CASE STUDY:WHEN STARTING a small business the natural tendency is to keep overheads as low as possible. This often means the owner-manger ends up doing everything. While this may help contain costs it may not be the best strategy. "If I were starting over I would definitely employ people to help sooner," says Lilli Klint, who co-founded Lilly's eco cleaning products with Titta Jones in 2003. "If you have people to help you can focus on developing the business. If you don't you end up exhausted and disillusioned and wondering why you started it in the first place. The business ends up running you."

The idea for the business came about when Finnish-born Klint, who had her own contract cleaning company, developed a severe allergy to conventional cleaning products. She began researching traditional cleaning methods using natural ingredients and started experimenting with potential products in her kitchen. She subsequently introduced the products in her cleaning business and interest spread mainly by word of mouth.

"We decided to offer the products to the public and to run the manufacturing and the contracting side by side, but that turned out to be very difficult to do," says Klint. "The cost of being based on the east coast was also very high so we decided to move to somewhere less expensive and focus on developing the cleaning products. We moved to Castletownbere in west Cork four years ago."

Lilly's has a range of six products that cover the cleaning needs of the whole house. The company sells through health shops, independent supermarkets and eco websites, and employs four people.

Lilly's packaging has always been minimalist and Klint says resisting the temptation to make it fancier was a good decision. "It would have been very easy to get carried away with ideas that would have cost us a lot of money. You have to ask yourself what is right for the product and for us it was keeping it simple."

Making mistakes is an integral part of the learning curve in any new business but Klint is philosophical about mistakes. "You can learn a lot from getting something wrong," she says. "[Mistakes] happen so you have to allow for them. The way I see see it mistakes can help bring a business forward."

The next step is for Lilly's to break into mainstream retailing . "Eco products are no longer just for 'hippies'. There is now widespread awareness of the value of using environmentally friendly products and we want people to be able to buy them as part of their normal shopping."

This month, Lilli Klint looks back on the early days of her cleaning-products business and concludes that she would have employed people sooner than she did, despite the overhead savings that came with trying to do it all herself