Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)

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

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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 bef...

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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 bending the world shuts down. We're joined by Lisa Wooddress, founder and CEO of Organized 365 and creator of the Sunday Basket. To unpack exactly how organized 365 profits. When I started PhD, we're a 2.5 million dollar company, we're still 60% profitable.

We were profitable the last two years enough that we could do profit sharing, which I really love doing for my team.

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

My husband asked that question often. 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, so you were also selling work, systems, and organization. Why did you decide to sunset that part of your business? Especially if it was making, I guess, how much a million dollars a year? It was making a million dollars a year? A million dollars a year?

And it's just a thing about my company that I realized is, Lisa, welcome to Howie Profit. Thank you so much for having me. 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 organized 365 in one sentence?

So what people think when they hear organized 365 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. Really organized 365 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. Amazing. So basically, you've expanded into having programs and courses,

master classes, 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 and profiteers. So you were actually a teacher and you didn't become an entrepreneur until age 40. Tell us about that. Right, in my 20s and 30s, I was a state home mom.

And I did a lot of direct sales companies. I was in 23 different direct sales companies. Wow. And I made money and 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 organized 365. No idea how I'd make money.

But I knew that was a good SEO keyword. And I knew I loved talking about organizing. 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.

They did. Thanks for reminding me. 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.

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

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 Boston value me anymore. And so if my Boston 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 going to get on with it.

That was it. It managed to make 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 organized 365 from the start. Yes, because there were some really big bloggers and Cincinnati so I was in a blog in group. I had a blog in 2009, so I understood SEO keywords, that's all I understood.

These bloggers got really great deals with proctor and gamble and all these other big consumer package.

I could never land any deals.

I have never got, I've never gone viral. 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 Direct Sales Party, like Mary Kay,

Paper Chef. Okay. Just a few people go. 25 people were there. Okay.

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. Interesting. Okay. So you had this blog.

You were like, on the side, charging people at what point we were like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm going to actually create this organization business. 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 it for $5,000. Yeah. So you were charging about $5,000. Correct.

No, that's time. I was charging $40 an hour. Okay. One half hour minimum. So it was $100 to have me come to your house.

Oh my gosh. I have to talk about this. It was $5,000 for the week to organize your whole house with my team. Okay. So I have a 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? 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. Okay. I did five like sections.

Five like sections. 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. Yes.

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.

Okay. And the pricing for that is $75 an hour per person. So it was $150 for the team because I would send two people. Okay. Five hour minimum.

So it's $750 a day. We would quote a whole house in one week was $5,000 and I would come to and we get the whole house done in one. Got it. Okay.

Now were you making money on that business? Oh yeah. 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 on other cities and like making it this like huge brand of like we were going to- because there's nothing that like that that exists. So I feel like there's a reason for that. And there's a reason why I'm telling you. So in November when I heard some made a work with me, I'd replaced 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 in 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 in my eight months.

I had 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 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. 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, well, 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, social security numbers, 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.

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. 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. Yeah.

So this gave you way to scale your IP and all the knowledge that you accumulated without having to have all the extra people, right? 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 organizations really expensive, 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 for a month, but they had me come back a month after a month, after a month, were learning the skill of organizing. I was teaching them how to organize.

And I was like, okay, but 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 was shy, you know, you're

just kind of listening, and I'm teaching you. 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 making on the service business per month? Yeah, before we flipped and totally got rid of it, we made $400,000. And I remember when 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 in 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 with such

a good thing. Okay. 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 that stuff.

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 to talk about the business structure change. What did you do exactly?

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 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 LC 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 products, and I needed 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.

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

You'll get a K-1 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. Okay. 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, 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 the S-Corp, because it's your money. You've already paid taxes on it, so if you use S-Corp money, you've already paid taxes

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But I do want to ask you about what you learned, even though you sunsetted the service

Part of your business, it really gave you like hands-on knowledge of like dif...

types, different problems, how you solve them. So sometimes even though you're starting your business isn't where you end up, it's very important for your journey and the knowledge that you gain from the hands-on experience. A hundred percent, I mean, hands-on experience beats everything and having done it for six years, like I remember stories about what works and what doesn't work and having to wrestle

through some of those things are really important. Also, you make a lot of money really fast in a service business that really can help you get started because I didn't have any money to start my company. I just went from zero to zero. I don't even need investment.

No, you go. It's the same way when I started my social media services, like I was writing the posts, you know, like it's you, is the investment. Yeah, and the longer your business, I'll be in business 15 years by January. You're going to grow and evolve as a person, 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. Yeah, make 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?

Yeah.

So when I started organizing the first package I had was the mommy makeover package because

I was a mommy. Yeah, and so the mommy makeover package was four areas. Three boobs. New ass. Yeah.

I wasn't, I didn't know about that then. So it was your locker 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 in men who have 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. Yeah. And housing is so cheap, and 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 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 big deal. And then there were a lot of women who were in their later years, you know, 60's, 70's,

who maybe had lost a spouse who 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. Yeah.

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. How about your ADHD clients? They're probably the best. You make them with money on them because they'll never learn.

That's like my, I have a housekeeper, and she's probably like, thank God, how it doesn't follow their laundry, because keeps me getting some work. So the ADHD's really, really interesting. 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 need 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 in 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. 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 will be scientifically shown. What would be the intervention? Like, what would you do? The Sunday basket. Oh, the Sunday basket.

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. Yeah. Every single person has to create them to describe.

So you want household managers, which are usually women, to be, to feel like they're the CEO of their household. 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 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. Everybody'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 like every single person is cobbling together whatever they're doing at home from printables, up Pinterest, and podcasts they're listening to and whatever

the girlfriends doing or what they remember their mom doing or like, yeah, how are we doing?

I can't believe we're doing it at all, actually. Yeah, that's so interesting. We haven't put any of those business principles in the household. Yeah, fam, I genuinely feel ahead of the curve with AI for the first time because the last year, I felt like I couldn't see the value from it.

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Quowe.com/prafting. 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 looked it up, it's like a bin, was like

lots of folders. It's a project management box, it's a weekly planning system. As somebody who has ADHD, I love that. I love physical colors, anything that will make it somewhat fun to do the thing that I'm

Despising to do.

Yeah, I totally trick you. That's my whole goal. So what is the Sunday basket, and talk to us about the evolution of you selling it, how it started, how much money were you making, how much did you invest to create it, how did you talk to somebody and trying to get it made like, well, this is the story.

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

physical because so much what we do is cognitive and executive function is cognitive, so if you can externalize it, which is my thesis, then you can see it manipulated outside of your head and you could get more done. So the Sunday basket, I actually created it in 2002 when my kids were two years old and six months old, and personally used it.

And I taught it to people in direct sales because I couldn't get my consultants and direct

sales to be profitable because they were always side-tracked by everything they had to do

in their household. So I was like, well, fix the household thing so that you can actually do your job. Yeah. So then when I started the company, when I was 40, I blogged and podcast about the Sunday basket and I created like an ebook right away and I sold it for like seven bucks.

And then people kept coming around to, it was the Sunday basket that worked. So I was manufacturing the Sunday basket, actually my first manufacturer was in Dallas, Texas. Oh, nice. Yes.

So we made it here in Texas first and then they said my expectations were too high, which I've heard before, and we do manufactured in China now because it's a stone basket and a lot of people put like up to 20, 25 pounds worth of paper in it, so it needs to hold that. So yeah, we decided to manufacture it.

So I manufactured it here in Texas and I could order small amounts because I was using

a product they already had and I was just making a derivative work off of it.

And then when I started manufacturing in China, I actually patented it and start creating it.

Oh, so nobody, I was going to say, you must have a lot of copycats.

No, I don't have any. And I actually have my trademarks in England or the UK and also Australia already. So this basket is pretty expensive, like on your website, it's $250 on Amazon, it's like 180. It's two different versions.

Yep. Yeah. And they both have the box and the colored folders that you see, the workbook, the course and the accountability. The one that's 250 also has to make sure office supplies, tear pads and things that you'll

see me use in videos. If you don't want to like have to go back to the store and get things like just get it all at once, but the one 79 one will get you start has all the courses, all the accountability. And so I think it's so funny. I'm going to actually push back, sure, that you think it's expensive for $179 for a one-time

purchase that has lifetime access to co-working and we've been running the co-working for eight years. Well, I didn't know that to run weighty has, I think to me, the basket feels expensive, but the whole offering is not because it's lifetime access. Yes.

And I upgraded all the time. I upgrade the course and all of that, but I only push back because this is my biggest marketing hurdle is we households are responsible for 68% of USGDP. And you say that, what do you mean? I mean, that all of the amount of money that is moves in the United States, 68% comes

from households, spending because, like, the rest is government industries and, yeah, cleaning supplies. Is that what you mean? 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, 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 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, the alternative is paying nothing and just using your brain and forgetting things and just running around, like, yeah, living like a hot mess. Yeah. Yeah.

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 I'm in purchased and

most people DIY it. 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?

Okay. So, I'm going to play trick on you. Okay. You ready? Okay.

I'm pulling in the driveway. I've got changed the laundry, grab some for dinner and put my Pilates close on. So, I grabbed the mail as I'm walking the house because I mean, I'm walking by it anyway. I start flipping through. I'm like, I should really recycle what I need to recycle.

You don't want to bring that in the house, right? That's a productivity hack. So I get in the kitchen. I recycle 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? Turning about dinner?

No. I grab my dinner.

When I've done this with, I can't remember.

It was changed the laundry. Now, I'm away 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 your request, the dog is barking needs to go out. All these things deal real less 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. So the mail all just goes in the Sunday basket. Then people think, well, the Sunday basket is only a mail.

I would never open up the Sunday basket.

I'd be like, I'll see you next week. Next week. At these is example. Once you start using the Sunday basket, you realize, oh my gosh, there's so many things I'm trying to hold on to in my head.

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.

Yeah. 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 errands for the week, anything that's done that needs to go into a binder will go into a separate section.

And then whatever the other projects 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 creative 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. Oh, he's checking things off the list. We don't actually get around anything.

We want to do it home. I have such bad ADHD. I want 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 recent to me.

But that's how like what if you can't even check your mail?

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, can't believe I missed this. Oh my gosh, how can I be this to organize?

I can't believe that you know, everybody has that same story. But after about six weeks, you go, OK, I'm kind of on top of the fires. My dumpster fire is smaller now. Yeah. It's an assembly 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. What was the any like hurdles or challenges in relation to actually making the basket? 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 and China, they just bring it in here. China's really bad with glue. So then like the third version, like we're like, this would be cute. We're going to be like a lattice pattern, whatever we did on that pattern made the glue

not sticks. So then all the boxes were like coming apart, the colored slash packets to 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, OK, so good news to slash packets are here. Bad news are all defective. And I'd already collected money. I said, oh, my goodness, 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 packets, but 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 thing that I did was one set, the rainbow set of slash packets. And I had those shipped to my house because I mean, I worked from home. Yeah. 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, what 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. And you've got a 250 square foot place, two months later, we're in 400 square feet, six

months later, we're in 1500 square feet, I was like, wow, this doubling thing, really takes a blast space. 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?

Yep.

Okay.

So that was a start into courses and programs.

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.

Yeah. So I love taking it to that basic level. And I like office advice. Like when my mom would take me to office Max as a kid, I didn't want to them all. I wanted to go to the office supply store.

So I like office supplies. And office supplies over time have really gone downhill. They weren't as bad when I started making them, but now they're bad. If you look like they're really good. They're just like basic.

Yeah. They're basic and since COVID, like half of the binder manufacturers have gone out of business. Because for a while, nobody was using planners or binders. I literally just bought them a week ago 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 pretty crazy how much more productive you can get just by writing things down.

Well, I think when we first went digital, we were more productive digital because we had so many

analog systems. They were 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. So crazy. Okay, let's talk about your audience and your marketing channels.

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. Oh, you've accumulated this audience and what you do is so visual. So 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? Well, one, I don't want the complexity of digital. Like, tap to have your hair done and then are you going to wear the same outfit? Like, it's a vacuum. It's a vacuum.

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 state of a mom. Now I'm in a multi-generational family. My grandkids live with me, like I share all those in that information.

So 60% of my audience is not married with kids under the age of 18. And once I found that out, I was like, whoa, and now that my, yeah, now that 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, and any size dwelling get

organized. And so I don't have a mommy make over a 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. Okay. 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?

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

Let's stick on that for a moment, because I feel like people are curious about 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? 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 talk or wherever they go, and you're like, oh, finally the house is quite,

I'm going to do the dishes, don't do that. I know it's great. So don't make it invisible. You call it invisible. Just invisible labor.

Yeah, if everybody else is having fun, you have fun too. Like, I want everybody else's here, do the housework with that. They can help or not, but at least they'll see that it's getting done. So that's number one. Why, though, because then it makes it more appreciative, or 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...

because you need to do other things, then you are frustrated with them and they don't understand what the big deal is. Got it, yeah. Okay. So that'd be number one.

Number two, organize your spaces first, organize your closet, your bedroom, your backpack,

your laundry, like whatever impacts you organize that first, because number one, it will stay organized a lot longer than any of the family's 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 and it gets an organized and then again, we get frustrated.

Yeah. And they're like, why are you mad? Okay. Okay. So I'll 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 in order to take out in, and then work on that thing. So like for me right now, it's my nutrition and 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. Yeah. I really need to take some, I can figure out what to eat, because I could be hungry. 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? Okay. And it gives us some examples.

Okay. Great. So invisible labor is definitely an academic term. It's not my home, so I just want to take care of that one. 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 a 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.

And that's Swiss cheese learning was coined by 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 organized the kitchen and the toy room and the family room and I do it all weekend long and then I get to Monday and like house looks great.

And then 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. Yeah. So I'm applying that.

And then I did a whole series on that where I was like, 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.

Yep. When you turn a milestone birthday like 40, bringing cleaning, have a baby, all that stuff. So some are universal like everybody wants to get organized in September at some are unique to you. You're getting married and you're turning 40 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. 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, I don't know, but I could guess.

Okay. 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. I'm like, whatever. Yeah.

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 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 a lot of times when we do some of that kinesthetic work for myself personally, I'll make breakthroughs in other areas. Yeah. 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 or different channels, I don't know. You don't know.

No. I just make two million. I don't know. No. So I'm on Instagram.

I pulled everybody onto my own app. So we're not on Facebook. I mean, I have a council on Facebook, but I haven't been on Facebook in like six years, because people like to organize and private. Yeah.

And people don't want like Facebook having all their information. So I have my own app. I have a custom code of website. Like, I'm not on Shopify. I am an Amazon just for one.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm not in a lot of the places all the other people are.

That's kind of a problem.

I do have the podcast and people do refer to 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 now I've never been able to like dial it in.

This is how you like really big. 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?

People will say they find me somehow they end up on the podcast. And that's where they go. When you want to grow, like do you care about growing? Yes. Yes.

What do you do? So 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 Vasquez to expensive wool and an ad. I mean, you see what I'm saying on Facebook. That's not people aren't at $100,000.

No, you need to build the podcast works for you because you're building trust.

Yes. So like listen to your voice, feel connected with you, listen to you every day, until finally they're like, yes, we're so much advice. I'm going to buy her $250 basket and get to start it. And at least I get something physical in the process.

It's probably easier to make the core sale in 2026 with a physical product to be honest, because courses are kind of going a little downhill. But your talk to us about your model of your course, because it's actually your involved, it's more of a, is it like life kind of like group coaching? Yeah.

So I didn't finish that earlier.

There's always three components to anything that we sell.

There's a physical product. Okay. There's an online course like an on-demand course. And then there's some kind of a co-working. So in the Sunday Vasquez, you get the Sunday Vasquez, you get the online course.

And then about 40 out of 52 Sundays from 5 to 630 Eastern. There's one of two people that will lead a Sunday Vasquez club. The productive home solution. You 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 12, whereas I am, you know, an empty nest or now. Okay.

And then my life components are when I do planning days.

So now I'm taking you up to that level 5 CEO. Thank you, Lisa. So this is like the VIP premium package. So how much is somebody spending on that? So the planning day right now is $250 per session.

Okay. We just charge, and once you're in that, you can get the subscription, which drops it a little bit. And many people can join that. Many people can join that.

We have 1,000 people in it. You have 1,000 people in it. And they join every 1,000 people join the call. 1,000 people are in the subscription plan, and they have been for like 5 years. Okay.

We have very little choice. And then the show up on Sundays and do it with you. So this is the planning day. It's kind of like quarterly planning a business. It's kind of modeled after the EOS model.

So it's a two day event, a Thursday and a Friday. Thursday. 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 120 days. So we do this three times a year. Got it. Okay.

I feel like we need this like more broken now. I don't get what it. You do yet. So what is that? This is my home.

Uh, Logan Hallie for profit therapy. I'm just kidding. That's good. Product ladder. Tell us your product ladder.

Like what is the lowest entry point to work with you to the highest Sunday basket $179. Okay. The product of home solution is 1250 that's organizing your house. Does somebody go as an organization?

No. You have to organize your own house. I teach you. I know. So 52 week never ended.

Did you reach for that? Exactly. 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 professionals organize this for.

This is for the people who are like, I don't have $75 an hour to pay and a professional organization. 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 going to be like $3,000 for you to be all the operations systems.

You need. You 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 and 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 health care, settle your estate. Like these are real things that are going to happen in all households.

Yeah. And help save you time and efficiency so that you can make more money, do whatever you need to do.

So we're on the second stage.

Yeah, so it's Sunday basket organizing the house, the productive home solution. The paper solution is 750 and then you go to a planning day. So we have a monthly and a quarterly planning and you pay $250 a week, $250 per planning

Session.

They're only three a year, so $750 a year. Got it. 750 a year and it's a planning session with you involved. Yes. It's really cool.

You're helping people and you're making money. You're doing it. And so you've got a pretty small team, right? You've got nine people you mentioned. Yeah.

What are all the different roles that you have right now?

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. They're okay. It sounds like you need a marketing person, mate. Yes. We had a marketing person.

And we probably didn't need a marketing person. Marketing is me right now.

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? Yeah. I'm not really sure.

When I started the PhD, we're a $2.5 million company, and we maintain 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, once you have the Sunday basket, then you want to make all the other things, and then you just

bring it all the way. It's really great. It's really great. So your customers are really going up the product ladder. And they're just buying more office supplies, and they're using this system in

other ways. Awesome.

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

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 like, yeah, have her come to my house. She doesn't come or house. Never mind.

That sounds like work. So what I realize 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 and maybe growing

a business that may be leading in corporate America or whatever, but they know that they've been organized since successful over here, so they need to be organized and successful over here. 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? 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. Okay. So you have like a more holistic approach to manage the entire household. Yeah. So you were also selling work systems and organization.

Why did you decide to sunset that part of your business?

Especially if it was making, I guess, how much a million dollars a year? A million dollars a year? 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.

Okay. 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. Okay. 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 and you never had

a well-rounded business enough to make money. Okay. So I moved that into organized 365, but the problem was I had eight of these boxes. All things I had done, entrepreneur direct sales, teacher, corporate, like everything I've done.

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.

Okay. And as an employee, you have administrative tasks that you work with the team on to create the product that fulfills the CEO's vision. Okay. I 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's a thousand 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 votes, 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 in what I'm creating because

we still have so much work at home that is not operationalized. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that makes a lot of sense.

So even though it was making money. It was profitable. Was it profitable? Yeah. Okay.

You still shut it down because you felt like it was slowing you down with your core confidence

again eventually, like you want to make 5 million, 10 million more millions on your

organization. Yes. Business. That's interesting. It is interesting.

Well, you can only do so much like you as the individual CEO visionary creator can only do so much. Yeah, you got to focus. That's the name of the game. So it's like if you're using 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. No, you're getting your PhD to learn more about that. Yeah.

How do you think your PhD is actually going to help you in your business? Yeah. My husband asked that question often.

That's how we're coming out with this productive home CEO theoretical framework.

It's 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. And that will be like IP that you can sell with your business, right? So once you publish in academia, they own it, kind of like if you traditionally publish a book.

Yes, it is IP.

And this is taking household management to a level that's never been studied before.

The last time, say, college is studied household management in this way. It was all the way back in the 30s and 40s when the Lilian Gilberth did efficiency studies. She was the cheaper by the dozen lady. Okay. She was the 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 package goods were like, yeah, let's target that home maker. And they created the home maker out of scratch.

Like, it was a marketing gimmick. The state home mom, which I bought into hook line and figure and loved it. And then we've moved into the feminist, you know, women are doing more labor and visible 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. Okay. 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 as so me as the head of my household. How can I support myself other than just downloading Pinterest principles 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 can put in place in our parent's homes,

that I can put in place in my kid's homes, that I can put in place in my sister's home if I need to step in and be her power of attorney or her power of health care as opposed to running all their households on all their systems. So that's really what I'm going to focus on. 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? How much profit, how much are you spending?

What is your biggest cost centers in doing all these different courses?

And it's just a thing about my company that I realize is, because I am the manufacturer and I'm the distributor in one company, we actually don't do mark up between manufacturer to distributor or two end user. Okay, 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 cost for that product.

We just go straight from manufacturing to and use. So it looks like there's a lot more margin than there is. 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.

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

Yeah, so when you look at the P&L, like the actual physical products is low, like 10 to 15 percent

shipping is like 7 percent, so you're like, oh my gosh, you have like 80 percent margins. No, you don't because 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 that into operating expense. And that's probably like 40 percent, so we're still 60 percent profitable. But if I'm the face of the brand and I'm creating everything, I'm not in that.

I'm over in GNA, research is down in GNA, you know, all the other team members are down in GNA. So how they do it on a P&L, like what's considered profit and not profit, we were profitable the last two years enough that we could do profit-chering, which I really loved doing for my team. It was great this year, we weren't as profitable. So because you're developing, yeah, because you dropped that profit.

So profitable, but not- >> Okay, that's amazing that you did profit-chering with your employees.

Can you share a little bit about that, like how you actually did it?

>> 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 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.

When you're in a C-Corp, you have to make a decision, like I've pull a W2 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. >> Okay, 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-chering. So when you do profit-chering, that's going to be means tested, which means that we have a 401k. We do a company match of 4%, so we already check 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 $100,000,

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 to profit-chering distributions, probably 20 years ago, their the company he was with was bought, and it was about to be sold. And so the business owners wanted to take money out of the company, and it was avid-tages

to them to do it as a profit-chering. So he got like, it was a lot of money, like $20,000 or something like that, and one year in profit-chering, which all of us in your 401k. And he talks about that all the time, and how meaningful it was. So I was like, "I want to do that with my iPhone's 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, if no it'll grow so much bigger."

So I also try to do bonuses as well, because it's like money now, money later. Yeah, really great.

Where do you think you're the strongest in your business?

I think the fact that I am research back, going to do my own research, then 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. I also think one of your strengths is just your journey.

The fact that you're a teacher, so you're really going to teaching, you can come up with words and analogies, and then you did the physical organizing for people. So I feel like it's also your journey, which I think is the case for a lot of entrepreneurs, like your journey is also your strength. All right, next is weaknesses.

What do you think your biggest weaknesses are? I think 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. 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, I think it means you've got to like actually lean into social media and get on camera. Yeah. You don't even need to necessarily get on camera. It could be writing on social media, like, I don't know, but I just feel like you need

to embrace the fact that everyone's on Instagram, and I'm on Instagram every day. You're on Instagram every day. Yeah, but I'm not doing a good job of it, obviously. 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 of business, I think it's really about getting out

there. Yep. Agreed. Yeah. So I'm in Austin.

Yeah. Are you just getting out here right now? All right, opportunities. Where do you think you're biggest opportunities lie? I think that there are a lot of opportunities, and I try, even though I like to go after

every shiny penny, I'm trying to be very strategic with what I say yes to and what channels we go to next, we could do brand partnerships, 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. Those all have academic testing behind them. I want to do the study, find support, replicate 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 they're support for these. I think like an ADHD line, products, courses, just for them, like I think that could work really, really well. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs with a lot of money that have ADHD. Okay.

Threats. My company will have to be sold, like it's not going to go to my kids.

I want to work so I'm 80, Martha Stewart was the 80 when I made that goal.

I think she's 83 now, Dan Sullivan, the 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.

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

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.

Yeah. Who knows? What are going to be? Maybe like Dave Ramsey approach, like get other like faces in there. Yeah, you did.

I did. Yeah, I tried it. Didn't go well. I mean, your intellectual property is your intellectual property. Everybody's going to put their spin on things.

And when you create something as 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, "Is there a second Burnet round? Is there a second Mel Robbins?" No. I mean, people want that person who's created that community or that feeling or that intellectual

property. I don't think it's something that you could just like democratize. Yeah. So when you go to sell your company, it will be like all the courses and the materials and the content essentially.

Yeah. So Franklin Covey is now a public company. Okay. Today, you know, it was the Covey books and the Covey planner.

But now it's like multiple hundreds of million dollar company and it's no longer associated

with the person. Got it. I've been really good in making sure that I have patents and trade marks and copyrights and all of that kind of things.

So I think as far as that goes, that's not a threat.

My biggest threat is people just don't want to do work at home. They just don't want to do it. People want to pay for it. But if you can't pay for it, you've got a lot. I don't even want to pay for it.

They just want to like magically go away or not be a thing or AI robots. Yeah. Hopefully work. And anyway. Yeah.

Well, this has been such an awesome conversation. I feel like we learned so much about your business. My last question to you is, if you wanted to double the size of your business, what steps would you take today? So doubling the size of the business, I just did a reader survey, you know, finding out

what my audience wanted, and then I reversed engineered how can we give them what they want? Because you find the value in existing clients. You know that. Yeah. And how do you reach these existing clients?

Do you have like an email list that you target or how do you have an email list?

We have a private app. So every course has its own 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 hear me there.

That our email list is really engaged. So I got a lot of responses from the reader survey. Right. Come on. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on how we profit.

Where can everybody learn about you and everything that you do? Thank you so much for having me. The website is organized 365.com. I'm organized 365 on Instagram and the podcast is organized 365. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on how we profit.

Thank you. And not yet, fam, is how Lisa and organized 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 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 business is actually work. I'm Halle Taha, and I'll see you next time.

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