Lesbian entrepreneur uses crime scene TikTok to educate
(Editor’s note: This is the second in a multi-part summer series of stories taking a closer look at how a group of diverse LGBTQ entrepreneurs survived and thrived during the pandemic.
The series is sponsored by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce.) Spaulding Decon’s 4.2 million followers probably tune into the company’s popular crime scene cleaning TikTok to watch technicians scrub away blood or dismantle drug labs, but sometimes Founder and CEO Laura Spaulding slips in a little more. “Today we’re going to be talking about the affordable housing crisis,” Spaulding, a former Kansas City police officer, tells viewers in an April teaser; later a young woman shares how difficult it has been surviving outside the benefits threshold.
Spaulding founded her multimillion-dollar business specializing in biohazard clean up in 2005, and in 2016 it became the first nationally franchised decontamination service.
However, the onset of the global pandemic threatened to derail the success of this lesbian entrepreneur. When states were going into lockdowns in 2020, in a desperate effort to slow the pandemic’s death toll and contain the spread of the disease, many businesses struggled.
