When to Pivot and When to Let Go with Tidy Revival CEO, Carly Adams
“Take a long look at what is and what is not working for you in your business, and if it's not making money, then it's not working and figure out where things are feeling fragmented.”
Carly Adams is a decluttering specialist and owner of Tidy Revival, based in Sacramento, CA. Before the pandemic, her business was solely in person work. So when 2020 hit, like so many others, she had to re-create her business overnight. She now offers in person and virtual services as well as a community, podcast, and more. In our conversation today, she’s sharing how she made the virtual pivot in her business and the lessons she has learned along the way. There’s something for every entrepreneur in this conversation!
Topics:
How decluttering has profoundly changed Carly’s life, especially as an unorganized person herself
What Carly is most proud of in her business and why she thrives on encouraging clients from afar
The importance of learning to know when to pivot and when to let go as a business owner
Not being afraid of learning what’s not working in your business and keeping your audience in the loop
Carly’s advice for getting your audience involved in business decision making
About Carly:
Carly Adams is a decluttering specialist and owner of Tidy Revival, based in Sacramento, CA. She helps her folks get organized in her private community, The Club! Carly is a self-proclaimed “organizational nerd” that loves to geek out on the topic regularly on The Tidy Revival Podcast. When she’s not working, she can be found relaxing at home, collecting houseplants, snuggling her dog Gimli, and enjoying takeout with her husband Corey.
For more from Carly, be sure to:
- Check out her website.
- Follow her on Instagram @tidyrevival
- Download The Ultimate Declutter List
For more, make sure to:
- Follow me on Instagram @frenchie.ferenczi
-
Frenchie Ferenczi: [00:00:00] Hello, hello and welcome back to Strategy Snacks. I'm Frenchie Frenzi, I'm a business strategist and advisor, and today we are joined by Carly Adams host. Oh my god. Fuck. I need to start over. Sorry. I got, I overwhelmed myself with host of title Revival versus founder of Title Revival.
Carly Adams: All right. No, you're good.
And if it helps, I'm also the host of the Tidy Revival podcast, so all the things are true.
Frenchie Ferenczi: I know. I know, but that's like not it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so here we go. Hello. Hello and welcome back to Strategy Snacks. I'm Frenchie Frenzi, I'm a business strategist and advisor, and today we are joined by Carly Adams of Tidy Revival, who helps people declutter everything in their lives, which is just a very general intro, and I'm gonna have you say it more specifically and better
Carly Adams: than I did.
Oh, I love it so much. I'm just gonna use that now. But thank you, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Carly Adams, and yes, I'm the owner of Tidy Revival. [00:01:00] It is a home organization company based in Sacramento, California. So I help folks. In their home, hands-on, one-on-one, decluttering and home organization assistance.
I also have clients online that I help coast to coast and also I, you know, I've had folks in Europe that I'm helping, so we can do it from anywhere. And I'm also a community creator and a podcast host, and I'm sure we'll talk about all of that in a bit. But yeah, I'm on a mission to help people get the skills that they need to make those tough decisions around decluttering.
To really figure out how much of different things is the right amount for them, and then to create simple systems around it so they can just kind of streamline their life. It's also worth noting that I am a naturally disorganized person, so this all game, this is all a learned skill for me too, which is, I think one of the reasons that I'm just so passionate about it because it's [00:02:00] deeply and profoundly changed my life.
Frenchie Ferenczi: Oh, fascinating. Oh, I'm so excited. Okay. All right. Tell us, what is one of your biggest business wins, celebrations, moments that just felt really transform, transformative, and important?
Carly Adams: Yeah, so I think that the biggest win for me is really seeing the power in being able to encourage folks from afar because.
As I mentioned, this is all a learned skill and I love showing folks that they can do it too. That you don't need to have this be an innate thing that you're born with. So we have a private online community where we give tips, prompts ask folks to share what they're working on, answer a ton of questions along the way, and then really celebrate everybody's wins.
And. The magic of the group is that it really, folks, it really helps folks feel that they are not alone because decluttering can feel so isolating. Mm-hmm. But [00:03:00] this has been a great resource for my folks that are between sessions or maybe we've done a package together and now they wanna d i y or for folks who are far away or maybe they don't wanna spend.
Their money on in-home organization, but they do want some support. It can be a really great solution. So through learning these principles and then having that encouragement away along the way, excuse me. Seeing how much change folks can make and seeing all those aha moments has just been amazing.
And I think just the thing that I'm probably the most proud of. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And
Frenchie Ferenczi: you know, I think that for the organized people, it's probably very easy to be like just clean up, you know? And for. So that's who, for whatever reason, it doesn't come that easily too. I think feeling that sense of empathy and compassion rather than like something is like broken in you, is so valuable in terms of [00:04:00] fueling your motivation.
Yes. So I think that's amazing. Yeah.
Carly Adams: Yeah. And to go one step further with that, like my folks are generally coming to me because they're overwhelmed with too much stuff. So telling someone just go put it away. They're like, put e, where? Where is this supposed to go? Everything is crammed with stuff and I don't.
Even really have homes for things. Things are just a little bit everywhere, and how do I even get started and how do I know what to do first and how do I know what to do Second, they're just completely overwhelmed. So it's helping people take the first step and really learn how to create that action plan.
How to get started, how to do the decision making, how to create homes without shame around it, you know? Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. I'm obsessed.
Frenchie Ferenczi: Alright, so flipping the script a little bit, talk to me, what's one of the most [00:05:00] challenging lessons that you've had to learn
Carly Adams: along the way? Okay, so this has to do with the same group and it's really been about needing to know when to pivot and when to let go.
Because we started this group in 2020 as one of our revenue streams. As a response to the pandemic, has a very direct response to the pandemic and trying to stay in business. Because prior to that I was exclusively working with folks in home and all my in-home operations shut down completely for 15 months when everything happened.
I had folks close to me that were at risk and it just didn't make sense logistically to go back in until we were all vaccinated. We originally created a workshop series that was for sale and then, Kind of that was like, okay, we have this information. Let's just get it out there quick and dirty.
And then we also created our course community, and we spent a lot of time and energy and a lot of money learning how to make [00:06:00] it, how to promote it, and incorporating these strategies to help it grow. But it just wasn't growing like we and it had anticipated or strived for, or. Again, can't stress this enough.
Spent a bunch of money learning how to get it to grow. It just wasn't the r o I wasn't there. You know, and I, and I won't dig into all the things we tried, but let's just say we gave it our all. So this last spring we did a big survey with our audience to find out what they loved, what they cared about, what they didn't care about.
And then from that information, we revamped our private group into what it is now, but, We had to strip out a lot of the bells and whistles of the course community that were really cool, but they weren't popular with our folks and. We also found that in 2023, I mean, a lot of people were like, I'm just kind of burnt out on being in front of the computer, and they really wanted a place where they could still [00:07:00] get that same core information, but mm-hmm.
Now we drip it out into bite-sized chunks and they can kind of pop in, pop out, and everything is in our private Facebook group versus the course format where we had a. Big chunk of information that was living in a different area. We also completely dropped other features too, like we used to have regular live calls and.
These bells and whistles that we dropped really also allowed us to drop the price significantly because we weren't paying for these features. There was gonna be a less of a time commitment on the team's end. And so, yeah, so it, it allowed us to lower the price considerably and keep the magic of the group, which really was in the community that people could dip in and out of as they needed.
So that was a big lesson and it was a hard decision, but. It was definitely the right one. So it was a good, good lesson.
Frenchie Ferenczi: So you're saying you decluttered it?
Carly Adams: Yes. I'm saying we, [00:08:00] it wasn't working out and we took everything out of the closet and we categorized it and figured out what was working for us now versus 10 years ago or whenever, in that same analogy.
And yeah, we just dec cluttered the crap out of it. It was great. I love
Frenchie Ferenczi: it. That's amazing. And I think that speaks to two things that are just so important. I think one is that like really listening to your audience, and this is like just such a core tenet of what I like, just I. Preach because it's like they're the people we're building for.
They're the people who are gonna buy from us. And so if we're not giving them what they want, just because we think it sounds the way that it should for whatever reason. Yeah. Yeah. The only should is what they think it should be. So I think that is like so powerful and such a good example of that. And the other piece is also as a business owner, Like not being too attached to the actual products that we create, which is very [00:09:00] difficult.
Oh yeah. In the same way it's also hard for people that you work with, I'm sure to not be too attached to the stuff. But really learning to separate from that is so powerful. So thank you for sharing such a good example of that. And last but not least, what is one strategy snack that you wanna share with our listeners?
Carly Adams: So it's exactly what you said. It's really taking a long look at what is and is not working for you in your business. And if it's not making money, then it's not working and figure out where things are feeling frag, fragmented. You know, if you're getting a lot of consults, but you're not getting a lot of sales.
Aim to figure out where in the consult process. Like, where are things not clicking? Where are things a little bit broken? If you're getting a lot of emails, signups, like your list is growing, but you're not selling. Maybe there's something around there you can look at. So don't be afraid to dig into what's not working.
And to your point don't be afraid to ask your [00:10:00] audience because they're gonna tell you exactly what you need to know. And you might have some guesses, like we had some guesses before we, we made the changes, but. Our whole goal was to make changes that were based on data informed decisions versus what we call strategic spaghetti, which is just like, you know, you're throwing spaghetti against the wall and like I love that it may be strategic, but if your audience doesn't agree with it, then it's not gonna help you.
Right. I also have a hot tip for if you are deciding to. To survey your audience, highly recommend bribing people because without that, I, and we've done it, we found it even inside our community. If there wasn't some sort of giveaway, I mean, we do a lot of like target gift cards. You know, you're, you're injured to win a Target gift card.
Without that there is no data. And with it, there's tons so, We found that [00:11:00] that was just a very quick and easy way for us to be able to have that, that carrot dangling that's just like a really popular thing and helped us get a lot of great info. Okay.
Frenchie Ferenczi: Wait, quick follow up question. How many of your guesses came true and how many were invalidated?
I mean, you don't have to say numbers, but just like overall.
Carly Adams: I would say honestly, I think we were about 90% on the mark. Okay. It was, it was kind of like my gut is telling me that people don't care about X, Y, Z and that they would rather see 1, 2, 3, and then when we surveyed them, That was most of it. There were some, there's always gonna be something in the data where you're just like, huh.
Like at one point we shared on LinkedIn, and this is really diving into like the backend of things. Like at one point we shared on LinkedIn, which I hadn't. Wanted to, but I also didn't express that to my va. [00:12:00] Like those words did not leave my mouth. And because their algorithm is so much like Facebook of 10 years ago mm-hmm.
I think that's the point where it got spread and we ended up getting a lot. More respondents that didn't match up with our ideal audience because they weren't in our ideal audience. So when we were sharing in our newsletter and we were sharing on Instagram, Facebook, we weren't asking people to share because we were kind of hoping that they wouldn't.
But LinkedIn, if anybody responds to that, then whoever they know can see that response and it, mm-hmm. It just organically spreads a little bit more, but we ended up having like a larger number of. I mean, just to be frank, like male respondents for our survey, that skewed it because our, our audience is traditionally something like, you know, 85% female.
Yeah. And so if we're getting more male respondents, we're like, okay, well this, [00:13:00] this got shared because these folks have just come in from this. This isn't from the newsletter list, it's not from this. So things like that, or. Yeah, some of the, we got a lot of people responding to a portion of it, noting that they were in-home clients, but they weren't, they ab 'cause I don't know them and I would if they were in home.
So it's just things like that. And so, you know, you have to, there's some things that you have to kind of, you know, anything that was about the in-home experience was just part of it. 'cause it was a longer survey. We kind of had to just. Take that out. Or if they said that they were already in our private community and they absolutely weren't, we couldn't use any of that data.
So it was interesting. Right. But it was good. Yeah. Cool.
Frenchie Ferenczi: Cool, cool, cool. I love that. Well, thank you so much for all of this and all of your insight, and I would love for you to share where can people find you, follow you, connect
Carly Adams: with you? Yeah. Thank you again so much for having me. I love talking business strategy and [00:14:00] love everything that you're doing, so this is amazing.
Thank you. Thank you. You can find me@tidyrevival.com and we're also on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest at Tidy Revival.
Frenchie Ferenczi: Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. To everyone listening, make sure that you connect with Carly. Whether it's on the home front or the business front, there's a lot of decluttering that I think that we all need.
And I feel like some of the, the mindset shifts and pieces just apply across the board. And when, you know, actually you're gonna appreciate this and then we'll wrap up, but I was in a group and. This, or I'm in a group and this person was talking about how they consistently declutter when they need to make more money because decluttering has like, energetically just like brings more money into their world.
So I find that really interesting.
Carly Adams: Yeah. I am in a money mindset group for entrepreneurs and decluttering ends up being a really important part of everything that they talk about too, which obviously I was drawn [00:15:00] to, but. You know, we all need it. Even organizers need it, and I declutter for a living. So just know that you're not alone.
There's always something that you can go through and kind of shift that energy around, and it really does help. I love it.
Frenchie Ferenczi: I love it. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Everyone listening. Thank you so much for listening. As always, we'll be back with more soon. Have a good one. Bye. Thanks.
Bye.