Kate Pawlowski has always been close with her mom, Ann Lightfoot. Even in her teenage years, when slamming doors and instigating screaming matches is the norm, she and Lightfoot were “really good friends.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean Pawlowski planned to grow and scale a business with Lightfoot, especially when she admitted they started their professional organizing and decluttering business “on a whim.” In fact, when the two women first started Done & Done Home a decade ago, it was simply to use their stellar organizational skills to help a friend move.
“When we started, we didn’t have a long-term plan in mind necessarily,” Pawlowski said during a joint interview with Lightfoot and Small Business Xchange. “I know when a lot of people are just starting their businesses, they have a business plan — even five-year projections. We did it on a whim, because it was something we liked, and we knew people would pay us to do it. We just thought we should take a stab at it to see how it would go.”
Since that moment, Pawlowski and Lightfoot have built the business brick by brick. And now, with 12 employees and a nationwide reach, the women are sharing some of the key lessons they’ve learned in their journey.
Acknowledge and Embrace Unique Strengths
The transition from family members to founding partners was easy, mainly because at the most basic level, Pawlowski and Lightfoot enjoyed spending time together. But the two women also found they had different strengths that ultimately complemented each other.
“There were many cases where our generational gap was actually a positive thing,” Pawlowski explained. “My mom is of her generation, so she loves to be on the phone and talk to people. She’s super friendly and warm, and everybody likes talking to her. Meanwhile, I’m like, please shoot me a text.”
With these innate personality traits, Pawlowski gravitated towards back-end operations and marketing, while Lightfoot was a natural sales and business development executive.
Provide Equal Decision-Making Power
Over time, Pawlowski and Lightfoot have each grown more comfortable in their roles, which has allowed them to assign ownership over specific responsibilities. This has allowed them to minimize conflict or, in some cases, have more respectful business disagreements.
“Over time, we have found which responsibilities and focus areas belong to each of us,” Pawlowski said. “If it’s something for a client — say, a delivery was late, or something went wrong — my mom’s solution is always in favor of the client. I may say it’s going to cost us money, but her solution is always in favor of the client and making things right, and I always say, ‘alright, fine.’ But then she lets me take the lead on things that fall more into my category of making decisions. So now we have fewer issues than we did in the earlier days because of that approach.”
Build a Tech Stack that Works for You
There are no shortage of tools and apps available to support small businesses, which is why it “takes a long time to find the right apps and software that work for you,” Pawlowski admitted. “There’s a lot of trial and error, and as you’re expanding, certain things work at certain times, but then you outgrow them.”
Despite the growth and change Done & Done Home has seen, Pawlowski and Lightfoot are “really happy with where we are right now,” Pawlowski said. QuickBooks serves as the foundation for operations, with Pawlowski largely driving the financial side of the business. “I don’t know how we would have grown our business without it,” she said. “And now we use QuickBooks Time for our team scheduling and time tracking. The fact that these two things are combined has been incredibly helpful. I won’t even look at something if it doesn’t integrate with QuickBooks. We’ve been using it since day one, and it has grown and changed with us. That has always been my sticking point” Done & Done Home also uses the Method customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and Slack and Asana for collaboration and project management.
Although Done & Done Home appears to have the ideal tech stack, it took the team some time to find the right tools for its diverse user base. “Because I’m of an older generation, [tech] is not as intuitive to me,” Lightfoot said. “But there were some that simply made no sense and I did not want to waste my time putting information in. Once we got Method, it all made perfect sense to me, and it integrated so well with what Kate was doing. It was more straightforward. If something is not working for you, there’s probably something out there that would work better.”
Explore Ways to Diversify Revenue
Pawlowski and Lightfoot have mastered the art of organization and decluttering from their various jobs, which typically revolve around preparing for moves and organizing estate sales. It was these experiences that inspired them to write a book, Love Your Home Again, and create a dedicated online course for fans who wanted to learn how to apply their principles.
“Our ‘Chaos to Calm’ course is geared towards people organizing their own space. People through our social media and newsletters wanted help from us, but couldn’t pay for our services,” Pawlowski explained. “We wanted to take basically everything we knew and give it to people in a digestible way.”
The first iteration of the online course was launched in 2020 but has been updated with newer, fresher content, so it wasn’t too redundant with the book, according to Pawlowski. Although they have been “really pleased” with the course’s response, Lightfoot noted that to drum up demand and turn digital courses into a viable revenue engine, “you have to get them out there. You have to advertise.”
Don’t Be Afraid to ‘Ride Out’ Your Advertising
Social media, especially Instagram, is critical for the Done & Done Home business because it gives Pawlowski and Lightfoot the chance to build credibility and trust with their base of about 100,000 followers.
“People want connection with other humans,” Pawlowski said. “It’s great to have a Reels of a pretty pantry, but if it doesn’t connect to a story or a person, in this case mom and me, then it’s not going to be the same.”
Done & Done has tapped into this authenticity to create highly targeted advertising campaigns through Meta and Google. Because the business serves specific markets, it must balance organic content that builds community and drives reach; and hyper-targeted advertising campaigns that drive tangible business results. For example, the company generated $100,000 in course sales by implementing a targeted ad campaign through Meta.
“You sometimes don’t know whether a specific post, ad or Reels drove the results, but we know that people keep finding us and hiring us,” Pawlowski said. “I think sometimes with ads, you just have to let it right. You have to give it enough time and let the algorithm work. People have to see you a bunch to get comfortable, and then they have to think about hiring you or buying from you.”
