We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lisa Tolan-Hardy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lisa below.

Hi Lisa, thanks for joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

My short answer to this is yes, I do wish I had started my business sooner, but I also feel like personal life events will have impacted my ability to think clearly and keep things moving if I had started earlier.

I started ElleTee’s Essentials almost two and a half years ago coming off of a lay-off, a HORRIBLE job after being laid off, being unwilling to continue my 2.5 hour commute (each way, mind you) and a love for all things self-care related. My business is on a steady growth rate and statistically on track, especially after adding event hosting to the fold. Things happen the way they do for a reason, and I do think that starting my business and trying to maintain it during or shortly the death of a spouse would not have resulted in such positive results.

After overcoming this personal obstacle, I truly believe that I am able to think more clearly and rationally now. In a strange way, a tremendous loss left me in a much better mental space because I HAD to learn to think about the consequences of my actions on a personal and professional level. This is huge in running a business.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I am an African-American woman and owner of ElleTee’s Essentials, a company specializing in small batch, handcrafted bath & body creations made with high-quality ingredients at affordable prices. I have always experimented with DIY self-care, and feedback received from others on my handcrafted products prompted me to venture into making and selling my creations.

The problem my products and business solves is limited options for quality personal care products at affordable prices. My goal is to maintain product quality while also maintaining affordability. People should not have to wait for an annual sale to be able to get the self-care products they want and need.

Within the past year, my company has also started not just attending and vending at pop-up markets, but also hosting them in an effort to give other smal businesses the opportunity to grow their brands in venues that they otherwise would not have access to and also offering advice or mentorship when I can.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I have met some REALLY great women that I am fortunate enough to call friends now.

The first, I met when I was out “in the field” selling my products at a pop-up market. This was a market that I had attended before with great sales but on this day, it was really slowfor some reason. My now friend’s booth was across from mine on this day, and she asked if I could keep an eye on things while she ran to the ladies room. When she came back, we started chatting about the market, our businesses, etc. and somehow got on the subject of me starting to host pop-up markets. As luck would have it, my friend also has a brick and mortar store at a location that I had been to as a vendor at a pop-up. While I was there with another host, I also happened to meet the property manager who would be my contact for hosting my own market. While she did give me her business card when I was vending there, I had not been able to get a response from her when I reached out about organizing my own market at her venue. When I told told Sarah this, she was surprised and told me how responsive the manager usually is. Sarah then offered to put me directly in touch with the manager later that day since she had a good relationship with her. Sarah and I exchanged information, and the rest of history. Sarah’s advice and friendship has really invaluable to me and we have now hosted several markets and other events at this venue I had been trying to get into on my own with no luck.

Another fortunate situation came about when communicating with another property manager at a venue where I was hosting a market. The property manager let me know that while the space would be available to me, there was also another event host that was about to start organizing markets at the venue as well, and asked if I wanted to be put in touch with her so that we could compare notes on our experiences at the venue, what works, what doesn’t, etc.. Fast forward to today and netither one of us is still hosting markets at that venue or even in touch with that property manager. Us and the property manager just never seemed to be on the same page when it came to why this market wasn’t picking up steam. Even when the property manager offered us other venues, she kept offering venues with the same deal-breaking issues as the first one. The silver lining of this cloud is that I was introduced to a new friend and we still currently co-host several events together.

Because of how I met these two wonderful women, I always tell my vendors that of course we want to make money when we put our energy into packing up, setting up displays, and then packing up again to go sell at a market, but also look at the bigger picture. If you have down time when you’re out selling, get to know other vendors or the organizers of the market. Even though you didn’t make much (or none!) money that day, you never know what other doors will be opened for you.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Although this is something that I am still learning, I do believe that I give my current customers unfettered access to me via social media and sometimes even text because at this point I don’t have a team assisting with responding to customer concerns and inquiries. I think that is important with newer companies like mine, and even more so with personal producs like the ones that I sell. The challenge will be keeping this personal touch going as my company grows.

I have also started a rewards program, and I always include freebies with customer orders. It’s a great way to get more orders and let customers try out a product that they hadn’t thought about purchasing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.elleteeessentials.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elletees_essentials/ and https://www.instagram.com/elletees_events/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elleteesessentials and https://www.facebook.com/groups/921893025338493

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