We recently connected with Lora Ladd and have shared our conversation below.

Lora, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

My business has two different starting points:

1)  After losing my job in graphic design during the 2008 recession

2) when I made a pivot, launched my sustainable cleaning product line in 2022 and closed my cleaning service in early 2023.

I’m going to share more of my story from starting point #2. I had built a highly successful cleaning service that averaged 500k in sales per year and at my peak, I was managing 15 employees. That was, until 2020/covid happened and the world changed drastically. I laid off my team in March of 2020 and lost almost my entire income and sales for a time period.

That spring of 2020, I joined a mastermind group for women in mindful/heart led business, which was where I processed some of these major shifts and started to come up with some ideas on how I could reach more people with my 15 years of professional cleaning experience. At the time, everyone and their mother was launching online courses in place of their usual brick-and-mortar offerings. A friend in the group took a look at my highly successful training program for my cleaning team and said – wow! you have a course just in this program.

So I set out to develop a course, teaching people how to clean their own homes (especially during a time where more people were spending time at home). I created the course and then put it in the “parking lot” and never launched it. Why? After hearing a staggering statistic that most people *don’t* finish courses, I decided to look at the root and asked myself, how can I truly support people?

In my years as a cleaner and seeing thousands of homes, something that I consistently noticed was the fact that most people have a cupboard/closet/garage-full of cleaning supplies. Most of which they don’t use. Why not give access to people the cleaning system that I built that only uses a total of 7 core products to clean a home? After all, some of my products I made in-house. It must be easy (so I thought).

SO. I set out to create the first cleaning product line that actually teaches people HOW to clean with each product. Was it easy? No.

There was a learning curve from the start – I first needed to learn industry language. What is a manufacturer? What’s a formulator and formulation services? What’s a distributor? Do I need one? Where do I find bottles and other packaging? The list of questions in the beginning seemed endless. Slowly, but surely in time and through many conversations with a variety of resources my plan came together. The first manufacturer I planned on working with couldn’t create one of my products, so I ended up needing to find a different manufacturer.

Also – how do I create a product that’s low to zero impact carbon emission and that’s healthy and safe for people at home and for the children and pets? Something that I learned early on in cleaning, is that you don’t need toxic chemicals to clean a home. Often it’s a matter of technique in tandem with the right eco friendly cleaning products. I also realized that the majority of products that you’ll buy at the store are highly diluted with water with a little bit of actual cleaning concentrate in the mix. Which means, single use plastics filled with water are being shipped to retailers using carbon emissions. So why not take the water out of the shipping process and offer a refillable solution?

During that time, I also reached out to countless packaging manufacturers on Alibaba and some people didn’t get back to me at all and others I began to develop the right relationships with. It was a process.

After many rounds of samples with my local person who created the cleaning concentrates, I nailed down my formulas and my scents. Given that I have a background in graphic design, I designed all of my packaging and worked directly with manufacturers for the bottles and other packaging. I went through many rounds of samples with these, too.

Eventually, as everything came together in 2022, I finalized my orders. Some of my manufacturers required what’s called a “MOQ”, which means “minimum order quantity”. This to me made the most sense to launch a product at a decent price. After all, I believe in my products and surely it would sell. In July of 2022, a 40ft shipping container arrived from the sea to my office doorstep. AND BOY. Did I not realize what I had signed up for with this undertaking. Everything from not realizing that you need a pair of wire cutters to open the shipping container to remove pallets from it. In hindsight there were many mistakes I made because I just didn’t have the experience.

For example, I spent 3k on a moving service to unpack the pallets and move the boxes into my upstairs office. At some point, the floor became “bouncy” and the weight load became too much. So I had to think quick and find a storage space to move product there. The movers were able to move the remaining boxes from the shipping container and hold the boxes in their truck overnight. Additionally, this whole process happened on a 100+ degree day and the shipping container driver had to wait over 8 hours for us to unload. All of this could have been diverted with a better plan by hiring a forklift and delivering to a floor level warehouse facility!

After that experience, it’s been a process managing inventory and getting to a place where I was able to officially launch at the end of 2022. Between hand filling bottles with cleaning concentrates and assembling packaging for 50,ooo+ bottles, it’s been no easy feat. I currently have 2 full storage units with product in it and spent most of 2023 managing inventory. I’ve finally gotten to a place where I can focus on sales and consumer outreach.

Lora, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started The Tidy People (your home cleaning BFFs) as a love letter to my family. I grew up in an environment that was fairly chaotic and messy. I long for order and I love to create beautiful spaces for people to live and thrive in. It’s been a long journey of 15+ years of running a cleaning service and cleaning brand. I’ve seen it all and the takeaway is that empowerment is the key to any one persons success. We all hold the keys to creating what we want to make of anything in life. There are plenty of people who I’ve helped, but the most impactful relationships are with the ones who want to be helped and have a desire to be a tidy person.

Originally my business was called Ergo Errands and I rebranded to The Tidy People in 2019.

I am proud of the brand I’ve built as well as the community we have on Instagram of 32k+ followers, which I built from scratch when I rebranded in 2019.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

In 2021, I began to run engagement ads and did this for about 2 years. These were ads that were anything from memes to posts that brought value to people’s lives. I noticed that there was a drop off in the algorithm after a while in early in 2023 and was also running out of my pandemic funds and stopped engagement ads. That bit of a boost however did help me grow a highly engaged audience that find a lot of value from the thing that I post. I post a lot of relatable content around cleaning, tidying, and managing relationships with others and self in the home environment. I use a lot of humor and have really dialed in the brand voice for The Tidy People.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Since I ran a business previously that had the #1 expense being payroll, I qualified for a series of PPP funds during the pandemic. This was much needed and helped me sustain my cleaning service for a while. I also took out an EIDL loan and this help further fund my operations and expenses.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thetidypeople.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetidypeople/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetidypeople
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loraladd/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thetidypeople
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thetidypeople

Image Credits
Wiley Image