our house for the next one hundred and twenty days. So we do this three times a year.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Got it. Okay. I feel like we need this like more broken down. I don't get what you do yet. So what is the?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Welcome to How We Profit Therapy. I'm just kidding.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Product ladder. Tell us your product ladder. Like, what is the lowest entry point to work with you to the highest?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Sunday basket, a hundred and seventy-nine dollars.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  The productive home solution is twelve fifty. That's organizing your house.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Does somebody goes and organizes your house?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  You have to organize your own house. I teach you how. I know. It's a fifty-two week, never-ending program.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  I'm too rich for that.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  And there's a good point to that. So this is not designed for people who are too rich for that. Like, that's what in-home professional organizers are for. This is for the people who are like, I don't have $75 an hour to pay a professional organizer, but I will learn the skill. And also, just getting back to like, we're running an enterprise. Like, we are running the household engine. And this is the, like, if you were an entrepreneur, and I said, okay, it's gonna be like $3,000 for you to get all the operating systems you need, you'd be like, where can I sign up? But when we're talking about a household, we're like, $750 to do all the information management, that's so much money. Aren't those just binders? No, they're like, the life, like, they're the operating system, the KPIs, the processes

• 49:01Speaker 01

  that you would have in business for your household, they will help you. If somebody has to step in as power of attorney, power of healthcare, settle your estate, like, these are real things that are going to happen in all households.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and help save you time and efficiency so that you can make more money, do whatever you need to do. Okay, so we're on the second stage.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's Sunday Basket, organizing the house, the productive home solution, the paper solution is 750. And then you go to Planning Days. So we have a monthly and a quarterly planning.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  And you pay $250 a week?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  $250 per planning session. There are only three a year, so $750 a year.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Got it. 750 a year, and it's a planning session with you involved?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  It's really cool. You're helping people. And you're making money doing it. And so you've got a pretty small team, right? You've got nine people you mentioned. What are all the different roles that you have right now?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  So we have full-time graphic designer, a full-time finance, one that's part-time finance, and warehouse. I have a chief of staff, I have an executive assistant, I have somebody else who works in the warehouse, customer service, there's me.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  There's me. It sounds like you need a marketing person, maybe?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yes. We had a marketing person. We probably do need a marketing person. Marketing is me right now.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And something that I heard you say earlier in the conversation is that you've never been viral. You're like, I did this all, you have like a $2 million business, you've never been viral. You've got a great podcast, though, which is really great long-form content. You built a great blog. What are your thoughts around the fact that you've never gone viral, but you still have a successful business?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not really sure. When I started the PhD, we're a $2.5 million company, and we maintained that for four years before we sunset our work product, and now we're at 2 million. And it's really, the customers, once they really buy into doing the products, like, they, once you have the Sunday Basket, then you want to make all the other things, and then you just do your old house away.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  You have really great LTV. So your customers are really going up the product ladder.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And they're just buying more office supplies. And they're using this system in other ways.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Awesome. And do you think there's a lot of word of mouth happening?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  No, you know why? People don't want to tell people when they're doing organizing, and/or if you tell other people when you're doing organizing, people are like, yeah, have her come to my house. She doesn't come to her house, never mind, that sounds like work. So what I realized is, a lot of people don't want to do the work of getting organized. But the people who do are usually leaders in their other roles. And so they see the value of getting this organized, because it will give them time, so they can have more time for what they're uniquely gifted and created to do, which may be volunteering, it may be growing a business, it may be leading in corporate America, or whatever, but they know that they've been organizing successful over here, so they need to be organized and successful over here.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  And I don't think you have a lot of competition. I can't imagine that there's a ton of courses available for organization. Am I right?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Most of the courses that are out there aren't as complete, and they focus on one niche, which is mostly married women with children. So they're not looking at a woman that is not married. Or you go into the productivity space, or time management space, and they can teach you a time management, or a journal, or some systems, but they don't have the home organization piece.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  So.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  So you have like a more holistic approach?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  To manage the entire household?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  So you were also selling work systems and organization. Why'd you decide to sunset that part of your business? Especially if it was making, I guess, how much money?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  A million dollars a year.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  It was making a million dollars a year?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  It was making a million dollars a year. So I was doing these home planning days three times a year, trimester, and I was doing quarterly planning days with people in work. So that was a recurring product. And then the Sunday Basket, same exact product, we called it a Friday work box. And that is the box I originally created back when I was doing direct sales. And now I had my whole team profitable, because I taught them that pink leads to purple, leads to blue, leads to green. So marketing pink leads to purple products and customers, leads to team members to support those, leads to revenue.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  And so, once you learned that in direct sales, you made money. But if you didn't learn that, like, you only focused on one color, you never had a well-rounded business enough to make money.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  So I moved that into Organize 365. But the problem was, I had eight of these boxes, all things I had done. Entrepreneur, direct sales, teacher, corporate, like, everything that I've done. So I was teaching it that way. Then I made it just one box. But I'm an entrepreneur. So when you are an entrepreneur, pink leads to purple, leads to blue, leads to green. When you are an employee, green leads to blue, leads to purple, leads to pink, because the entrepreneur is the one that comes up with the ideas, and the marketing and the new. And as an employee, you have administrative tasks that you work with a team on to create the product that fulfills the CEO's vision.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And to truly make that line what it needed to be, I needed to create two products, one entrepreneurial and one employee. And I could have done it. But what I found was, I was spending so much time figuring that out, that I was not iterating on the home. And there are thousands of people who do this, and I'm the only person that does the home at the level that I do it. And so I burned the boats, just like I got rid of the in-home organizing when it was making almost half a million dollars to start something that was making nothing. I did it again. And now, I'm like, okay, I see we need monthly CEO sessions. I see we need a planner. I'm coming out with a planner next month. I see we need a state course. So I'm like, I see now, the pieces that are already missing

• 54:39Speaker 01

  and what I'm creating, because we still have so much work at home that is not operationalized.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. So even though it was making money, it was profitable. Was it profitable?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Okay. You still shut it down because you felt like it was slowing you down with your core competency. And eventually, like, you want to make 5 million, 10 million, more millions on your organization?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Business. That's interesting.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  It is interesting. Well, you can only do so much. Like, you, as the individual CEO visionary creator, can only do so much.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got to focus. That's the name of the game. So it's like, if you're losing focus, trying to develop something that you aren't even necessarily like, the top expert in the world on. That's probably also what you're feeling. You're like, I know how to organize. I had that business. Now you're getting your PhD to like, learn more about that. How do you think your PhD is actually going to help you in your business?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, my husband asks that question often. That's why we're coming out with this Productive Home CEO Theoretical Framework. It's a podcast series now. It'll be a book next year. And then that will be the theory that I ground all my research in. So to have research theory, you have to have a book. So I'm going to create the book. And then I'm going to go and run a lot of studies. So I'm going to self-fund my studies and get them published in academia and elsewhere.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  And that will be like IP that you can sell with your business, right?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  So once you publish it in academia, they own it, kind of like if you traditionally publish a book. But yes, it is IP. And this is taking household management to a level that's, that's never been studied before. The last time psychologists studied household management in this way was all the way back in the 30s and 40s, when Lillian Gilbreth did efficiency studies. She was the cheaper by the dozen lady.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  She was a psychologist. And so she studied household efficiency. And then academia moved into economics, and that's where we were in the 60s and 70s. And that's when consumer packaged goods were like, yeah, let's target that homemaker. And they created the homemaker out of scratch. Like, it was a marketing gimmick, the stay-at-home mom, which I bought into, hook, line, and sinker, and loved it. And then we've moved into the feminist, you know, women are doing more labor, invisible labor, the burnout and the mental load of women, which is real and definitely needs to be studied in academia. We've been studying that since the mid 80s.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  My thing is, okay, yeah, that's true. But I can't get my husband to do something different. I can't get my kids to do something different. I can only impact me. And so me, as the head of my household, how can I support myself, other than just downloading Pinterest printables and things like that? Like, I need an operating system. I need a way to operationalize what I'm doing. I need a way that I have a system that I could put in place in our parents' homes, that I could put in place in my kids' homes, that I could put in place in my sister's home, if I need to step in and be her power of attorney, or her power of healthcare, as opposed to running all their households on all their systems. So that's really what I'm going to focus on.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  So let's talk about margins, profitability. So, right now, you're not doing the home services anymore. You really got your products that you just went over. What is your margin on all this? Like, how much profit? How much are you spending? What is your biggest cost centers in doing all these different courses?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  And the interesting thing about my company that I realized is, because I am the manufacturer... And I'm the distributor in one company. We actually don't do markup between manufacturer to distributor to end user.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  But I could, like if we were to end up like in Target or something, we would have the manufacturing, we would package that and then there'd be a, you know, cost for that product. We just go straight from manufacturing to end use. So it looks like there's a lot more margin than there is.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  And because a lot of it is online, you know, I already made the course. So what's, there is no hard cost in that anymore. I continue to update it, but there isn't a hard cost.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Other than like you and the other people that have to show up on the Sunday planning days and stuff.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when you look at the P and L, like the actual physical products is low, like 10 to 15%. Shipping is like 7%. So you're like, oh my gosh, you have like 80% margins. No, you don't. Cause we have warehouse fees. We have warehouse employees. We have customer service. So then you take it down to like, okay, we can lump all of that into operating expense. And that's probably like 40%. So we're still 60% profitable.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  But if I'm the face of the brand and I'm creating everything, I'm not in that. I'm over in G and A, research is down in G and A. Um, you know, all the other team members are down in G and A. So how they do it on a P and L, like what's considered profit and not profit. Um, we were profitable the last two years enough that we could do profit sharing, which I really loved doing for my team. It was great. This year we weren't as profitable. So.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Because you're, you're developing.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Cause you dropped that product.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  We're still profitable, but not.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Oh, that's amazing that you did profit sharing with your employees. Can you share a little bit about that? Like how you actually did it?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So again, back to that C corp and S corp. So the S corp can have retained earnings at the end of the year, whatever the profit is, like in an S corp, it would just flow through to the business owner or they could distribute it if they want to. But if they don't, it'll just flow through to them. Where you're in a C corp, you have to make a decision. Like I pull a W two salary. I also get royalties. And then at the end of the year, what is the profit? So I think each year we had like $200,000 in profit. So then when you have that $200,000 in profit, you could pay your 21% tax, $42,000 and then just keep the rest of the $160,000 in the company and just add it so that you can use it to buy things.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Or you can distribute it to yourself, like as a business owner, you could just do that. Or you could do what's called profit sharing. So when you do profit sharing, that's going to be means tested, which means that we have a 401k, we do a company match of 4%. So we already checked the box of one of the means testing. And then they look at the entire employees, everyone that qualifies, and they do all these actuarial things and they come back and they say, okay, if you distribute a hundred thousand dollars, this is how it would break out. If you distribute 150, this is how it would all break out. And I remember when my husband got two profit sharing distributions, probably 20 years ago, there, the company he was with was bought and it was about to be sold. And so the business owners wanted to take, um, money out of the company and it was advantageous to them to

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  do it as a profit sharing. So he got like, I, it was a lot of money, like $20,000 or something like that in one year in profit sharing, which all goes into your 401k. And I, he talks about that all the time and how meaningful it was. So I was like, I want to do that with my employees one day. So that we did that two years in a row. And sometimes people won't see that as a real benefit because they're like, well, but that's in my 401k. I can't spend it today, especially if they're younger, even though it'll grow so much bigger. So I also tried to do bonuses as well, because it's like money now, money later.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Really great. Where do you think you're the strongest in your business?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I think the fact that I am research back, going to do my own research, that I understand the entire lifespan of the adult cycle, that I have a complete from decluttering to organizing to increasing productivity and beyond scope, like the depth of my researches and my knowledge is really strong.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  I also think one of your strengths is just your journey.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Like the fact that you're a teacher, so you're really good at teaching. You can come up with words and analogies and then you did the like physical organizing for people. So I feel like it's also your journey, which I think is the, the case for a lot of entrepreneurs. Like your, your journey is also your strength. All right. Next is weaknesses. What do you think your biggest weaknesses are?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  I think, uh, one of my biggest weaknesses is I don't know how people find me and I don't know how to have more people find me.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  You definitely need to think about, how are you going to create marketing channels? Especially with a 60% margin. It's like, how are you just going to get more customers in the door? And I think honestly, like as a marketer myself.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  I think it means you've got to like actually lean into social media and get on camera.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Or you don't even need to necessarily get on camera. It could be writing on social media, like, I don't know, but I, I just feel like you need to embrace the fact that everyone's on Instagram and TikTok.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  I'm on Instagram every day.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  You're on Instagram every day.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  But I'm not doing a good job of it, obviously.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  And it's like, you need to be like DMing people and bringing them into your world and having webinars and it's really cool that you've got this podcast and I think that's working. But if you want to like 2X, 3X, 5X the business, I think it's really about getting out there.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yep. Agreed.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  That's why I'm in Austin.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, she's getting out here right now. All right. Opportunities. Where do you think your biggest opportunities lie?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  I think that there are a lot of opportunities and I try, even though I like to go after every shiny penny. Um, I'm trying to be very strategic with what I say yes to and what channels we go to next. Um, we could do brand partnerships. You know, I could start speaking on stages. I already have six books, but I plan on continuing to publish about a book a year. So we have a lot of opportunities. I think research is probably the biggest one though, when we can start having some academic support for these products specifically in the home, like you do for any other thing that's in a business. You know, those all have academic testing behind them. Um, I want to do the study, find support, replicate

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  my own study and then offer my products to independent researchers to be able to see if they can also replicate the study to see if there's support for these.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I think like an ADHD line, products, courses just for them. Like, I think that could have worked really, really well. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs with a lot of money who have ADHD. Okay. Threats. What's your biggest threats?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  My company will have to be sold. Like it's not going to go to my kids. So, but I want to work till I'm 80. Martha Stewart was 80 when I made that goal. I think she's 83 now. Dan Sullivan is 82 or whatever. I'm like, okay, well, if they can make it to 80, I can make it to 80. So that's 26 more years. Like I have quite a few years of working.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  But if you're the face of the company, how's that going to work?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  We're creating an AI right now. I'm doing that Delphi AI and I'm creating two of them, one for our home, our home-based products and one for the CEO line. And so you're going to be able to voice chat with that 24/7. So that's one way.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Um, who knows what are going to be opportunities.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Like Dave Ramsey approach, like get other like faces in there.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Tried it.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah, I tried it.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Didn't go well.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  I mean, your intellectual property is your intellectual property. Everybody's going to put their spin on things. And when you create something that's truly unique, like I've created, people want you like, is there a second Oprah? I'm not saying I'm Oprah. I'm just saying, you know, is there a second Brene Brown? Is there a second Mel Robbins? No. I mean, people want that person.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Who's created that, you know, community or that feeling or that intellectual property. I don't think it's something that you could just like democratize.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when you go to sell your company, it will be like the, all the courses and the materials and the, and the contents essentially.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Franklin Covey is now a public company.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  But back in the day, you know, it was the Covey books and the Covey planner, but now it's, and it's like multiple hundreds of million dollar company. And it's no longer associated with the person.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I've been really good at making sure that I have patents and trademarks and copyrights and all of that kind of thing. So I think as far as that goes, that's not a threat. Um, my biggest threat is people just don't want to do work at home. They just don't want to do it.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  People want to pay for it, but if you can't pay for it, you got to learn.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  They don't even want to pay for it. They just want it to like magically go away or not be a thing or.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  AI robots.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Hopefully.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Don't work. But anyway.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, this has been such an awesome conversation. I feel like we learned so much about your business. Uh, my last question to you is if you wanted to double the size of your business, what steps would you take today?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  So doubling the size of the business, uh, I just did a reader survey, you know, finding out what my audience wanted. And then I reverse engineered, how can we give them what they want?

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Because you find the value in existing clients. You know that.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  And how do you reach these existing clients? Do you have like an email list that you target?

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  I do have an email list. We have a private app. So every course has its own, um, thing inside of the app. And then you can also get in the app for free. I'm on Instagram. I do podcast episodes. So they hear me there. Um, but our email list is really engaged.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  So I got a lot of responses from the reader survey.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Very cool. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on How We Profit. Where can everybody learn about you and everything that you do?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. The website is organize365.com. I'm organized365 on Instagram and the podcast is organized365.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on How We Profit.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  And that yap fam is how Lisa and Organize 365 profits. What stood out to me today is that Lisa is not just selling organization. She's naming a problem millions of people feel, the invisible work, the paper piles, the mental load and the overwhelm of running a home. And when a founder can name the problem better than anyone else, create a system around it and build trust through the years with teaching and podcasting, that becomes a real moat. Thanks for listening to How We Profit Wednesdays, the Young and Profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins and the real story of how their businesses actually work. I'm Hala Taha and I'll see you next time.